Hacker News: centra_minded

New comment by centra_minded in "Buying a Home Is Probably Even Worse Than NYTimes/NerdWallet Calculators Imply"

centra_minded — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 20:57:48 +0000

You can filter for SF/NYC home appreciation in the tool at the bottom of the post to see the difference between in-demand areas and overall.

New comment by centra_minded in "Buying a Home Is Probably Even Worse Than NYTimes/NerdWallet Calculators Imply"

centra_minded — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 20:36:02 +0000

> "For those unfamiliar, these rent/buy calculators attempt to estimate the cash flow over XX years for renting vs buying a home. For buying, this is the down payment, mortgage, taxes, etc, and then crucially selling the appreciated home after XX years. For renting, this is mostly rent, but also crucially investment income from investing the money that would have gone into the mortgage/down payment. When I recalculate these numbers, all I'm doing is saying that the default home appreciation rate and the investment appreciation rate should be updated in the tool, and showing the result of that."

When you buy a home, you pay a down payment you counterfactually could have invested (and any difference in rent vs. mortgage can be invested). The article is just saying the calculators skew towards buying by underestimating investment growth and overestimating housing appreciation.

New comment by centra_minded in "Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming""

centra_minded — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 01:13:11 +0000

Modern programming already is very, very far from strict obedience and formal symbolism. Most programmers these days (myself included!) are using libraries, frameworks, and other features that mean what they are doing in practice is wielding sky-high abstractions, gluing things together they do not (and can not) fully understand the inner workings of.

If I create a website with Node.js, I’m not manually managing memory, parsing HTTP requests byte-by-byte, or even attempting to fully grasp the event loop’s nuances. I’m orchestrating layers of code written by others, trusting that these black boxes will behave as advertised according to my best, but deeply incomplete, understanding of them.

I'm not sure what this means for LLMs programming, but I already feel separated from the case Dijkstra lays out.

New comment by centra_minded in "DALL-E + GPT-3 = ♥"

centra_minded — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 18:22:41 +0000

GPT-3 and DALL-E (by my subjective opinion) feel much better than other models that their respective tasks.

DALL-E in particular kind of blows the VQGAN+CLIP messing around I've done out of the water. GPT-3 feels markedly better than other text generation or chatbots I've tried.

Definitely these are well marketed, and not the only models aorund, but they also feel ahead of other things I've tried. Can you point out some of these other tools/models?