Hacker News: eudamoniac

New comment by eudamoniac in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

eudamoniac — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:33:18 +0000

The words clearly are not random. I don't know how the author chose the word bank, but it's not a representative sample. It's all fairly common words and then intentionally silly words that are very long (Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia), that wouldn't really appear from a random sample as frequently as they do. I tested myself from my own Webster's collegiate dictionary some years ago with actually random words and the results were way off compared to this.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Elon Musk Becomes First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading"

eudamoniac — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 04:51:49 +0000

Yep, and if you buy stocks you'll consistently lose money when the stock doesn't go up.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore"

eudamoniac — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:24:02 +0000

Why is the landlord being unproductive relevant? If the government owned the land, they would never sell the land, so the concept of land appreciating doesn't exist. The only difference is that the government would possibly rent at-cost, but the profit margins for landlords are not the main factor driving up rent. Get rid of landlords and the rent prices would decrease only very slightly.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

eudamoniac — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:05:45 +0000

The platform is not the issue. Competent engineering teams could blow this out of the water with a single threaded jquery web app.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

eudamoniac — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 03:32:55 +0000

Yeah but unfortunately the majority of people calling are calling about things they can do themselves in the self-service portal.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb"

eudamoniac — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:14:21 +0000

If these were actually banned books people would be a lot less enthusiastic about the endeavor. Pretty much every book that is genuinely banned, in that no publisher or printing house will print it and no bookstore will sell it, is either a racist diatribe, how to make bombs, or similar. These books on the other hand are books that one librarian or school admin somewhere in this vast country decided would no longer be included in their small library. Not very interesting.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)"

eudamoniac — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:19:28 +0000

Also FYI this company/CEO ghosted me.

New comment by eudamoniac in "How to earn a billion dollars"

eudamoniac — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 05:02:36 +0000

I'm not sure this is true. I consider this website very much to the right of most web fora.

New comment by eudamoniac in "How to earn a billion dollars"

eudamoniac — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 04:59:44 +0000

I have no problems with PG or with the existence of billionaires in general, but this is just a poorly thought essay. All of the arguments about growth are specious, and he frequently makes unsound leaps of logic. If I saw this in the wild, sorry PG, but I'd think this is an amateur blogger posting yet another something he edited longer than he thought about.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Elon Musk Becomes First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading"

eudamoniac — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:45:09 +0000

This strategy is not a traditional loan with interest and regular payments. If you try to live on regular loans it doesn't make any sense. It's a scheme mostly only available to HNW people where they repay upon death in certain tax loophole ways.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Elon Musk Becomes First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading"

eudamoniac — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:42:04 +0000

This quote refers to shorting; it's not applicable to every bear position anyone ever attempts to take. You won't go insolvent buying puts.

New comment by eudamoniac in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

eudamoniac — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:52:55 +0000

Not really a "very very good chance", but the few instances of this happening have accomplished the intended effect of making everyone terrified of the possibility and thus never doing it.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

eudamoniac — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:01:56 +0000

I don't know why I'd ever want a promotion, and I haven't ever got one. I did turn one down once. A promotion is like 5% more pay for way more work and a bunch of corporate bullshit along the way. If I want to move up I just change jobs.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

eudamoniac — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:40:35 +0000

> the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_.

How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

eudamoniac — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:34:38 +0000

But the initial claim was that 1:1 meetings "add value to the team". I can believe that they add value to the manager's manager, but they are not adding value to the team of the person being met with.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

eudamoniac — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:27:52 +0000

But 1 on 1 meetings are not crossing team boundaries, they are always within the team which is pretty much always smaller than 50. There's no reason the team cannot "talk to everyone all the time" just because other teams exist. But instead this communication is replaced by meetings even though the ability to talk hasn't changed.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

eudamoniac — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:25:31 +0000

Because it does not take 7500 employees to keep a website online. It never did and it still doesn't and Twitter is not special in this regard.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

eudamoniac — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:08:33 +0000

You think stock dividends pay out 4x the amount of money that the company pays for salaries?

New comment by eudamoniac in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

eudamoniac — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:01:26 +0000

Funny how high performing startups delivering real value don't have these meetings and they sort of appear out of the ether after the 1000th employee is hired.

New comment by eudamoniac in "Claude Fable 5"

eudamoniac — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:30:32 +0000

It doesn't know. It's not willing. It's not thinking. It is predicting the next token.