Hacker News: cowanon77

New comment by cowanon77 in "Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML"

cowanon77 — Sun, 03 May 2026 08:45:35 +0000

Jira is only a set of changes though. What happens on a long (10+ year) and complex (10+) developer project with many changes and revisions? Eventually you need an explicit specification that itself has a "current state", and a change log. Theoretically you could generate this from Jira, but in my experience it eventually became a mess on any larger project that didn't have explicit and maintained writen requirements.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores"

cowanon77 — Sun, 03 May 2026 08:33:22 +0000

There is an imbalance in leverage and timing though. Dynamic pricing requires a lot of real time and historical data; companies can access and share that information easily, and you as a consumer cannot.

Even in areas with multiple competitors, they can (and do) effectively collude by getting their information through data brokers and third parties.

I don't have a solution, but we are currently very far away from a free market in general.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation"

cowanon77 — Fri, 01 May 2026 10:07:28 +0000

The core theories of economics seem correct, and in fact predict the current situation if used correctly. The problem is that the game has been systemicaly rigged. Employers have maximimized their legal leverage, while crushing all employee and subcontractor leverage. The central banks favors (and often rigs) the metrics that favor the rich (GDP, U3, CPI, etc), and ignore alteratives that favor labour. The government designs tax policy to favor integenerational wealth, and capital accumulation over income.

The new deal in America roughly got things correct, and was followed by the greatest expansion of the middle class in history. What we're suffering from today is the systematic destruction of that social contract.

New comment by cowanon77 in "US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic"

cowanon77 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:58:40 +0000

It's similar to the problems with GDP, CPI, U-3 (Unemployment rate), etc. You really need at least 30-100 metrics or more to get a grasp of what's really happening in a complex eonomy. Debt can be good if it causes more growth in the economy, and bad if just gets trapped in a few foreign investment funds. But the number by itself doesn't tell us any of that, yet that is all that grabs the focus.

Often politicians will try to shrink or control the debt without deeply investiagting the true causes, because the real causes may be politically inconvenient.

New comment by cowanon77 in "US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic"

cowanon77 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:41:39 +0000

This is the big misnomer - it's debt on the U.S. balance sheet, but is a credit on someone else's balance sheet. By itself, it's not necessarily bad; it really depends on who the debt is issued to, why, and on what terms.

Time would be better spent talking about other issues, but national debt is a simple number politicians can complain about rather than talking about the more complex issues that really impact the rest of us.