Hacker News: ardeaver

New comment by ardeaver in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

ardeaver — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:00:56 +0000

I'd be interested to see if the actual cost of AI will actually have any impact on how often CEOs end up talking about it. In my experience, there's a certain level of assessment that goes into whether or not a line item on your expenses is considered a problem or an investment. If you can still hand wave your way into convincing investors that $200K in AI credits replaces 3 $200K/year software engineers, even though it used to be $100K for the same amount of credits, you might be fine. At some point, some part of that equation will likely fall out of favor with investors or the math will no longer work out, and maybe it's the cost of natural gas or helium.

New comment by ardeaver in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

ardeaver — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:27:35 +0000

I've always felt that AI's main contribution to eliminating jobs is giving CEOs the ability to do layoffs while trying to both separate themselves from the current economic uncertainty and imply that they are an AI company.

Companies do this all the time. A CEO's job is to convince investors that their company stands to win in whatever the current hot trend is. During bitcoin's crazy run in like 2022 or whatever, a ton of tech companies were hopping on the bandwagon and branding themselves as a blockchain company. Look at Block/Square. The current trend is that AI is hot and the economy isn't. Therefore, it's beneficial to the stock price to tell your investors that you're laying off 50% of your staff because you're AI-powered. Just look at Block/Square. My experience has been that most companies have an incredibly patchwork implementation of AI, and that most of the work that they do (particularly larger companies) isn't made more efficient by using AI.

In a few years, there will be some new hotness, and all companies will be saying that the DNA of their company is whatever that is.

As for the current uncertainty in the job market, when you randomly have 50% tariffs slapped on goods you need and can't readily find available in the US for the same price and find that 20% of the world's oil supply is cut off, you tend to not want to invest in the future. Talking about AI is cheap. Tariffs are expensive.

New comment by ardeaver in "Thoughts on OpenAI acquiring Astral and uv/ruff/ty"

ardeaver — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:22:04 +0000

The news of this acquisition has made me too scared to admit that I actually have no issues Poetry.

New comment by ardeaver in "The “small web” is bigger than you might think"

ardeaver — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 01:13:58 +0000

I also think equating good = "no monetization" is exactly how we've ended up in a situation where everything is controlled by a few giant mega corps, hordes of MBAs, and unethical ad networks.

We should want indie developers, writers, etc to make money so that the only game in town doesn't end up being those who didn't care about being ethical.

New comment by ardeaver in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

ardeaver — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:48:32 +0000

The thing that actually killed Blockbuster was Carl Icahn. He bought up a bunch of shares and wanted to quickly turn a profit on the company. At the time, they were investing heavily into a Netflix-like service, which required a significant up front capital investment and, therefore, was losing money. Icahn, wanting to make a profit, decided to cut spending and basically not look forward at all. He got a quick, massive bump in stock price and jumped ship as it was crashing into the iceberg. Blockbuster was caught in the middle of a paradigm shift and found itself massively under prepared to deal with it.

New comment by ardeaver in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

ardeaver — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:35:23 +0000

You're not wrong, I just wish you were lmao

New comment by ardeaver in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

ardeaver — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:18:42 +0000

When I was really early in my career, a mentor told me that code review is not about catching bugs but spreading context (i.e. increasing bus factor.) Catching bugs is a side effect, but unless you have a lot of people review each pull request, it's basically just gambling.

The more expensive and less sexy option is to actually make testing easier (both programmatically and manually), write more tests and more levels of tests, and spend time reducing code complexity. The problem, I think, is people don't get promoted for preventing issues.

New comment by ardeaver in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

ardeaver — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:11:29 +0000

There are many days where I feel like the right thing for my career is to focus on building meaningful software that solves an actual problem. Then there are days like today, especially after seeing this.

New comment by ardeaver in "Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company"

ardeaver — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 12:26:50 +0000

Perhaps I'm not totally clear on how this particular device works, but it doesn't seem like it has no ability to connect to the Internet.

Honestly, I'd say privacy is just as much about economics as it is technical architecture. If you've taken outside funding from institutional venture capitalists, it's only a matter of time before you're asked to make even more money™, and you may issue a quiet, boring change to your terms and conditions that you hope no one will read... Suddenly, you're removing mentions of your company's old "Don't Be Evil" slogan.

New comment by ardeaver in "An Update on Heroku"

ardeaver — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 02:05:53 +0000

As far as the Salesforce acquisition goes, I'd be curious to see who made the decision to put Heroku into maintenance only mode.

I worked for a different part of Salesforce. I don't really feel like Salesforce did a ton of meddling in any of its bigger acquisitions other than maybe Tableau. I think the biggest missed opportunity was potentially creating a more unified experience between all of its subsidiaries. Though, it's hard to call that a failure since they're making tons of money.

It could be a case of post-founder leadership seeing that there's not a lot of room for growth and giving up. That happens a lot in the tech industry.

New comment by ardeaver in "One year of keeping a tada list"

ardeaver — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 16:12:20 +0000

I can also imagine that you might need to change your definition of what an accomplishment is. I tend to think of it as something that has a measurable output, but difficult-to-measure progress towards an outcome is also something (despite what product managers might think)

New comment by ardeaver in "Pre-commit hooks are broken"

ardeaver — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 23:02:20 +0000

At my last job, we ran all of our tests, linting/formatting, etc. through pre-commit hooks. It was apparently a historical relic of a time where five developers wanted to push directly to master without having to configure CI.

I too was about to become a war criminal.