Hacker News: bnug

New comment by bnug in "Gemini 3.5 Flash"

bnug — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:55:42 +0000

At these pricing levels, corporations who use the models will need to ensure employees are using them efficiently. I know, where I work, we don't really think about the cost to the company when using copilot chat, but sounds like it could start adding up really fast, especially for poorly defined questions that have to be revised multiple times.

New comment by bnug in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

bnug — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:53:26 +0000

This resonates with me. I'm a Mechanical Engineer who loves the process of coding. I did take an intro to business class in undergraduate though, and my professor said one thing that has stuck with me for 30+ years - 'The fundamental goal of a business is to make profit now and in the future'. Vibe coded slop might get some traction and make money now, but high quality code will reduce technical debt and allow it to be made in the future. So, in some ways, both camps are right. The PM/Manager/VP want to make money now, but if they completely disregard the nerdy engineer, they will sabotage their future.

I see a disconnect between these two camps that will probably cause a lot of chaos in the near future. Those that figure it out will thrive.

New comment by bnug in "Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?"

bnug — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 19:56:07 +0000

Yeah, I was just thinking of a very popular bar that I would go to about 15 years ago that was operated on very simple touch screens with large UI buttons. The bartenders could enter drinks & the tab it goes on very fast. It wasn't flashy, but very simple large buttons that always pop up in the same place very quickly, so they definitely had some muscle-memory going on for navigating it.

New comment by bnug in "Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?"

bnug — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:57:21 +0000

Oh yeah - AutoCAD by Autodesk was also like this. Once you memorized the keystrokes, you could fly through your line drawing.

New comment by bnug in "Claude for Excel"

bnug — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 11:31:39 +0000

I like this take. There seems to be an over-focus on 'one-shot' results, but I've found that even the free tools are a significant productivity booster when you focus on generating smaller pieces of code that you can verify. Maybe I'm behind the power curve since I'm not leveraging the full capability of the advanced LLM's, but if the argument is disaster is right around the corner due to potential hallucinations, I think we should consider that you still have to check your work for mission critical systems. That said, I don't really build mission critical systems - I just work in Aerospace Engineering and like building small time saving scripts / macros for other engineers to use. For this use, free LLMs even have been huge for me. Maybe I'm in a very small minority, but I do use Excel & Python nearly every day.

New comment by bnug in "I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform"

bnug — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:37:21 +0000

That could be the case, but I work in a mechanical engineering group as the only person on the team who can write code or automate things with it. We're in a large corporation with a sizeable IT support group that builds a decent chunk of the software in-house, and our team views much of it as terrible. So, I've rewritten applications or supplemented the "terrible" but irreplaceable software with tools to make our jobs much easier. I don't think that I'm better than our in-house IT folks at software development but that my perspective as an actual end-user gives me a much better idea of how to meet our own needs. I'm also highly motivated to make it effective, since I'll be using it. So, the title initially resonated with me and didn't see this comment coming. That said, I'm sure your point is valid in many cases as I'm not familiar with formal software development / project management.

New comment by bnug in "AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'"

bnug — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:16:01 +0000

>but no jobs are being replaced

I agree that an LLM is a long way from replacing most any single job held by a human in isolation. However, what I feel is missed in this discussion is that it can significantly reduce the total manpower by making humans more efficient. For instance, the job of a team of 20 can now be done by 15 or maybe even 10 depending on the class of work. I for one believe this will have a significant impact on a large number of jobs.

Not that I'm suggesting anything be "stopped". I find LLM's incredibly useful, and I'm excited about applying them to more and more of the mundane tasks that I'd rather not do in the first place, so I can spend more time solving more interesting problems.

New comment by bnug in "Successful people set constraints rather than chasing goals"

bnug — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 11:02:59 +0000

https://www.coljohnboyd.com/

New comment by bnug in "Hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park"

bnug — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 14:31:38 +0000

Fair enough. Why don't you fill out your profile? I would love to read it as I'm always curious about the backgrounds of people who's behavior or personality I don't understand, and you're essentially vaguely summarizing the topics in all of your posts, which strikes me as different from anything I've experienced.

New comment by bnug in "Hydrothermal explosion at Yellowstone National Park"

bnug — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 16:23:29 +0000

Anyone know how apparent bot posts like this wind up here? Third one I've seen today, now easy to notice after someone pointed it out on another topic.

New comment by bnug in "New AI classifier for indicating AI-written text"

bnug — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 21:05:05 +0000

I'd think people would migrate to just re-typing whatever was generated and change some wording along the way to prevent detection.

New comment by bnug in "Mcmaster.com is the best e-commerce site I've ever used"

bnug — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 12:58:45 +0000

Yeah, if you're in a large metro area (I was about 1 hour from the Atlanta distribution center), they would often ship SAME DAY if you ordered by about 10am. It was amazing, and very convenient during chaotic times when you forgot to order one tiny little piece of hardware that was needed before your custom built tooling could be delivered. This was in 2005 - 2007 timeframe, before Amazon started the 1 day stuff.

New comment by bnug in "Ask HN: What task would you pay for a mobile robot to do for you weekly?"

bnug — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 14:42:29 +0000

If it could wash my dishes & do my laundry, if this was actually feasible, but that's probably pretty far off.

New comment by bnug in "Stoicism is not enough"

bnug — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 13:47:19 +0000

I don't think this is a fair criticism of Stoicisim. It definitely doesn't say ignore the outside world or things you can't change, rather acknowledge and accept them to allow the capacity to focus on the things you can change.

New comment by bnug in "Why Does the U.S. Have the Best Research Universities? (2020)"

bnug — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 16:48:16 +0000

I think its because advanced degrees fast track the immigration process, and the better paying jobs are in the US. Those born in the US get a bachelors degree and then a job (probably to pay off the student debt). For a non-US born person with a bachelors degree, it is far more difficult to find a job in the US, so they apply for a MS/PhD program. Then the MS/PhD programs are full of foreign nationals, and naturally the academic R&D jobs pull from that pool made up of mostly non-US persons.