Hacker News: dclowd9901

New comment by dclowd9901 in "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion"

dclowd9901 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 22:24:06 +0000

Clearly some folks here have never worked at Amazon before. It's genuinely terrifying to see what most of the internet runs on.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:59:25 +0000

Yet, with 37% of people being only a $400 surprise cost away from financial destitution, you might be completely wrong.

https://www.investopedia.com/here-s-how-many-americans-can-t...

New comment by dclowd9901 in "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:54:08 +0000

Still, it lowers the resolution of the results if you have to throw out a significant portion of the interviews.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:51:18 +0000

> Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes

Would that everyone employed this level of skepticism before commenting on figures.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:21:16 +0000

Ah, guess I was conflating the two (they are quite similar after all). From their documentation (the link you posted):

> For untrusted repos, use a basic text editor instead.

Is that really our options here? How shitty.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left"

dclowd9901 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:16:15 +0000

This draws to mind the dialog that opens when you open a new project in Cursor (and VSCode too, I think), where the IDE asks the user if they trust the project they're opening. Is Cursor under the impression that this is sufficient security apparatus?

New comment by dclowd9901 in "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"

dclowd9901 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:59:17 +0000

I'm always confused by these phrases:

> The new API cuts word error rate by 3.5 to 4x on the same audio: from 9.02% to 2.12% on clean speech

Shouldn't they have said "cuts error rate by 78%" or something?

New comment by dclowd9901 in "A possible future for Damn Interesting"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:31:46 +0000

Oh yeah, I think I alone have shared this article with a few dozen people.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "A possible future for Damn Interesting"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:27:52 +0000

Just more focused places to find it, I think. I loved the historical seafaring stories that DI would post, but then I realized that there were subject matter podcasts that dug into these stories even more. So I think it was just specialization taking over.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "A possible future for Damn Interesting"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:43:04 +0000

Admittedly, I haven't read DI in quite a while, but seeing this post brought back a flood of memories from my college days of waiting for the next article to drop. This blog was the precursor of an entire genre of "generally interesting shit" that has kind of underpinned most of the spirit of podcasting today. Shows like 99PI, Stuff You Should Know, RadioLab and so on owe I think a little something to this blog.

The amount asked for is meager, and I was more than happy to throw some bucks at it.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:11:50 +0000

There is no such thing as a complete piece of information and it is unreasonable to expect every published piece of every bit of information to contain all required context to understand it. I'm not defending the Yale article's basic miss on the information, but rather your laziness on looking for more information when something came across your purview.

If someone said to you "hey, I heard they're pulling back on measuring ocean currents, isn't that shitty?" Would you get defensive and start yelling at them about not providing the "other side"? No, you'd say "whoa, I better figure out what's going on here" and make it a point to dig more, not sit there and bitch and moan about incomplete information. Yale.edu isn't a news service, it has no obligation to "both sides" a story for you.

Furthermore, what even would be the point of anyone regurgitating that hopeless pile of words the NSF's chief barfed out (apart from illustrating that's all they have as an explanation)? You mistakenly gave the administration the benefit of the doubt here when you really had no business doing so.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 03:56:17 +0000

Or even the UN? That organization that this administration wants no part of...

New comment by dclowd9901 in "U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 03:51:08 +0000

https://archive.is/fZ9CN

> Michael England, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, said the decision to dismantle the network, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”

1) it's not hard to do your own research. If you're here, I assume you know how.

2) does that answer satisfy you? The bullshitty word salad doesn't surprise me. With this administration I expect incompetence and double speak and am rarely disappointed. I wonder why at this point in time you choose to give them so much leeway.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "Where does next-token prediction leave us?"

dclowd9901 — Wed, 27 May 2026 06:20:34 +0000

"Ingenuity" is what I think is missing. The sheer _want_ of solving a problem that is distinctly a living creature's concern.

The irony is if we ever taught machines how to have this, they'd probably not want to work for us anymore.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

dclowd9901 — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:35:33 +0000

Nonsense. The goalpost is "this is as good as a senior engineer". A senior engineer can easily understand architectural rationale. Don't dismiss my argument because it's inconvenient to yours.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:27:48 +0000

I'm not sure what your background is, but as a staff level engineer, I can assure you they do not. They in fact seem to lack any understanding of architectural intent within a sufficiently large code base. This seems obvious since they can't fit the entire code base in their context at once.

We have many folks (not engineers) at our company using LLMs to open PRs, and every one of these PRs has profound architectural design problems.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "AI is making me dumb"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:23:19 +0000

I've been using it mostly to bat away yak shaving rabbit holes one can get into when working on a large and complex project. I work mostly on platform work, which is generally nebulous in its feedback loop and testing. Relegating AI to refactoring and building tools to help me research keeps me focused on solving the actual main problem I'm trying to solve, reduces context switching. I really don't understand people who use it to bat out their main focus. I simply don't trust it at that level.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

dclowd9901 — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:20:25 +0000

I see it as rude as well. The literal interpretation is: "your time is worth absolutely nothing to me."

New comment by dclowd9901 in "GitHub is having issues now"

dclowd9901 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:23:47 +0000

Without reaching for my tin foil hat, I have a feeling MS is able to suppress these incidents somehow, because yeah, that one was pretty bad.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "GitHub is having issues now"

dclowd9901 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:01:20 +0000

What's your general increase of cost and maintenance overhead? How many devs and repos do you have?