Hacker News: danjl

New comment by danjl in "I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken"

danjl — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:56:32 +0000

Silicon Valley has plenty of safety-related companies, engineers, and cultures. Medical devices, biotech, chip and hardware, aerospace, and even new companies, like Waymo, have deep safety-based products and cultures. The problem in this case is actually quite specific to frontier AI labs. They have been pushed by market forces and a lack of regulation and skip well-known safety practices.

New comment by danjl in "AI Is Breaking This Thing We Call Trust"

danjl — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:59:40 +0000

The assumptions we made about code always led to the biggest issues. If you assumed a junior engineer, or even a senior engineer not familiar with the local practices, would not make certain mistakes, then those mistakes always slipped through. If anything, the AI makes us be _better_ reviewers, since we need to check more of our assumptions at the door. I used to check the compiler assembly output, in case I could optimize it either by hand, or by changing my code to use a do-while instead of a for loop. I don't do that anymore. The same thing is happening with AI-generated code. I used to have to check it all very carefully, and regenerate code when the AI chose to add a whole new mechanism to the code base rather than re-using an existing mechanism, to keep the code solid. That happens less and less, and soon, it won't make sense to read over the code at all. Maybe in some specific circumstances that will be necessary, but less and less overall. And that's ok. We have moved to higher and higher levels of abstraction over the decades that I've been coding, and each time we can take on bigger problems and invent new things.

New comment by danjl in "Moderna reports first positive Phase 3 for mRNA neoantigen therapy in melanoma"

danjl — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:53:11 +0000

Will this targeted approach be beneficial to other cancer types? Is there any data or theory about this class of drugs as a more general therapy?

New comment by danjl in "Claude Code May–August 2026 weekly limits promotion"

danjl — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:03:26 +0000

I suspect the net result will be that more Pro $100 subscribers upgrade to $200/mo. If you explicitly do simpler stuff with Opus, you generally have enough Fable time for most programming and planning tasks.

New comment by danjl in "What is a product?"

danjl — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:11:14 +0000

A product is much more than the software and its reliability. The business side is just as big of a lift. You need to build a business, not just a product. A business includes understanding the value proposition, not just a potential solution in the form of a tool. It includes understanding how the software fits in to the target customer's workflow, and how it provides real value. You need to be able to communicate that value proposition to the customers, investors and your employees, amongst other stakeholders. Later, this transforms into understanding the sales cycle and how to use marketing to grow your users. The business side has always been the hard part. Software was always easy to build. The hard part is knowing what to build that really provides value.

New comment by danjl in "Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software"

danjl — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:23:30 +0000

Perhaps also a bit of ageism. Always hard to prove. Often implicit.

New comment by danjl in "The One-Person Company Fantasy"

danjl — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:38:49 +0000

Of course Solopreneurs were a thing long before AI. It just takes special people. I think the assumption of this article is that there may be a larger array of people capable of running their own business with the aid of AI. I'm similarly leery of this for the same reasons covered in the post. Solopreneurs were generally technical people who had been forced to learn the business side after playing a senior role, generally a CTO or CEO, of a previous startup. They are "full stack" founders, who have deep understanding of the entire business stack, both on the business and technical side. These special people will likely be supercharged by AI, which they can intelligently direct to offload much of the grunt work, both on the technical side, and on the business side, especially for marketing.

New comment by danjl in "New Claude app strings, Fable 5 coming back only with verification"

danjl — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:50:14 +0000

I mean, it is possible, that, after verification, credits are added to the Fable usage from your existing subscription plan. Maybe not. But maybe yes. No way to know. And, remember, when Fable was first released, they announced that it was only going to be on the existing subscription plans for a short period.

New comment by danjl in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

danjl — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 19:54:36 +0000

The Lance Armstrong defense

New comment by danjl in "The National Parks Were Reportedly Told to Stay Silent on Deaths"

danjl — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:24:02 +0000

The insecurity of this administration is screaming

New comment by danjl in "Elevated error rate across multiple models"

danjl — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:49:05 +0000

Perhaps they are adding security controls to bring Fable back online? One can hope.

New comment by danjl in "Astronauts told to return to ISS after sheltering over air leak repairs"

danjl — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:33:18 +0000

It seems as though the leaks are always in the Russian section? Perhaps this is why. Humans are the weak link. Damn breathers.

New comment by danjl in "The Ask"

danjl — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:16:31 +0000

I mostly agree. I'm curious to hear more details about why you think AI cannot replace middle management?

New comment by danjl in "The Ask"

danjl — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:07:52 +0000

I have 35+ years experience as a manager and engineer at large enterprise tech companies (what the kids now call FAANG, though some of the company names were different back then), and was a Founder, CEO and CTO at a $7M VC funded company and several other "differently-funded" startups.

New comment by danjl in "The Ask"

danjl — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:39:48 +0000

Harsh take: AI should replace most middle management. It is the easiest part of an organization to replace. The people making things should mostly communicate about company strategy, cross-team issues, and job requirements with an AI. There should be a handful of high-level strategy on top of the AI. The AI should have access to all the documents for the company. The middle management should be put in a spaceship along with HR and sent off to another planet so the people who build things can just get stuff done. This will never happen.

New comment by danjl in "Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?"

danjl — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:17:53 +0000

Then you should be scared about every single online account you use, since they all have this same capability of suspension of your account. That's inherent in any service policy.

New comment by danjl in "Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension"

danjl — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:14:16 +0000

I think the message here is that you can't trust any single cloud provider. You at least need two with full operational capability.

New comment by danjl in "Google changes its search box"

danjl — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:18:49 +0000

Feels a bit like New Coke

New comment by danjl in "I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support"

danjl — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:03:20 +0000

This sounds just like all my neighbors complaining about their internet provider.

New comment by danjl in "A $20/month user costs OpenAI $65 in compute. AI video is a money furnace"

danjl — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:38:36 +0000

The economics work if you generate the video locally, using your own compute and a pretrained model provided for a fee. The compute bit is the expensive part. Local users could trade time for money. They just don't have a business or security model that allows them to distribute the model for people to use locally. Sure, you might need to wait all night for 10 seconds of video generated on your 4090, but you could do it, and folks might even pay for the privilege of using the pretrained model. Licensing for local compute might even pay back the cost of training the model with enough time and users.