Hacker News: closeparen

New comment by closeparen in "I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore"

closeparen — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:37:30 +0000

The wealth of the capital class is, unsurprisingly, capital - the facilities, equipment, organizational structures, etc. used to make stuff. What does it mean for capital to be hoarded?

New comment by closeparen in "Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide"

closeparen — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 21:27:59 +0000

A company at the scale to benefit from this almost certainly has some kind of development sandbox environment and/or periodic job runner that's integrated into its environment and maintained by a team, not random Mac Minis.

New comment by closeparen in "My favorite keyboards"

closeparen — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 18:23:35 +0000

From what I've read, very few people who buy ortho split keyboards, even people who love and swear by them, ever recover their WPM. I could never get comfortable on my Ergodox. The Glove80 seems more promising, but I can't afford the productivity hit at work, particularly when communicating on Slack. But the Kinesis Freestyle2 with the tenting kit quickly became my daily driver & basically solved my wrist and thumb pain.

New comment by closeparen in "In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough"

closeparen — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 17:43:10 +0000

It was enough for a single person in a good studio or middling 1BR with no kids, probably no car, and no desire to own property.

New comment by closeparen in "In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough"

closeparen — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 17:41:30 +0000

High CoL jurisdictions like having the offices there, they just prefer that the employees and their families be someone else's problem. I couldn't imagine anything short of a federal right to remote work really doing much.

New comment by closeparen in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

closeparen — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:46:43 +0000

If you personally are being rotated out of FAANG, sure. If FAANG isn't hiring, good luck.

New comment by closeparen in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

closeparen — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:35:40 +0000

In other words, do not buy a house or start a family within 2 hours of any of their supported work locations.

New comment by closeparen in "Formal methods and the future of programming"

closeparen — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 20:23:00 +0000

>Now, since it's impossible to code review the tens of thousands of lines of code that AI produces

I would simply not ask the AI to write me more code until I'm satisfied with the code it's already written! But it is true there's more of an opportunity to let the thing rip if you can give the harness the ability to meaningfully verify its own work.

New comment by closeparen in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

closeparen — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:41:45 +0000

Name, address, and phone number served plenty of critical functions when they were published in the White Pages. Cell phones not being listed there was kind of an accident of history. It was common to call a listed landline and be given or forwarded to a cell number. Only after most people stopped having landlines altogether did a phone number come to be considered sensitive information (unless you were a celebrity or something).

Ironically Facebook is responsible for much of this, as friending someone on Facebook became a lower stakes, less intimate alternative to exchanging phone numbers.

New comment by closeparen in "AI coding at home without going broke"

closeparen — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:33:44 +0000

>Around $400 a month of plans buys roughly $2800 of API usage at list prices, which is a real bargain right up until you hit the ceiling. The plans are metered, and any large AI native workflow will chew through the included tokens fast

I don't think that's true at all. I'm doing 8-12 PRs a week at work, all primarily Claude Code, and the usage at API billing has never broken $500/mo.

New comment by closeparen in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

closeparen — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:27:48 +0000

Pretty much anything coming out of middle management or "org leadership" is performative. Line managers and their reports are generally actually building products and keeping the lights on.

New comment by closeparen in "Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other"

closeparen — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:53:44 +0000

Many companies, including in their software development functions, are oral cultures rather than literate cultures.

New comment by closeparen in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

closeparen — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:52:18 +0000

There is a tier just outside of FAANG that pays similarly or better, prominent examples being Uber, Airbnb, Stripe, Block, Databricks, Datadog, Pinterest, Snowflake, etc.

New comment by closeparen in "The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies"

closeparen — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:46:34 +0000

You get Social Security and Medicare. Which are cheaper now than they will ever be, as the population is only getting older.

New comment by closeparen in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

closeparen — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:07:11 +0000

Apple does this.

New comment by closeparen in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

closeparen — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:14:01 +0000

What happened to onshore development in Silicon Valley in 2022 happened to corporate America’s IT departments in the early 2000s.

New comment by closeparen in "Backpressure is all you need"

closeparen — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:35:47 +0000

It is too bad that so many companies have built these huge microservices beasts where you cannot run much more than unit tests locally, and you pretty much have to guess at the impact of your change until you have merged it, deployed it, and turned on the feature flag for your own account / test account. This loop is slow, which is perhaps a cost they are willing to pay, but it is also not safe for agents, which will be a massive setback.

New comment by closeparen in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

closeparen — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:13:30 +0000

The narrative "we don't need as many staff because of AI" is a labor disciplining device whether or not it is true. Remaining engineers, loaded up with more projects under the threat of layoffs and with no outside opportunities, work nights and weekends to get them done. Then it is literally true that we accomplished more with less. And in a sense it is even "because of AI." But not in the way that you're supposed to think they mean it.

New comment by closeparen in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

closeparen — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:05:18 +0000

Which is why junior and senior talent alike are forced back into the office. Except that tenured senior and staff employees from the boom times are in the San Francisco office, but all the new grad hires from the last 2-4 years are in various third world offices. And neither of them can get conference rooms, so everybody's on Zoom at their desk all day, trying to be heard over their neighbors.

New comment by closeparen in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

closeparen — Sat, 23 May 2026 19:41:17 +0000

Illustratively, living in the house is worth about $15,000/month and everything else combined is maybe $2,000.