Hacker News: kristianc

New comment by kristianc in "Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade?"

kristianc — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:51:24 +0000

It won't happen, for two reasons. One is that great deal of open-source software and hobbyist knowledge sharing has never been driven by financial reward anyway and people will continue to do it anyway. Finer grained controls over opt-outs would be great (the equivalent of a search engine 'nofollow' would be great and will hopefully come with time).

Many kinds of technology faced this kind of tragedy of the commons argument in the past and it never bears out. Printing presses copied manuscripts, search engines copied and indexed web pages, open-source software was incorporated into commercial products, Wikipedia repackaged knowledge produced elsewhere.

In almost all cases the total amount of creation increases because the technology lowered costs, expanded audiences, or created new forms of value. The speed of creation of new 'View Source' outpaces the number of people pulling back.

New comment by kristianc in "Is AI causing a repeat of Front end's Lost Decade?"

kristianc — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:30:09 +0000

That's not what I said, I said I likely understand it less than a 635B parameter LLM, and that using the LLM as a shortcut to that knowledge is something I'd consider perfectly acceptable. I might even become better at it through using the LLM.

New comment by kristianc in "Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?"

kristianc — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:06:31 +0000

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make.

You can argue that abstractions hide consequences that fall on users who didn't choose them, but I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

New comment by kristianc in "How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works"

kristianc — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:41:44 +0000

That's the one, I couldn't find the original

New comment by kristianc in "How Shamir's Secret Sharing Works"

kristianc — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:53:13 +0000

Reminds me of this classic war story:

https://medium.com/@amanat361/shamir-secret-sharing-the-stor...

New comment by kristianc in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

kristianc — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:39:42 +0000

There is probably something here about human psychology where we underestimate the switching costs of things we have already, and are wired to look at things through the lens of the world we have now.

Absolutely no-one is concerned today about what happens when you dip out of connectivity because fast mobile connectivity was not abundant in 2007 (the iPhone was only released that year), which obviates the "this will never replace a USB" criticism. Mobile made a whole new class of businesses possible.

New comment by kristianc in "[dead]"

kristianc — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:59:23 +0000

I feel like we are at peak "this is the new normal" now. If the last time we did this (less than five years ago) is anything to go by, the lesson to learn is that while a lot of things do change, a lot remains disarmingly similar to the way it was, and that prognostications about the future can be very premature. For what its worth, I think the layoffs now will look as foolish in extent as the over-hiring during COVID did back then and that we will discover that while AI can make us efficient, human qualities like judgment and taste and interacting directly with customers, prospects and users will count for more than we are giving credit now.

Railway Currently Down

kristianc — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:08:58 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/Railway/status/2056873075401007338

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201363

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

New comment by kristianc in "Elevated error rates on Opus 4.7"

kristianc — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:38:41 +0000

They're having quite the day for devrel..

New comment by kristianc in "The conflation of money and things"

kristianc — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:28:52 +0000

trading their goods and services for money brought nearly a billion Chinese out of extreme poverty so I'm not sure they'd agree

New comment by kristianc in "The conflation of money and things"

kristianc — Thu, 14 May 2026 20:14:36 +0000

Because "money and physical things are conflated in our thinking" is simple enough to sound trite.

New comment by kristianc in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

kristianc — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:23:53 +0000

This hasn't been my experience. I'm finding that I'm spending less time on maintenance precisely because it's less tedious to maintain as I go now, and because the "make a small change across 400 files" type thing which would have seemed impossible before can be chewed through by an agent in a couple of hours.

New comment by kristianc in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% workforce"

kristianc — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:42:33 +0000

The future might have more outages then.

New comment by kristianc in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

kristianc — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 23:45:25 +0000

... or by textbooks, Stack Overflow, senior engineers, code review. How many engineers today got their start by building Minecraft mods or even MySpace?

I do think that these pieces sometimes smuggle in a nostalgic picture of how engineers "really" learn which has only ever been partly true.

New comment by kristianc in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

kristianc — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:14:42 +0000

To think we'd have known about this in advance if they'd just have open sourced Claude Code, rather than them being forced into this embarrassing post mortem. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

New comment by kristianc in "People Do Not Yearn for Automation"

kristianc — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:55:34 +0000

The article literally draws that distinction in the first paragraph.

New comment by kristianc in "If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true"

kristianc — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:59:42 +0000

Sure, but if the advice works, you'd see failure rate drops over time. It would work like medicine - we have more people than ever before, but almost no one dies of polio anymore. That's not what we see though, failure rate is basically the same.

New comment by kristianc in "If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true"

kristianc — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:13:53 +0000

Well of course it is, most startups are dead on arrival.

The big pinch of salt I throw in with advice like this though is that startup failure rate hasn't dramatically shifted despite two decades of lean startup methodology, accelerators, and an entire cottage industry of startup advice. It's never the fault of the framework, mind you.

New comment by kristianc in "Claude.ai down"

kristianc — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:00:32 +0000

>AI models are not really effected by that at all.

I don't know about that. More usage means more support, which means more docs and open source projects, wrappers, harnesses built around them etc.

Way less demand to build tooling around open weight models if they remain hobbyist.

New comment by kristianc in "Claude.ai down"

kristianc — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:19:27 +0000

If it goes as well as the 'open' / federated social network alternatives of the 2010s, I wouldn't count on it.