Hacker News: cweld510

New comment by cweld510 in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

cweld510 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:02:42 +0000

AI is only eating some of that though. For instance, everyone who does performance work knows that perhaps the most important part of optimization is constructing the right benchmark. This is already the thing that makes intractable problems tractable. That effect is now exacerbated — AI can optimize anything given a benchmark —- but AI isn’t making great progress at constructing the benchmark itself.

New comment by cweld510 in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

cweld510 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:55:52 +0000

I agree with this — there is at least some bifurcation by skillset and capabilities. Lots of engineers are overfitted to working on consumer web apps or SaaS products, but those are no longer an area of focus. You need to be adaptable enough to work on other kinds of systems too. Doing so either requires that you’re really good commercially (can lead development of a product over time, drive revenue, etc) or very good technically at a wide breadth of technologies and problems.

What makes this more extreme is that we’re in a paradigm shift, technically. Systems of the future look different than what’s been built before. Building agentic stuff is very different than web apps. The infrastructure side is also different. Moreover, both are uncertain so there’s no plug-and-play set of skills that would fit into any company in the way you could probably get hired reliably in the 2010s if you can operate Kubernetes, design a database schema, write Node.js APIs, etc.

New comment by cweld510 in "I'm not worried about AI job loss"

cweld510 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 14:04:34 +0000

Context windows are a natural improvement, but new architectures are completely speculative and it’s unclear we can make any sort of predictable progress with new, better architectures. Most progress has been made on essentially the same architecture paradigms, although we did move from dense models to MoE at some point.

New comment by cweld510 in "How your high school affects your chances of UC Admission"

cweld510 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 01:59:01 +0000

You said above that our country “needs the best engineers and doctors.” Are the tests you mention really objective, direct measures of which student is likely to be the best engineer or doctor in the future? What does it even mean to be the best engineer, and how do you test that?

New comment by cweld510 in "I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer"

cweld510 — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 19:59:19 +0000

Depends on the team — managing can be quite a bit more scope than being a senior IC, depending on expectations for that role. You have broader ownership of technical outcomes over time, even aside from the extra responsibility for growing a team. Managers have all the responsibility of a senior engineer plus more. In that way manager feels to me like a clear promotion to me. Manager vs staff eng, maybe not though.

New comment by cweld510 in "Tips for stroke-surviving software engineers"

cweld510 — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 22:10:27 +0000

I don’t agree with that though, plenty of places practice agile well. Maybe big corporations don’t practice it well, but startups often do agile correctly and understand the philosophy.

New comment by cweld510 in "How AI conquered the US economy: A visual FAQ"

cweld510 — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 18:50:27 +0000

I think the primary benefit of LLMs for me is as an entrypoint into an area I know nothing about. For instance, if I’m building a new kind of system which I haven’t built before, then I’m missing lots of information about it — like what are the most common ways to approach this problem, is there academic research I should read, what are the common terms/paradigms/etc. For this kind of thing LLMs are good because they just need to be approximately correct to be useful, and they can also provide links to enough primary sources that you can verify what they say. It’s similar if I’m using a new library I haven’t used before, or something like that. I use LLMs much less for things that I am already an expert in.

New comment by cweld510 in "A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages"

cweld510 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 15:12:46 +0000

What matters is whatever he believes the likelihood to be, not what it actually is.

New comment by cweld510 in "Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf"

cweld510 — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 13:41:14 +0000

Big companies hired a lot, but I don’t think this specifically is true? In theory a high-value engineer would be productive, or else they aren’t worth stealing.

The simpler explanation seems more correct here — there was a lot of product fluff and a lot of headcount allocated to build that fluff.

New comment by cweld510 in "How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not"

cweld510 — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 07:23:34 +0000

What does it mean for someone’s model of the world to be accurate? My experience with mild depression is that you notice many negative things which are true but then lack perspective about how much they matter. When you feel better you just don’t pay any mind to these negative things.

New comment by cweld510 in "How much energy does it take to think?"

cweld510 — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 09:36:04 +0000

It’s probably also the case that being physically fit and healthy helps one think more clearly. Carlsen notably spends a lot of time on physical health in addition to prep.

New comment by cweld510 in "Why Algebraic Effects?"

cweld510 — Sat, 24 May 2025 14:30:30 +0000

Doesn’t that imply an interface is necessary though, so you can compile (and potentially release) the components separately? I don’t use .net but this sounds quite similar to pulling things into separate crates in Rust or different compilation units in C, which is frequently good practice.

New comment by cweld510 in "When a team is too big"

cweld510 — Thu, 22 May 2025 12:06:00 +0000

Reading between the lines, my guess is that the standup was the only forum for communication that the team had, and lots of communication was required because people weren’t working on the same things. The only real solution to that is to get people talking outside the standup.

New comment by cweld510 in "The great displacement is already well underway?"

cweld510 — Thu, 15 May 2025 13:41:34 +0000

I don’t think this is because of AI. Rather, it seems a continuation of a shift which has already been occurring for my entire career, which is that the tech industry continually sheds people whose skills are entirely practical and are tied to a specific era or regime of technology. For instance, at one point, there were webmasters, but now those jobs don’t exist anymore. Sysadmins have gone through a similar struggle with the advent of the cloud. Once there were sysadmin jobs, and now there are no more. Today it is happening to a certain kind of full-stack engineers specializing in technology of the last 15 years. In the future it will probably happen to YAML engineers who specialize in Kubernetes and GitHub Actions.

Consistently the most durable roles seem to be those which require theoretical understanding of the fundamentals —- UI/UX, systems, algorithms, etc. It’s unfortunate that not everyone gets a chance to learn these things.

New comment by cweld510 in "Linear Programming for Fun and Profit"

cweld510 — Fri, 09 May 2025 14:31:54 +0000

You're right -- we do relax the integrality constraint, gaining performance at the expense of some precision, and we're generally able to paper over the difference at scheduling time. We've investigated integer linear programming for some use cases, but for solves to run quickly, we have to constrain the inputs significantly.

New comment by cweld510 in "Linear Programming for Fun and Profit"

cweld510 — Fri, 09 May 2025 14:11:46 +0000

Great to see this post here -- really enjoyed writing it! I think it's really cool how an algorithm from an operational research context can play a critical role in a high-availability large-scale cloud service.

Linear Programming for Fun and Profit: Finding Arbitrages in the GPU Market

cweld510 — Wed, 07 May 2025 18:57:22 +0000

Article URL: https://modal.com/blog/resource-solver

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43919379

Points: 11

# Comments: 0

New comment by cweld510 in "Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?"

cweld510 — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 01:23:17 +0000

Sure, but without an LLM, measuring customer retention might require sending a request over to your data scientist because they know how to make dashboards, then they have to balance it with their other work, so who knows when it gets done. You can do this sort of thing faster with an LLM, and the communication cost will be less. So even if you choose the wrong statistic, you can get it built sooner, and find out sooner that it's wrong, and hopefully course-correct sooner as well.

New comment by cweld510 in "Pledging $300k to the Zig Software Foundation"

cweld510 — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 17:27:00 +0000

Rust is more a response to C++ than to C. Both C++ and rust are big and complicated languages that are good for large projects that are performance-sensitive. Both have very strong static typing and can be verbose as a result.

C feels substantially different than Rust. It’s much smaller and less complicated. It’s technically statically typed, but also not in that it doesn’t really have robust non-primitive types. It’s a very flexible language and really good for problems where you really do have to read and write to random memory locations, rearrange registers, use raw function pointers, that sort of thing. Writing C to me feels a lot closer to Python sometimes than to Rust or C++. Writing algorithms can be easier because there is less to get in your way. In this way, there’s still a clear place for C. Projects that are small but need to be clever are maybe easier done in C than Rust. Rust is getting used more for big systems projects like VMs (firecracker), low level backends, and that sort of thing. But if I was going to write an interpreter I’d probably do it in C. Now, I’d do it in Zig.

New comment by cweld510 in "AI solves International Math Olympiad problems at silver medal level"

cweld510 — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 13:38:53 +0000

The useful thing about proofs is that they are written in English (or another language), not formal logic. In general they can be mapped to formal logic, though. This means that people can digest them on an intuitive level. The actual goal of a proof is to create new knowledge (via the proof) which can be distributed across the mathematical community. If proofs exist but are not easily comprehensible, then they don’t accomplish this goal.