Hacker News: devin

New comment by devin in "The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs"

devin — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 01:38:51 +0000

Here are some. I typed them just for you.

New comment by devin in "Dutch central bank moves share of gold from U.S., Canada to London"

devin — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:25:52 +0000

It's a hedge against the risk of the current government. Leaving a bunch here is part of the hedge. It's not as "multifaceted" as you're making it out to be.

New comment by devin in "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"

devin — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:13:15 +0000

Yes, there is a post that made the rounds not long ago entitled Taste Is All That's Left: https://notashelf.dev/posts/taste-is-all-thats-left

Knowing what not to do has always been important, but it is perhaps more important than ever.

New comment by devin in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

devin — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:09:02 +0000

This reminds me of a story I heard (read?) a long time ago. At Disney World they had a rule about a garbage can being within a 10 foot distance of basically anywhere in the park. The logic was that when a garbage can is nearby, there is additional social pressure not to litter, and the result was that they were able to save money on park cleanup because people used the cans.

When I see lone overflowing garbage cans in big cities I think about this.

New comment by devin in "There's no reason for software to be slow anymore"

devin — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 06:54:37 +0000

This is kind of a shallow assessment of "slowness". Slowness is a feeling, not a fact. Network is slow as a rule relative to other parts of the stack, but it is not usually what contributes to the feeling that your software is slow. It takes a good amount of incompetence and arrogance to cultivate that particular experience.

New comment by devin in "There's no reason for software to be slow anymore"

devin — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 03:10:31 +0000

I agree, but it won’t be because we can’t do it. It will be easier than ever to achieve, but of course money for the tokens to do it will go toward some other aspect of the business. That the products get worse seems to be the rule.

New comment by devin in "There's no reason for software to be slow anymore"

devin — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 02:29:40 +0000

The very first thing many people did with AI is start calling the automated tests it writes good enough to capture the desired behavior. Writing tests isn't a whole lot of fun for most, so now the thing that it is supposed to help ensure we're not evolving our software into piles of trash is, in fact, one of the most neglected parts of vibed out codebases.

New comment by devin in "There's no reason for software to be slow anymore"

devin — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 02:25:41 +0000

I would be genuinely interested to see how it evolves the same program over a large number of generations. Given a whole lot of software is more a collection of programs rather than a singular "program", I have to imagine that the outcomes would be vastly different in shape when dealing with smaller targeted, articulable-in-a-few-paragraphs programs vs many-years-of-business-domain layered programs.

New comment by devin in "Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants"

devin — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:51:39 +0000

No, "any" flight attendants are not going to have disrupted sleep schedules. Many FAs sleep in their own beds consistently. Not all FAs fly long haul. Most of them _don't_ fly long haul routes. Domestic carriage is dominant.

Junior staff have less choice when it comes to flying routes where this kind of thing is true, but that changes as they gain seniority.

Cleaners, fumes, etc. almost certainly are not good for you, but the comment started from "look at all of these old haggard FAs" and I don't think any of the rest of this is particularly strong supporting evidence for that claim, even if I agree you shouldn't huff campfire smoke.

New comment by devin in "Cancer-related mortality among US pilots and flight attendants"

devin — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 18:03:47 +0000

I handed it a downvote. Here's why:

> Older flight attendants look really damaged by the job.

First off, this is just anecdotal and I know FAs who do _not_ look "damaged by the job". So, we're off to a bad start.

> The combination of irregular sleep, quite likely too much alcohol and sun in layover locations when younger.

Not all FAs fly crazy schedules. This comment then makes assumptions about where younger FAs fly, and suggests they all drink too much. More conjecture to back up a weak claim without any evidence provided.

> Plus radiation, and biological hazards like being around sick people and smelling farts all day. Being in an enclosed space is not that great for the lungs either, just being around people wearing perfume, is likely bad for the lungs

OK, so this article is about radiation. That is at least addressing the topic. Calling "smelling farts" a biological hazard is borderline ridiculous. "Being around sick people" is what nurses do all day. There are _many_, _many_ professions where _being around a lot of people_ is part of the job. It does not seem particularly notable here.

They end by saying that being in an enclosed space is bad for your lungs. Uh, ok. Maybe? Probably? How bad? Compared to what? Being outdoors in an area prone to air pollution?

New comment by devin in "New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson"

devin — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:04:44 +0000

Anchoring your identity to brands is tragically uncool no matter how you slice it.

New comment by devin in "PostgreSQL for Everything"

devin — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 03:52:33 +0000

Running a small ES with dual save alongside your relational store is trivial. Kafka I will grant you is a lot to operate, but I would not choose Kafka unless I have a Kafka-shaped problem, and if it looks like that I would never, ever choose Postgres. Equating Kafka with “I need a queue” is a laughable comparison.

New comment by devin in "PostgreSQL for Everything"

devin — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 03:50:30 +0000

What do you know about full text search? Faceted search? Custom tokenization? It is wild to see people talk about Postgres fulltext like it’s all you could need, even for small apps.

New comment by devin in "PostgreSQL for Everything"

devin — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 03:47:53 +0000

This is a ridiculous cutoff. Are you kidding?

New comment by devin in "PostgreSQL for Everything"

devin — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:59:15 +0000

If you actually start looking into these things, you often start looking at custom pg extensions, which means you just made the decision to "simplify" your stack by maintaining your own postgres cluster with custom extensions. This is just papering over the fact that you're increasing the complexity and saying "well it's still just postgres!" as you do it.

New comment by devin in "PostgreSQL for Everything"

devin — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:26:36 +0000

This kind of post (Postgres! It's all you need!) is getting pretty tiresome. Postgres does not even come close to a full replacement for Elastic, and that's just the first bullet.

Looking down the list it is pretty easy to go: Yes, postgres can be used instead of that for extremely basic use cases, but it all goes out the window you actually need any of the power of these other tools.

New comment by devin in "The Amazon tax"

devin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:56:55 +0000

Etsy suffers from the same review astroturfing and product category crowding that Amazon does, but the product categories tend to be narrower so it's never quite as bad.

Etsy is certainly _bad_, but getting to Amazon levels is a whole other animal.

New comment by devin in "Incident with Github.com [resolved]"

devin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 03:21:44 +0000

I can appreciate that, but GitHub was acquired nearly 10 years ago. Let's not sit around pretending that GitHub was some fully autonomous business unit when they had a "CEO". Maybe it was _better_, but I would still imagine it was still some form of "in name only". That's the just the nature of acquisitions.

New comment by devin in "Incident with Github.com [resolved]"

devin — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:41:21 +0000

In name, sure. Does it matter who you call the person directing the chaos?

New comment by devin in "AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira"

devin — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:08:36 +0000

It’s clear that they want this to be true so bad that they’re just not going to do it, and will spend a ton of money on quality gates and mitigation strategies instead of just reading some code.