Hacker News: impostervt

New comment by impostervt in "Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?"

impostervt — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:47:35 +0000

Honest question, not really related to the story: What makes someone "exploited"?

Most of us trade our time for money, so at what point does the money become too little and be considered exploitative? Are all gig workers exploited? Didn't they make a rational choice that this is the best opportunity for themselves?

It certainly feels wrong, the low wages. I'm just wondering where the threshold is.

New comment by impostervt in "Help us raise $200k to free JavaScript from Oracle"

impostervt — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:49:45 +0000

Honestly think Go is worse. So hard to google anything about it.

New comment by impostervt in "The Storm Hits the Art Market"

impostervt — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:37:07 +0000

You can buy shares on their secondary market pretty cheaply right now.

New comment by impostervt in "How well does the money laundering control system work?"

impostervt — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:58:05 +0000

"major Western banks frequently pay large fines for AML violations, yet bank executives rarely face criminal convictions"

Seems like changing this would fix a lot of the problems.

New comment by impostervt in "Launch HN: Societies.io (YC W25) – AI simulations of your target audience"

impostervt — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 13:38:31 +0000

I use AI to create customer avatars representing potential buyers of a product I may create (based on existing competitors and their customer reviews). I then use those customer avatars to help design the product.

I love the idea of going from "AI generated customer avatar" to "simulated real people". It would help add depth to the customer avatars, and lead to better product design.

I tried creating a society around products that I sell, but it looks like the "real-world data" is pulled from LinkedIn? I'm not necessarily targeting business people.

New comment by impostervt in "How I fixed my blog's performance issues by writing a new Jekyll plugin"

impostervt — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 11:00:20 +0000

Over the weekend I stood up a small site with a blog of only a few articles. I've done this in the past with Wordpress and Jekyl, but I do it pretty rarely so I forget exactly how to do it and how to make the sites fast.

So I let Claude write it. I told it I wanted a simple static website without any js frameworks. It made the whole thing. Any time I add a blog post, it updates the blog index page.

The site is, of course, very fast. But the main gain, for me, was not having to figure out how to get the underlying tech working. Yes, I'm probably dumber for it, but the site was up in a few hours and I got to go on with my life.

New comment by impostervt in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

impostervt — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 11:49:35 +0000

As long as it's not SOAP, it's great.

New comment by impostervt in "-2000 Lines of code (2004)"

impostervt — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 11:04:27 +0000

About 1.5 years ago I inherited a project with ~ 250,000 lines of code - in just the web UI (not counting back end).

The developer who wrote it was a smart guy, but he had never worked on any other JS project. All state was stored in the DOM in custom attributes, .addEventListeners EVERYWHERE... I joke that it was as if you took a monk, gave him a book about javascript, and then locked him in a cell for 10 years.

I started refactoring pieces into web components, and after about 6 months had removed 50k lines of code. Now knowing enough about the app, I started a complete rewrite. The rewrite is about 80% feature parity, and is around 17k lines of code (not counting libraries like Vue/pinia/etc).

So, soon, I shall have removed over 200,000 loc from the project. I feel like then I should retire as I will never top that.

New comment by impostervt in "100 years of Zermelo's axiom of choice: What was the problem with it? (2006)"

impostervt — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 15:58:19 +0000

I've never quite gotten the axiom of choice. Can anyone ELI5?

New comment by impostervt in "The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return"

impostervt — Thu, 29 May 2025 15:49:37 +0000

I take a similar approach to investing on Masterworks (they sell shares of paintings). Most investors seem to buy the upfront offering, which is always $20/share, regardless of the painting. They don't seem to realize that MW holds onto the paintings for years, so it can be hard to cash out. Many will sell at a loss just to get their cash our before the painting is sold, so I can buy their shares very cheap.

New comment by impostervt in "Tesla offering insane perks as sales dry up"

impostervt — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 02:53:54 +0000

I recently got a letter from the bank that owns my tesla loan, informing me that I can buy the car at the end of the loan. Previously that wasn't an option. Plus, it was for $28k (at the end of a 3 year loan).

Got another letter trying to get me to buy a new 3 with 0% interest for 60 months.

They're definitely under pressure.

New comment by impostervt in "Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?"

impostervt — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:36:36 +0000

Do GLP-1 already do this, to some extent?

New comment by impostervt in "DeepL Voice: Real-time voice translations for global collaboration"

impostervt — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 12:25:58 +0000

I created a web site that uses AI to translate books, and in my testing, Deepl was way better than other AIs I tried at translating.

New comment by impostervt in "Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth"

impostervt — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 14:10:34 +0000

Oof just watched a video from the Pear.ai guys and was happy to hear they made it into YC. I don't know much about the project, but they seem like good people.

New comment by impostervt in "The Dogma of Otherness (1986)"

impostervt — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 11:28:17 +0000

Pretty nice guy, too. Back in the early-mid 90s I was a teenager and got on some kind of David Brin fan site (this may have been on Prodigy it was so long ago), where the man himself would sometimes reply. He once responded to a message I posted, and it just about made my year.

New comment by impostervt in "Web components are okay"

impostervt — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 23:45:06 +0000

A few months ago I started a job where I inherited a JS code base that is around 250,000 lines. It was one big class, with several sub classes, that did everything. Some files were 30k lines long.

No frameworks, no reactivity. If you click a button, you had to update everything on the screen with event listeners manually.

Took the guy years to write it. It's like a monk got locked in a cell for years with a basic book of javascript.

I started by refactoring into web components, because I had to do it piecemeal. It's been a big help, and I've cut 50k lines of code so far. But the real point was to just learn everything the old code was doing before I start a rewrite.

New comment by impostervt in "Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker"

impostervt — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 15:06:04 +0000

Seconded. I used Personal Capital for a while but the links to my accounts broke frequently. Moved to Monarch and paid for it and its way less of a hassle.

New comment by impostervt in "They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7"

impostervt — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 13:34:40 +0000

Flashbacks to high school CS back in the 90s. Started with basic then moved on to this. I understand now they use Java to teach kids, and I can't imagine trying to learn to code with that language.

Ask HN: What advice would you give a tester who wants to become a coder?

impostervt — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 13:50:30 +0000

I've been hit up a few times by testers from previous jobs, asking for advice about how to get into coding. They don't usually have a coding background, but they're young and smart and I think they could do well. They're usually interested in being front end developers.

Since they're already full-time professionals, I've generally pointed them towards Udemy. I like how their classes are structured - usually bite size portions so you can do a few a day.

However, I worry that they may need some extra push to get them going. I was wondering if there was something else I could say to help them along?