Hacker News: andrew_lettuce

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "I wanted to build vertical SaaS for pest control, so I took a technician job"

andrew_lettuce — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:54:34 +0000

The idea that AI makes adaptation and maintenance easier for non domain experts seems a stretch at best. All we've seen to date is it makes building shallow copies quicker for more people, and helps experts go faster. Neither of these applies to the majority of bootstrapping vertical domains

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "FFmpeg 8.1"

andrew_lettuce — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:36:32 +0000

Because ffmpeg is built on the Unix chained utility philosophy I find ai is also good at building scripts the use it as well

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "FFmpeg 8.1"

andrew_lettuce — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:33:06 +0000

Yep. Which is a great architecture IMO. Simple, performant and flexible: choose 3

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Kagi Small Web"

andrew_lettuce — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:26:46 +0000

The perverse thing here is that's exactly the opposite of how we've traditionally valued resources!

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Kagi Small Web"

andrew_lettuce — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:25:34 +0000

This website is the small web - self contained. It's a really good example of the Internet we had and apparently some still want. I think of it like computer graphics where you're definition of space can get bigger as you add a bunch of resources each with their own model space into the relative context of world space. The small web should define how we do that and discover things, not what or how we build within each specific model space.

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "LLM Writing Tropes.md"

andrew_lettuce — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 03:10:00 +0000

Construction paired with punctuation is literally the entire point of written communication.

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns"

andrew_lettuce — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:13:47 +0000

Or worse, public masterbation.

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns"

andrew_lettuce — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:08:19 +0000

Feels like a missed opportunity to not use Blockchain for the reputational ledger. A throwback reference to quaint, olden times.

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project"

andrew_lettuce — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:35:51 +0000

because brilliant jerk is not acceptable

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Don't make me talk to your chatbot"

andrew_lettuce — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:15:44 +0000

Exactly, if 1/2 their support calls are PW resets, and that costs them a fortune solve the problem, don't slap AI lipstick on the chat pig.

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Don't make me talk to your chatbot"

andrew_lettuce — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:12:52 +0000

The obvious trade off here is engineering effort vs. development cost, and when the tech support solution is "have you tried turning it off, then on again?" We know which path was chosen

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Don't make me talk to your chatbot"

andrew_lettuce — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:10:46 +0000

The thing is a YOU don't get to decide this. Maybe the PW reset flow is significantly more complex for some people who don't have an actual human walk them though it; maybe Xfinity routers shouldn't need to be power cycled to fix problems. Maybe corporations should make their products better to avoid do many support calls or price that into the purchase price. At least let's be honest that the entire exercise is an attempt to externalize costs on their customers.

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs"

andrew_lettuce — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:08:32 +0000

But not particularly good for the startup ecosystem; it could make it even less attractive to not take a corporate job

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Silicon Valley can't import talent like before. So it's exporting jobs"

andrew_lettuce — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:00:00 +0000

I have a master's degree and make more than that but still can't write a performant Linux runtime agent, will you pay and train me?

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel""

andrew_lettuce — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:50:58 +0000

You might already know this but in relational algebra the select is SQL's from and the projection is SQL's select, which makes more sense. I always preferred the linq syntax with the from first too

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel""

andrew_lettuce — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:48:11 +0000

When it comes to SQL it's the select that's by far the majority of the work though, the hard work with mutating operations is on the database implementation, not really the syntax or query plan

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel""

andrew_lettuce — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:43:44 +0000

I get the ease of use - and sometimes use them myself- but implied (or relative) shortcuts are IMO a bad habit that can lead to serious issues that don't manifest as errors. I do like the from clause first which better matches the underlying relationship algebra!

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw"

andrew_lettuce — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:30:24 +0000

Forget about Costco, if some people here are so convinced this behavior is illegal they should be going after every fast food company that offers anything like "get a free/cheap xyz with any drink purchase!" Where the subsidy is obvious.

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw"

andrew_lettuce — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:24:07 +0000

And not typically channels that can survive independently

New comment by andrew_lettuce in "Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw"

andrew_lettuce — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:22:57 +0000

This isn't typically an area where laws and regulations can work effectively because who knows until after the fact? Taxation laws do deal with this from a different perspective, for example most jurisdictions won't let a company take losses every year forever, as they judge the intent of a corporation. Even this is incredibly complex so I'm not sure how your idea would work, even the term "break even" doesn't have a clear definition, ex: do Capital assets still depreciate the same in the AI world? When did Amazon start to break even? What if they didn't deliver shopping on top of aws? Was that an unfair subsidization?