Hacker News: capitalsigma

New comment by capitalsigma in "Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?"

capitalsigma — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:22:06 +0000

This is more or less my belief too. But I think there are probably domains/companies where the "promo video" is actually good enough to ship (or at least, where that's the quality that devs were shipping before)

New comment by capitalsigma in "AI coding is gambling"

capitalsigma — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 20:19:59 +0000

People don't write blog posts about how they wake up at 3AM to assign new tasks to their intern, nor do they build "orchestration frameworks" that involve N layers of interns passing tasks down between eachother

New comment by capitalsigma in "100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product"

capitalsigma — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:59:13 +0000

Also the process sounds like a nightmare: "it broke and I asked 4 different LLMs to fix it; my `AGENTS.md` file contained hundreds of special cases; etc." I thought this article was intended to be a horror story, not an advertisement

New comment by capitalsigma in "Denmark to raise retirement age to 70"

capitalsigma — Sun, 25 May 2025 19:19:55 +0000

I'm pretty sure that "lack of market opportunity" isn't the reason that nobody has yet managed to invent eternal youth

New comment by capitalsigma in "Mojo is available for local download"

capitalsigma — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 20:21:34 +0000

It seems like they're targeting AI chip start ups with the promise of a compiler framework that can integrate with a custom backend

New comment by capitalsigma in "Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement"

capitalsigma — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 16:51:23 +0000

"matchmaking"

New comment by capitalsigma in "A Gentle Introduction to Liquid Types"

capitalsigma — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 06:44:30 +0000

It seems a little disingenuous to call something written in an obscure Haskell dialect a "high performance UDP packet parser"

New comment by capitalsigma in "Govt warns kenyans about Worldcoin"

capitalsigma — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 20:50:16 +0000

Money allows for economic specialization, leading to greater productivity. You don't build an economy that produces cell phones when you're stuck bartering goats for wheat.

New comment by capitalsigma in "LPython: Novel, Fast, Retargetable Python Compiler"

capitalsigma — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 18:12:37 +0000

I thought that Fortran was traditionally faster than C++ for numerical code due to stricter aliasing rules in the language, which I wouldn't expect to carry over to an IR?

New comment by capitalsigma in "Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops"

capitalsigma — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 18:44:25 +0000

Most big tech firms give engineers RSUs for this reason

New comment by capitalsigma in "Office real estate crash will be so sharp, values unlikely to recover by 2040"

capitalsigma — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 15:00:27 +0000

Ponzi scheme is when the price collapses for something that I don't like, and the more that I don't like it the Ponzi-er it is

New comment by capitalsigma in "Apple wants rights to the image of apples in Switzerland"

capitalsigma — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 15:23:54 +0000

SWEs at Apple are not "barely able to afford rent"

New comment by capitalsigma in "Meta has started its latest round of layoffs, focusing on business groups"

capitalsigma — Wed, 24 May 2023 13:55:07 +0000

Techies (at least at meta) are owners in the sense that a large % of their comp is in the form of equity, so it is in their interest for the company to maximize stock price.

New comment by capitalsigma in "It’s time to embrace slow productivity (2022)"

capitalsigma — Sat, 20 May 2023 00:15:45 +0000

Would you prefer subsistence farming?

New comment by capitalsigma in "The Great CPU Stagnation"

capitalsigma — Thu, 18 May 2023 17:42:40 +0000

There are overheads in server workloads that scale with the number of machines (network traffic, serializing/deserializing requests). There are also fixed costs per server that don't scale with core count, or at least scale sublinearly (storage, physical data center space, motherboard, ease of maintenance). So running 10 machines with 100 cores can be cheaper and more performant than running 1,000 machines with 1 core even if $/core is higher. And of course individual cores can be beefier: wider SIMD units, application-specific extensions like bfloat support for ML workloads, etc.

Of course Moore's law is slowing down, but cores/$ is an extremely silly metric to use

New comment by capitalsigma in "Mark Zuckerberg: “Please Resign” (2010)"

capitalsigma — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 22:50:24 +0000

We're not talking here about being overly critical in a code review, or even criticizing someone who pushed bugs to prod. This is someone who intentionally violated company policy in a way that harms everyone who works there. It is not business as usual. Getting mad about this sort of thing is like getting mad about somebody keying your car or spreading false rumors about you: entirely reasonable and justified and not an interaction where professionalism is expected.

New comment by capitalsigma in "French workers protest plan to increase retirement age"

capitalsigma — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 22:40:40 +0000

Increasing salaries will increase the cost of goods and services, meaning that more savings are required. It doesn't necessarily balance.

New comment by capitalsigma in "It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?"

capitalsigma — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 13:43:32 +0000

It's unclear to me how making these divisions dramatically increase their infrastructure costs (by either pulling them in-house or paying a premium to the original parent company) will "help them compete"

New comment by capitalsigma in "Bing AI can't be trusted"

capitalsigma — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 17:43:46 +0000

These models are very impressive, but the issue (imo) is that lay people without an ML background see how plausibly-human the output is and infer that there must be some plausibly-human intelligence behind it that has some plausibly-human learning mechanism -- if your new hire at work made the kinds of mistakes that ChatGPT does, you'd expect them to be up to speed in a couple of weeks. The issue is that ChatGPT really isn't human-like, and removing inaccurate output isn't just a question of correcting it a few times -- it's learning process is truly different and it doesn't understand things how we do.

New comment by capitalsigma in "Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave"

capitalsigma — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 21:26:09 +0000

The point is that ICs are judged based on their individual contributions, i.e. their own code, design docs, etc, whereas managers are judged based on their team's contributions