Hacker News: aworks

New comment by aworks in "Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing"

aworks — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:59:09 +0000

I had a separate dental insurance policy but as you suggest, it didn't make much sense and I dropped it.

So yes, dental/vision was a wash versus private medical insurance. There are some other therapies I no longer have any coverage for under Medicare.

New comment by aworks in "Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing"

aworks — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:00:55 +0000

I'm not following this advice for now but a recent post about not delaying

https://nesteggcare.com/why-would-you-delay-the-start-of-soc...

New comment by aworks in "Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing"

aworks — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:51:34 +0000

For general medical coverage, it was better for my Mom and now it seems better for me. Some things are not covered with traditional Medicare e.g. dental and vision.

New comment by aworks in "Laws of Software Engineering"

aworks — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:21:28 +0000

I worked for a company that also had hardware engineers writing RTL. Our software architect spent years helping that team reuse/automate/modularize their code. At a mininum, it's still just text files with syntax, despite rather different semantics.

New comment by aworks in "Laws of Software Engineering"

aworks — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:16:24 +0000

I worked for awhile as a janitor in a college dorm. Not an easy job but it definitely revealed a side of humanity I might not have otherwise seen. Especially the clean out after students left for the year.

New comment by aworks in "Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing"

aworks — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:53:22 +0000

Likewise he can probably defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit...

+1 for Medicare for the non-rich, though. I'm a retiree and the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.

New comment by aworks in "Why LLMs Aren't Giving You the Result You Expect"

aworks — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 20:32:22 +0000

"Agile Vibe Coding in action: short cycles, fast feedback, continuous correction.This isn’t a formal spec. It’s a conversation that keeps going during the work, not before it."

New comment by aworks in "Claude Design"

aworks — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:56:48 +0000

Hmm. The design of left turns on "stroads" seems to vary in the US. Mostly left-turn/U-turn lights in California, loop arounds in suburban Detroit, unprotected left turn lights in Kentucky, differs if the route is a national, state or local road etc.

On the other hand, right turn on road now seems to be universal unless a sign prohibits it. And all states apparently enforce slowing down or moving to the adjacent lane for stopped emergency vehilces.

New comment by aworks in "AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing"

aworks — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:37:42 +0000

It was a long time ago but I attended a session by IBM at an OO conference. The speaker's claim was that the half-life of programming language knowledge was 6 months i.e. if not reinforced, that how fast it goes.

I learned the Q array language five years ago and then didn't touch it for six months. I was surprised how little I remembered when I tried to resume.

New comment by aworks in "Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]"

aworks — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:38:38 +0000

I"m not saying it had high approval. I'm saying it had high community awareness, unlike the current mission. I was in a bookstore where they were playing the radio over their speakers as Apollo 13 reported problems. That seems different to our current fragmented, de-institutionalized world, FWIW. Maybe there are tiktok memes that I'm not aware of.

New comment by aworks in "Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]"

aworks — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:40:24 +0000

I was 10 in 1969. Landing on the moon was a communal and shared event for a large percentage of the population, via one of the three television networks. As was the war in Vietnam.

Many decades later, our institutions are in need of rebuild, for the common good. Maybe this event is a "small step" in that direction.

New comment by aworks in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

aworks — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:11:42 +0000

I was an engineering manager for a commercial C/C++ toolchain used in embedded systems development. We, and our customers, examined the generated code continously. In our case, to figure out better optimizations (and fix bugs). For some of our customers, because their device had severe memory constraints or trying to do difficult performance optimizations.

Moving up to an MMU and running Linux was a different (more abstract) world. Although since it was embedded, low-level functions might still be in both assembly and C if not the apps on top.

New comment by aworks in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

aworks — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:34:51 +0000

Interesting counter-factual.

Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle suggests what would have happened if the US did lose the war. Remaining neutral would have been a different result, though.

New comment by aworks in "The most-disliked people in the publishing industry"

aworks — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:24:59 +0000

6 quarters, not 6 semesters!

Decades later, I wish I had more linear algebra.

New comment by aworks in "The most-disliked people in the publishing industry"

aworks — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:56:36 +0000

I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.

New comment by aworks in "Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings"

aworks — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:18:38 +0000

I was a manager of engineers and manager of managers. I've never heard the word fun used in conjunction with reviews.

It's a system and process put together by others, with forms and criteria that were flawed. It required real effort to do it even half successfully. It's not clear it ever had much impact on future behavior. and it had to be done on a timeline that interfered with doing the regular job.

If someone had a real performance issue, there were better approaches to the problem.

Yet every company I worked from from tiny startup to large Silicon Valley company insisted on it every year.

New comment by aworks in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

aworks — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:57:00 +0000

Americans during WWII thought it was a fight for national survival, starting with the shock of Pearl Harbor. Isolationishm turned to intervention in the "Good War." I won't defend any war after that...

New comment by aworks in "Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection"

aworks — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:25:10 +0000

I need to reread it but Paul Fussell makes the case that old wealth is inconspicuous and secure (and maybe inherited) versus nouveau riche which is about visible luxury, branding, and showy consumption. I don't remember if he mentions the need to promote ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame...

New comment by aworks in "Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection"

aworks — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:18:32 +0000

Is this a difference in kind versus say the printing press and books? That technology gave some souls a platform.

Then and now, having a platform isn't the same as having an effective and popular platform for force indoctrination...

New comment by aworks in "The OpenAI graveyard: All the deals and products that haven't happened"

aworks — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:42:51 +0000

I think this is the right question. My search/chat is now 50% ChatGPT, 30% Google, and 20% Gemini. I have no idea the business implications of this.

For that matter, I don't know the bandwidth and compute cycle tradeoffs between traditional search and AI.