Hacker News: brianmcc

New comment by brianmcc in "Why top firms fire good workers"

brianmcc — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 09:25:50 +0000

I don't think anyone's saying unions can do that? They can protect workers and provide some balance in the power dynamics, but there absolutely are limits.

New comment by brianmcc in "The surprising benefits of giving up"

brianmcc — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 13:04:19 +0000

No it's more because things have gotten worse. When people's parents could get an X-bedroomed house on a single parent's income, which they grew up in and developed their sense of aspiration and normality, but they cannot do so with joint really high incomes, there's a very tangible sense of progress having not just stalled but gone backwards.

New comment by brianmcc in "Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure"

brianmcc — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:18:26 +0000

Plus the Scottish Govt have removed the peak/off-peak ticket split, everything is now priced at off-peak - i.e. cheaper - rates.

Doesn't necessarily impact season ticket holders but it's been a pretty good move for the most part, and a well received change.

New comment by brianmcc in "Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres"

brianmcc — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:06:40 +0000

"Lots of the team knows Postgres really well, nobody knows Kafka at all yet" is also an underrated factor in making choices. "Kafka was the ideal technical choice but we screwed up the implementation through well-intentioned inexperience" being an all too plausible outcome.

New comment by brianmcc in "Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers"

brianmcc — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 12:11:52 +0000

The technologically inept get QR codes tattooed on their foreheads.

New comment by brianmcc in "Just Use HTML"

brianmcc — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 13:57:18 +0000

Perl CGI FTW! :-D

New comment by brianmcc in "Perceived Age (2024)"

brianmcc — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 11:59:24 +0000

Sure I mean it's not a crime or anything, just highlighting you're highly unlikely to get anything like the perspective, wisdom, insight, that - for example - an 80 year old might share.

You could ask a 5 year old for opinions, they're not going to be very well informed.

New comment by brianmcc in "Rupert Murdoch buys out 3 of his children to seal fate of his media empire"

brianmcc — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 12:29:54 +0000

Interesting choice of words in the original article and headline here - to "seal one's fate" feels quite pessimistic and doom-laden. Why not something like "secure its future"?

New comment by brianmcc in "Show HN: Swimming in Tech Debt"

brianmcc — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 14:45:17 +0000

Sure, just that stories about "paying down tech debt" are an implicit admission of flaws and shortcuts and "doing it again because it wasn't done right initially".

Which is all true but the concept of making deliberate trade offs for speed and expedience invariably gets lost.

Stories about ongoing improvement - tech enhancement - just get seen as more positive. Plus that term covers both remediating original shortcut choices as well as new engineering improvements arising.

New comment by brianmcc in "UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost"

brianmcc — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 12:30:03 +0000

As something of an AI skeptic the thing that bothers me most is the wholesale gullibility and credulity of leaders. Incredible claims IMO require incredible levels of evidence, not just "tech bros with vested interests tell us this, it must be so!".

A level of general experimentation by companies and other organizations is clearly warranted, and it should be marked accordingly. This just isn't happening in a lot of places: "become 10x more productive or bye-bye" is just totally ludicrous stance to take.

So it's good to see some reports coming out where some attempt at actual measurement and assessment of efficacy has been made.

New comment by brianmcc in "Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document"

brianmcc — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 12:23:49 +0000

Ironically, screen sharing on zoom whilst all colocated can be less bad than sitting round a gigantic TV type screen for calls where screen content is needed :-|

New comment by brianmcc in "Show HN: Swimming in Tech Debt"

brianmcc — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 12:20:01 +0000

A total tangent but it's amazing how more palatable "tech enhancement" is in planning, management chats, etc., than anything involving the term "tech debt"

New comment by brianmcc in "Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up"

brianmcc — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 12:56:30 +0000

Sadly yes - "When America sneezes, the World catches cold"

New comment by brianmcc in "Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?"

brianmcc — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 13:08:20 +0000

I mean maybe if you hear it a lot, there's a reason for that?

Frameworks may not bring magical perfection but they bring a lot of objective benefit to the table.

New comment by brianmcc in "iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras"

brianmcc — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 13:52:58 +0000

Then they half press the shutter button and achieve only a brief moment of auto focus :-D

New comment by brianmcc in "iPhone 16 cameras vs. traditional digital cameras"

brianmcc — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 13:26:00 +0000

>> The iPhone picture always turns out, but the Canon takes a modicum of skill, which my wife is not interested in, and I'll never be able to teach passers-by when they take a group picture for us

This is why my Canon 80D sits and gathers dust. Too many family moments fluffed, vs my Android's basically 100% hit rate. Yes this is largely a skill issue on my part, which is sad, but modern phone photos are more than adequate these days.

New comment by brianmcc in "The first non-opoid painkiller"

brianmcc — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 12:38:45 +0000

Wife: good day at the office dear?

Me: yep argued with some strangers on HN about how daft/wise UK's paracetamol laws are, highly fulfilling!

:-)

New comment by brianmcc in "The first non-opoid painkiller"

brianmcc — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 12:31:04 +0000

You can buy two packs of 16 each, enough for 4 days usage at 2 per dose, 4 times per day, after which point if you still need them you maybe have a bigger problem. Or can just restock. What's "fantastically stupid" about it?

New comment by brianmcc in "Salesforce CEO Claims Half of the Company's Work Is Now Done by AI"

brianmcc — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 12:23:00 +0000

Ah that distinct phase of the Gartner Hype Cycle where CEOs claim massive amounts of use of Technology X regardless of whatever the underlying reality is

New comment by brianmcc in "Younger generations less likely to have dementia, study suggests"

brianmcc — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 12:35:45 +0000

It could but you need a body of evidence for it, plus credible pathways to explain it. So far the greater weight seems to be behind "use it or lose it".