Hacker News: colinrand

New comment by colinrand in "Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'"

colinrand — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:00:30 +0000

There is a lot to be gained from 1-1 in person tutoring. Can't read the article so don't know their specific gripe. But often when learning a kid needs redirecting, reassurance, or other emotional support. Getting this from AI seems like giving up humanity and connections for the sake of silicon valley educational 'betterment' which has always been suspect.

It is shocking how quickly many people are to dismiss the benefits of human interaction and connection since they aren't quantifiable.

If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?

New comment by colinrand in "I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers"

colinrand — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:57:50 +0000

Omg. this is the best word ever: poptimism

New comment by colinrand in "Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities"

colinrand — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:51:12 +0000

I have ben discussing with folks that we are going to have a 'covid' moment in cyber where IT becomes untrustworthy leading to a rapid societal shift with massive ripples in all areas of life. Economic funding is not possible to do this in advance, it will take a catastrophic level event to get cyber defense anywhere close to the levels of this type of cyber offense. And before anyone in cyber says we have the tech, the problem is not the tech, it's a people problem. Getting any group of people of any decent size scale to act together without urgency is really really hard.

New comment by colinrand in "Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative"

colinrand — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:23:26 +0000

yeah - from a strict trust point of view, if Github/MSFT are training agents I would be skeptical of them.

however, there is a practicality issue too. Avoiding all untrustworthy software would have you end up living in a shack in the woods foraging for food.

New comment by colinrand in "The Amazon tax"

colinrand — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:55:02 +0000

>>Somehow nobody noticed.

I disagree, many many people noticed and we were irked by it, but it's extremely impractical to fight against it.

New comment by colinrand in "The Origin of Consciousness (2008)"

colinrand — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 22:20:08 +0000

I find this on the crackpottery side. Narrowly defining a certain aspect of consciousness to make a point, and disregarding many (most) other aspects of consciousness. Self-aware much?

New comment by colinrand in "Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative"

colinrand — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:50:53 +0000

Having an AI company host your source code is giving your source code to an untrustworthy agent who might break their sandbox and might use your source code to accomplish a task that they have been given in their testing ground, for testing purposes only, that would definitely positively not ever be used for non-testing purposes.

New comment by colinrand in "Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work"

colinrand — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:00:54 +0000

this is a cool idea, but i suspect will be limited in use cases. the vast majority of people don't want or can't modify their software competently and will rely on others to do that. once you're relying on someone else, they do not want to maintain different copies for every user, that sounds like a maintenance nightmare for admins or else such a new paradigm that it takes a new generation of admins 20 years to get comfortable.

New comment by colinrand in "Googlebook"

colinrand — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:41:23 +0000

I could not agree more. We need less tech in classrooms, not more.

New comment by colinrand in "The Human Root of Trust – public domain framework for agent accountability"

colinrand — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 17:39:38 +0000

Enterprise adoption of this type of cryptographic authentication is nil.

New comment by colinrand in "The Human Root of Trust – public domain framework for agent accountability"

colinrand — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 06:15:49 +0000

I like this direction, but I don't think the crypto angle is necessary or practical in an enterprise / corporate setting. Current audit and compliance frameworks don't leverage or really recognize or encourage cryptographically based proof of action, so I don't see the agentic world as needing this to drive agentic adoption.

However, everything else you lay out is spot on.

New comment by colinrand in "OpenAI Selects Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to Extend Microsoft Azure AI Platform"

colinrand — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 21:43:40 +0000

This is super sketch for others on the platform. First hand experience from using OCI - they have severe capacity constraints and need _lots_ of heads up when you want to increase your usage of things. Auto scaling it ain't.

So if OpenAI starts drawing significant resources from their cloud hardware, good luck gettin your own. Including me :)

New comment by colinrand in "ChatGPT has entered the classroom: how LLMs could transform education"

colinrand — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 16:48:50 +0000

This is a very economically driven situation in the US. Upper middles load their kids up non stop with educational stuff outside of the schools, but the lower middle on down can't afford this (it's really expensive) and school often functions primarily as child care.

New comment by colinrand in "ChatGPT has entered the classroom: how LLMs could transform education"

colinrand — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 16:12:56 +0000

I always get very skeptical with putting more technology in the classrooms (at least here in the US). The primary problem is funding and too many kids for a single teacher. Educational innovation comes in with a bang and out with a whimper when the study turns out to be flawed, often quite severely.

I'm sure LLMs can augment learning in some settings, esp in higher ed, but putting more computer time for kids learning basics (I mean K-8 mostly) I hope is handled more carefully than things like Quizlet...

New comment by colinrand in "Map of Space Invader Mosaics in Paris"

colinrand — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 19:38:20 +0000

We were there over the summer and this was such a fantastic activity for my kids. It got them looking up at the buildings and really helped draw their attention to architecture and build a better mental map in their heads of the city. Not going to comment on if having a map is good or not, but the project is amazing.

New comment by colinrand in "LinkedIn is laying off nearly 700 employees"

colinrand — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 20:52:00 +0000

Has anyone else noticed that their connection count stays 'correct' but a significant number of people that I used to be connected to now are surfaced as recommendations for me to connect with? It's absurd! I doubt people regularly go through their networks and unconnect from people that they don't want to keep in touch with, kind of defeats the purpose. So wth?

New comment by colinrand in "You're barely managing"

colinrand — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 15:25:03 +0000

I have started thinking more about the traditional relationship between labor and management whenever someone brings up the topic of managing in the modern era. (Perhaps its because my highschooler is taking US History...) What I always find missed is that modern management glosses over the fundamental clash of interests, the IC interest versus the business interest, and that it is the manager's role to guide through carrots and sticks the IC to achieve the business interests. It often take many layers of management to complete the messaging gymnastics required to guide and hide the IC workers directions. But if you don't understand labor, you're missing a big responsibility of management.

Ask HN: How to calculate SaaS COGS for production environment when DevOps

colinrand — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 20:17:13 +0000

Hi all, Curious to know how folks have been accounting for COGS for a SaaS service in an environment where the engineers responsible for maintaining production rarely actually touch production directly.

In the olden days, we would have a few engineers dedicated to managing production systems, and we would just use their time in the calculations. That was fine, because they spent much of their time looking at the bits, sometimes changing systems, and generally just being responsible for prod.

My current system is in the newish model where nobody actually touches production. All changes are software driven, logs are analyzed automatically with monitors, and generally only investigated when issues arise (detected or reported).

Anyone have a rationale for how to allocate the infrastructure teams time to production for this accounting exercise? I'm guestimating 50-50 split, prod verse non prod support (developer support), but I'd love to hear other POVs. Thx.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37328379

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by colinrand in "Cleaning Up Dead Bodies in AWS IAM"

colinrand — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 16:37:43 +0000

Analyst firms (ie Gartner) are a big driver of this too. Couple that with the start up / VC model which needs to create new 'categories' to demonstrate differentiation, and you have a total mess.

New comment by colinrand in "AI real-time human full-body photo generator"

colinrand — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 15:09:56 +0000

Fwiw, I read the FAQ yesterday. It was either not there or else my blinders were on to not find anything.