Hacker News: docmars

New comment by docmars in "I've been waiting over a month for Anthropic to respond to my billing issue"

docmars — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:03:33 +0000

This is why the seven seas are so important for preserving our purchases, companies be damned.

New comment by docmars in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

docmars — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:39:53 +0000

This is such an egregious and embarrassing breach in privacy, it's crazy.

GDPR good, but oh no... gotta spy on everyone now.

New comment by docmars in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

docmars — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:07:30 +0000

Oh definitely, I'm no stranger to Apple's antics... but usually they're pretty particular about hardware decisions serving a functional purpose, and not just a way to protect their bottom line. They aren't exactly struggling to sell their stuff.

New comment by docmars in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"

docmars — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:15:03 +0000

I don't even understand the functional purpose of the rivets if the keyboard is already held in place with a million screws and the key slots cut into the aluminum frame. It makes no sense, seems like a waste.

New comment by docmars in "Go hard on agents, not on your filesystem"

docmars — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:47:12 +0000

Jai is the name of a programming language, no?

New comment by docmars in "TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool"

docmars — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:15:48 +0000

This is amazing! Just think how incredible this would have been to have in the 80's and 90's in some similar format.

New comment by docmars in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

docmars — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:58:33 +0000

Very true, that's the goal at least! Founders may just learn the hard way until the right people tell them no.

New comment by docmars in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

docmars — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:34:40 +0000

I suspect a lot of businesses are going to make this mistake in the "SaaS is dead" era as companies try to eliminate $50k/mo subscriptions for boring business software, and they figure it's easier to burn AI tokens creating an internal solution they didn't plan on maintaining in the far future.

Funny times we're in right now.

New comment by docmars in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

docmars — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:31:59 +0000

Think of it this way: they're paying you lots of money to build something boring that has a lot of prior art/research available to you for free. This could be the easiest money maker in your life.

It's not your problem they're hellbent on building a new wheel. They're willing to pay you!

Chances are, you've thought of your own pain points in whatever they've asked you to build and you've now got an opportunity to shine by solving them and demonstrate your expertise.

New comment by docmars in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

docmars — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:29:20 +0000

I would have said "Move them to Google Sheets, but I gather from the nature of the question this is about finding a solution to build from an engineering standpoint..." and then go into ideas for how to collect user research, and apply those findings to a new tool build.

New comment by docmars in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

docmars — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:44:18 +0000

Pretty ironic, isn't it? You'd think they'd have enough faith in Teams to compete with Discord on this front.

The friction comes from having to sign up for different forums or services. I'd wager fewer people use (or even like) Teams than Discord among the tech enthusiast types who are willing to give them feedback on their product.

New comment by docmars in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

docmars — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:42:50 +0000

For the same reason any company or open-source project uses Discord: it's a quick way to gather feedback and study how people use your products, without forcing users to sign up for something new if they already use Discord with a wide range of other servers.

New comment by docmars in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

docmars — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:35:02 +0000

Personally I think OpenAI is intending to infiltrate their political enemy's stronghold and look for ways to leak data to "get Trump" as per usual.

They'll say "oops" and then we'll spend the next few years listening to pointless Congressional hearings.

New comment by docmars in "Banned in California"

docmars — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:15:19 +0000

Make sure not to list the things that are easy to build or permit because California will find a way to make it impossible.

New comment by docmars in "Why is Claude an Electron app?"

docmars — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:19:11 +0000

There are some odd cases like that, but you can always "Ignore" a game and it'll never show up again. That also feeds into Steams curation for you based on your interests.

New comment by docmars in "Why is Claude an Electron app?"

docmars — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 01:44:45 +0000

I'm already dreading it. Steam was already full of junk being released by the dozens every single day. It's hard to think it could be worse.

New comment by docmars in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

docmars — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:50:44 +0000

That's the catch -- a team would need to care enough about quality, or don't at their own peril.

New comment by docmars in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

docmars — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:20:50 +0000

I think if you were to scale that kind of usage across a reasonable team size, costs would start to add up fast — and possibly beyond the cost of paying another engineer every year, especially if a lot of your teammates are new to AI, or aren't using it efficiently. Of course, it all depends on the appetite of the company.

The other constraint is, for those who are being laid off (maybe because of cost reduction to support an AI budget for a smaller team to use), engineers wanting to expand their skill set and practice these levels of usage + efficiency are effectively unable to with their own funding, making it more difficult to find employment as expectations heighten.

Prior to AI entering the fray, software development was largely free for everyone, allowing anyone with enough time and motivation to build the skills towards gainful employment. As AI becomes more prevalent and expectations around how it's used become higher, fewer and fewer applicants will be able to claim they have the experience necessary because it was out of reach due to costs.

New comment by docmars in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

docmars — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:06:07 +0000

True, but you'd be surprised how much you can tighten up a codebase by asking a heftier model to do a security review and suggest fixes.

New comment by docmars in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

docmars — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:01:55 +0000

This is correct, but part of the issue is that it significantly increases token usage costs. Some companies are doing:

- PRD and spec fulfillment review

- code review + correction loops

- security review + corrections

- addl. test coverage and tidying

- addl. type checks and tidying

- addl. lint checks and tidying

- maybe more I haven't listed

And these are run after each commit, so you can only imagine the costs per engineer doing this 10, 20, 50+ times per day depending on how much work they're knocking out.