Hacker News: kristianc

New comment by kristianc in "A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting"

kristianc — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 11:15:57 +0000

It’s probably still there, but it’s 26,000 light years away, so the light we’re seeing today left Sag A in the Paleaolithic era.

New comment by kristianc in "Meta VR Glasses"

kristianc — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 01:50:16 +0000

Creates another expensive bar for prospective challengers to clear - regulation nearly always ends up favouring incumbents, especially if they have a hand in shaping it.

New comment by kristianc in "AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You"

kristianc — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:49:43 +0000

> Fact is, vibe-coded projects devolve over time into an unmaintainable mess. The reason is simple, yet hard to fix: code maintainability and good architecture don’t have good measurements that we can apply, because it takes months, years even, to notice the effects of bad architecture or of unmaintainable code.

Oh boy do I have some news for you about legacy codebases.

I’m not even sure that his axiom is true. A project started with a 2024/5 model can subsequently be worked on by more capable models (who don’t, unlike some humans, have a deep aversion to paying down technical debt). I’ve seldom seen a human written legacy application spontaneously acquire a better engineering team every six months.

New comment by kristianc in "Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service"

kristianc — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 21:25:42 +0000

That’s the bargain Dropbox made when it took VC and then went public. Public markets don’t price a company purely on today’s cash flow, they price the expected stream of future cash flows. If growth stalls and the attempts to create new growth vectors don’t work, the valuation adjusts accordingly, and at some point an acquisition can become the rational outcome.

New comment by kristianc in "Dropbox's Jan 1st 2027 terms of service"

kristianc — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 07:56:24 +0000

Dropbox will be one of the next Bending Spoons acquisitions. Low growth, none of the upsell or product extension things they've done have really worked out, and no-one's idea of what the future looks like.

New comment by kristianc in "Show HN: Rickub – The Smartest Git in the Universe"

kristianc — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:28:11 +0000

For me it's a trust gap. Because I know the website UI has been automatically generated, I can't be sure of how much of the product is actually real, or how closely the claims on the page have been audited.

New comment by kristianc in "Warren Buffett Steps Down as Berkshire Chairman, Names Son to Replace Him"

kristianc — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:09:16 +0000

Whose strategy is explicitly to hold good stocks for a very long time.

New comment by kristianc in "Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?"

kristianc — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 16:16:00 +0000

It's interesting as grill-me and the other Matt skills are very much positioned to people who would consider themselves as developers. In fact, I'm not sure if people who were completely new to development would have heard of him at all.

New comment by kristianc in "Doomscrolling ourselves to death"

kristianc — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 12:42:25 +0000

Ed West’s longstanding intellectual project is fairly conventional reactionary/retvrn/conservative pessimism, and he has no particular technology background of all to speak of.

The argument is basically here is what happened to civilisation X when it abandoned virtue/cohesion/tradition; therefore contemporary liberalism, immigration, feminism, secularism, etc. are leading us towards the same fate.

No interest really in people whose project it is to launder reactionary opinions through ancient history.

New comment by kristianc in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

kristianc — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:17:44 +0000

To me it has a writerly New Yorker vibe to it, as in the magazine which reads as “polished” and probably performs well in RL but is totally exhausting to read in long sessions and completely inappropriate for coding where precision is paramount above all. In writing terms its called purple prose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose

New comment by kristianc in "Beware Management Consultants"

kristianc — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:03:22 +0000

Reading between the lines, you kind of get the picture...

2006 A spectacular turnaround sees a 10% sales decline turned into growth of 20% year-on-year by March 2006, making Iceland the UK’s fastest-growing food retailer.

2005 The Big Food Group is taken private and Iceland returned to the management of Malcolm Walker and other senior executives who had been ejected in 2001.

2004 The Big Food Group is nearing bankruptcy as provisions made in 2001 come close to exhaustion.

2002 Iceland-Booker is renamed The Big Food Group and launches a grandiose recovery plan (Click here to read the saga of ‘The one, two, three, four, five year recovery plan’) but customer numbers and sales remain in steady decline while costs escalate.

2001 New Iceland chief executive Bill Grimsey issues a massive profit warning, and Malcolm Walker and other senior managers are forced to leave the company

New comment by kristianc in "Beware Management Consultants"

kristianc — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:23:58 +0000

Score-settling by the ousted (and then returning) CEO Malcolm Walker. After Iceland merged with Booker in 2000, Walker was pushed out and a new management team led by Bill Grimsey took over. Sales declined, head office staff ballooned and they hired a lot of McKinsey types. Walker's point is that they'd overcomplicated what was basically quite a simple business.

New comment by kristianc in "Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history"

kristianc — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:18:52 +0000

As a buddy in construction used to say, concrete erasers are expensive.

New comment by kristianc in "Manus will return to operating as an independent company"

kristianc — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:13:04 +0000

Sure, but I'm sure China isn't keen for people to get the idea that there's a playbook for every ambitious Chinese founder on how to move Chinese-developed IP and talent outside Beijing’s control.

New comment by kristianc in "Manus will return to operating as an independent company"

kristianc — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:41:56 +0000

Almost certainly Chinese national-security and technology-transfer restrictions around strategic AI tech. China’s NDRC formally prohibited the acquisition and ordered the transaction unwound.

New comment by kristianc in "Is it all just vapourware?"

kristianc — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:41:37 +0000

I suspect the issue there was Claude, especially Opus 5, which just hates the idea that it could ever be wrong about anything.

New comment by kristianc in "Show HN: Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future"

kristianc — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:40:42 +0000

It feels like I might need 130 million years to watch the whole thing play out

New comment by kristianc in "Software is about people, not code"

kristianc — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:24:13 +0000

“Eventually I realised restaurants are about diners, not knives.”

New comment by kristianc in "What is a product?"

kristianc — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:18:43 +0000

You can still create enormous value modelling things that are well understood, and even boring. Most LOB SaaS wasn't created from deep Google-level engineering, it was taken in modelling an ugly workflow in CRUD and creating customer records, job scheduling, worker assignments, quotations, recurring contracts, invoices, inspection checklists. Most Construction Tech startups for instance today is this.

New comment by kristianc in "Show HN: Skyline Co-op is like SimTower, but built around democratic socialism"

kristianc — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:52:59 +0000

Most democratic socialist societies are capitalist, capitalism just remains politically subordinate rather than able to govern society unchecked.