Hacker News: ike2792

New comment by ike2792 in "Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone"

ike2792 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:40:46 +0000

This has mirrored what I've seen in my company. People in the data science/ML part of the company are super excited about AI and are always giving presentations on it and evangelizing it. Most engineers in other areas, though, are generally underwhelmed every time they try using it. It's being heavily pushed by AI "experts" and senior leaders, but the enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises that the "experts" keep making. Meanwhile, everyone can read the news about layoffs attributed to AI and can see that hiring (especially of junior engineers) has slowed to a trickle. You can only fool people for so long.

New comment by ike2792 in "Nobody is coming to save your career"

ike2792 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:53:27 +0000

Every engineer in a given department knows who the good and bad managers are. If you don't care about your engineers' development, you won't be able to keep good engineers on your team as they will transfer internally. Engineers also talk to directors and make sure they know who the good managers are. There's really no upside to treating your engineers like crap.

New comment by ike2792 in "Nobody is coming to save your career"

ike2792 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:27:43 +0000

I've been an engineering manager for 9 years and I've always understood that a big part of my job is career development for people on my team. An EM's role is to hire, retain, and develop talented engineers so that the team they manage can succeed. It always amazes me when I hear that managers don't do this. If they aren't developing their team, what are they doing?

New comment by ike2792 in "Sizing chaos"

ike2792 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:35:16 +0000

Vanity sizing is huge for men also. I have a 36" waist and I'm generally a 33 waist in most brands. Oddly, dress shirts tend to be spot on.

New comment by ike2792 in "FCC chair suggests agency isn't independent, word cut from mission statement"

ike2792 — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 22:20:53 +0000

The problem is that Congress has delegated a lot of its traditional law making power to the Executive Branch. Laws are written in vague ways with executive agencies given liberty to implement as they see fit. This gives a lot of additional power to the President (who can at least be dealt with by impeachment or being voted out in the next election) as well as independent executive agency heads (who can't be directly fired by anybody). I agree that Congress should be the ones passing laws as the excessive delegation of lawmaking by Congress is what's gotten us into the current situation

New comment by ike2792 in "FCC chair suggests agency isn't independent, word cut from mission statement"

ike2792 — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:02:18 +0000

It's a fair question to ask "who are independent executive agency heads accountable to" in a constitutional context. It is true that the Executive Branch has grown far beyond what the Founding Fathers could have imagined, but the idea of a unitary executive is that the President is responsible and accountable for everything that happens in the Executive Branch. If the voters don't like what the Executive Branch is doing, they can replace the President in the next election. What happens if voters don't like what independent executive agencies are doing? There's no democratic recourse.

Think of a scenario where a President was elected with a large-ish majority and promised during the campaign to change broadband regulations to reduce broadband prices across the country. Unfortunately, the FCC commissioners were all appointed by the previous president and block this policy change that the voters clearly support. How does that square with democratic accountability?

New comment by ike2792 in "This is not the future"

ike2792 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 18:13:52 +0000

I work at a company trying very hard to incorporate AI into pretty much everything we do. The people pushing it tend to have little understanding of the technology, while the more experienced technical people see a huge mismatch between its advertised benefits and actual results. I have yet to see any evidence that AI is "paradigm shifting" much less "revolutionary." I would be curious to hear any data or examples you have backing those claims up.

In regards to why tech people should be skeptical of AI: technology exists solely to benefit humans in some way. Companies that employ technology should use it to benefit at least one human stakeholder group (employees, customers, shareholders, etc). So far what I have seen is that AI has reduced hiring (negatively impacting employees), created a lot of bad user interfaces (bad for customers), and cost way more money to companies than they are making off of it (bad to shareholders, at least in the long run). AI is an interesting and so far mildly useful technology that is being inflated by hype and causing a lot of damage in the process. Whether it becomes revolutionary like the Internet or falls by the wayside like NFTs and 3D TV's is unknowable at this point.

New comment by ike2792 in "The Junior Hiring Crisis"

ike2792 — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 21:30:08 +0000

When I'm hiring an engineer, HR will easily let me bump up the offer by $10-20K if the candidate counters. It is nearly impossible to get that same $10-20K bump for an existing engineer that is performing extremely well. Companies themselves set up this perverse incentive structure.

New comment by ike2792 in "André Gorz predicted the revolt against meaningless work (2023)"

ike2792 — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 22:09:12 +0000

There is some truth to this, but I think this way of thinking is overly simplistic. From a material standpoint, any job that can provide for you and your family's needs is "meaningful" since you can't really have a meaningful life without having basic needs provided for. From a spiritual standpoint, however, I think it is detrimental for someone to know that their job is largely pointless or achieves no tangible outcomes in the world. I think this same criticism applies to UBI and other "end of work" ideas, since a person with no job is likely to suffer from the same lack of purpose as someone who senses their job is BS. People are intrinsically wired to want to do work and make some kind of difference (even if that difference is just knowing that you helped manufacture 500 cars that day, dug a ditch that will be used for some useful purpose, whatever).

UPS disposing of U.S.-bound packages due to new tariff rules

ike2792 — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 12:56:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/ups-delay-customs-tariffs-packages-destroyed-rcna236607

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45538464

Points: 8

# Comments: 3

New comment by ike2792 in "AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers"

ike2792 — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 20:50:51 +0000

About 10 years ago I worked for Fortune 500 company that had outsourced a bunch of its technical work to offshore contractors. New CEO and CTO came in and got rid of all the contractors, replacing them with talented US-based hires. Cut the size of our tech organization down from something like 12,000 (including contractors) to maybe 3,000. Our tech generally worked a lot better after that also.

New comment by ike2792 in "Two narratives about AI"

ike2792 — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 17:19:58 +0000

I think the first set of quotes are from people trying to sell something, while the second set are based on real data and people who have actually worked with AI. I'm a engineering manager over some infrastructure teams and we've tried to use it for network monitoring without any success. It seems like it would be handy; who doesn't want to query the state of your infra in natural language? The problem is it gives non-deterministic results and occasionally just makes things up. All the developers I know who use Github Copilot say it's very buggy and often makes coding take more time if they use it for any autogeneration.

New comment by ike2792 in "What will become of the CIA?"

ike2792 — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 19:27:43 +0000

Article II of the U.S. Constitution vests the entire executive power to the President, so technically it is the President who is responsible for following and implementing the laws that Congress has passed. Since recent Congresses (going back to at least the 70s and somewhat even to the 1930s) have written laws somewhat vaguely to give the executive branch a lot of discretion, there is a lot of legal uncertainty as to what actions are allowed in this discretion. This is why so many of Trump's executive actions are working their way through the courts as it isn't immediately clear what he's allowed to do with his executive authority vs where he is stepping on Congress's toes. For example, it is an open legal question whether the President and executive agencies are required to spend every dollar allocated by Congress or if they can decide they've already spent enough to meet the Congressional intent of the spending and can decide to not spend anymore.

New comment by ike2792 in "Why is AI so slow to spread?"

ike2792 — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 15:18:09 +0000

I would add that no one has shown any solid business benefit or productivity gain due to AI despite there being massive incentives for someone to do so. We've tried to use AI for multiple projects within my company and none of them have panned out.

New comment by ike2792 in "The death of partying in the USA"

ike2792 — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 18:27:21 +0000

I'm not saying this isn't part of the problem, but my experience has been different. When I was in my 20s, my friends and I all lived in apartments and had parties fairly often. I recall that when I was a kid in the 90s my parents often went to small house parties as well. Now, in my 40s, neither I nor anyone I know ever goes to parties despite us all owning houses and cars and living fairly close to one another.

My theory is that people have fewer parties because people have gotten flakier about attending larger social events. It is much easier to cancel plans at the last minute with a text or a social media DM, and people always seem to want to keep their options open. We've moved to getting together only with one other couple/family at a time b/c any time we try to have larger group events half of the invite list will cancel the day of.

New comment by ike2792 in "The Hollow Men of Hims"

ike2792 — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 18:20:37 +0000

This kind of thing heavily depends on your doctor and insurance plan. A lot of plans won't cover things like ED meds, weight loss, or hormone therapy. TBH I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing as long as affordable alternatives are available outside of the insurance plan. Plans covering every little thing will increase premiums, so maybe for the products that Hims sells, this is a case of the market solving a problem.

New comment by ike2792 in "The Hollow Men of Hims"

ike2792 — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 18:15:09 +0000

Same. For relatively safe medications, people should have the freedom to get medications that will resolve their issues without jumping through a bunch of hoops. As long as companies are providing full disclosure on the medications they are providing and side effects, I don't see any issue with it.

New comment by ike2792 in "The Hollow Men of Hims"

ike2792 — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 15:02:25 +0000

+1000 to this. If your primary care physician works for a large medical chain (which most do), they aren't allowed to prescribe anything that goes against the chain's so-called "evidence-based" standards. Never mind that most medical chains also have insurance company arms and that these "standards" just happen to line up with whatever it is the insurance company thinks is appropriate to pay for. If you go to an independent clinic you can usually get prescriptions for "lifestyle" issues such as the ones Hims treats and then use GoodRx or a cheap online pharmacy to fulfill your prescriptions. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the 2010 Affordable Care Act was to incentivize consolidation in the health care space, so independent clinics and practitioners are a dying breed.

New comment by ike2792 in "GCP Outage"

ike2792 — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 18:52:37 +0000

Maybe their dashboard is hosted on GCP and they are displaying a cached version. :-)

New comment by ike2792 in "Business books are entertainment, not strategic tools"

ike2792 — Sat, 10 May 2025 12:06:58 +0000

Apple is actually a great example of the MVP concept working. The original iPhone had no front camera, a crappy back camera, a low quality screen, no App Store, and no copy/paste. What it had was a great “feel” and it was intuitive to use. They released it, gathered feedback, and iterated.