Hacker News: leoqa

New comment by leoqa in "Intro to TLA+ for the LLM Era: Prompt Your Way to Victory"

leoqa — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:08:06 +0000

Unfortunately the benefit of TLA+ is the act of modeling your system painstakingly. The actual checker helps confirm your hypothesis, etc. But skipping the modeling and outsourcing it is not ideal. I’ve always struggled reasoning about models my team mates wrote, and will often have to mentally go through the process of arriving at the same abstractions/invariants etc before I can understand it.

New comment by leoqa in "Layoffs at Block"

leoqa — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 17:49:37 +0000

The higher velocity ends up bottlenecking on actual product decisions, deployments, testing etc. Before AI was generally blocked on the design approval, PR cycles, flaking tests etc. AI just helps me endure the pain of legacy code easier.

In my own personal projects I’m flying with AI. I know what I’m doing, I know how I would implement the code. Now I can just save the labor of typing the boilerplate.

New comment by leoqa in "Can you reverse engineer our neural network?"

leoqa — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 15:47:19 +0000

People are arguing about the role of these HFTs being a net good etc. They’re missing the point, these bright kids are trading something more profound- a sense of purpose, a higher calling or passion- to simply run adversarial arbitrage and pump their egos up with puzzles.

New comment by leoqa in "Layoffs at Block"

leoqa — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 02:19:16 +0000

I’m in big tech and use AI extensively, namely to do the same amount of output but in 1-2 hours a day. Been spending a ton of time on my side projects though.

New comment by leoqa in "The Hater's Guide to Anthropic"

leoqa — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:30:12 +0000

Seems like a lot of energy dissecting C-suite news clippings. The reality is that no one cares about alignment and it’s only controversial for the naive or the dramatic among us.

Claude is useful for software engineers. It’ll be useful until something is better-enough and then we’ll all move on to that.

Most folks are using both Claude/Codex together anyways, undermining the idea that Anthropics corporate strategy mattered in the market.

New comment by leoqa in "The anxiety driving AI's brutal work culture is a warning for all of us"

leoqa — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 01:51:11 +0000

He’s wrapped his identity in being a founder so can’t see the sacrifice/meaningless of it all.

New comment by leoqa in "A Programmer's Loss of Identity"

leoqa — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 01:36:06 +0000

Is the stakes and the ownership. 5 people in a coffee shop working on a 0-1 problem is a lot more stimulating than 90 people on a team shipping incremental updates to a legacy system.

New comment by leoqa in "A Programmer's Loss of Identity"

leoqa — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:34:58 +0000

This was always my least favorite part about being a software engineer (and the downfall of many): being a software engineer has become an identity crutch for many. I’ve see so many kids whose whole identity is being good at computers; they go through middle/high school, college getting affirmations about their value and intelligence. Then they get out of Stanford, Berkeley and show up to the feature treadmill that must keep moving but is weighed down by the 10000 short cuts made by the people who came before.

They burn out, or worse become toxic, because their shallow identity led them down the path to being a “Real” engineer and at the end of the day we’re not actually participating in any sort of real value creation beyond attention monetization.

The mystique wears off quickly and they don’t have real hobbies or interests, they basically talk about RSU packages at lunch and the latest tweets etc. I used to joke privately because almost every time we had lunch they spent most of the time discussing the optimal path to walk.

It’s unique in some way- you can’t be a good doctor or lawyer in middle school and the value system is geared towards maximizing paychecks and working in big tech. Once the reality sets in that you’re going to be doing sprint planning + standups for the next 20-30 years it can be a weird shock.

My first job was at a FANG and I lasted about 2 years- I remember riding the escalator in and seeing how miserable everyone looked on my first day. As an eager junior I reached out to the principal engineer in my org for mentoring, asking him what I could do to be better, faster. He told me: “go find a wife and don’t worry about work- you’ve got a long time left”.

At one point I looked at the senior guy running sprint planning and realized I didn’t want to be him. I bought a 1 way ticket and put in my 2 weeks. Went on to backpack around for a year then ended up at a startup where I made a bunch of friends working on real problems.

New comment by leoqa in "AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet"

leoqa — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 03:28:20 +0000

My hot take: reviewing code is boring, harder than writing code, and less fun (no dopamine loop). People don’t want to do it, they want to build whatever they’re tasked with. Making reviewing code easier (human in the loop etc) is probably a big rock for the new developer paradigm.

New comment by leoqa in "Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse"

leoqa — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 03:17:29 +0000

HSI was primarily the main investigative body responsible for human traffic and crimes against children prior to this administration. The second largest federal investigative agency behind the FBI (6k agents). Now doing immigration enforcement.

New comment by leoqa in "Show HN: A simulator for engineers transitioning from IC to management"

leoqa — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:49:48 +0000

This is clearly another LLM response bud. Stop using it to communicate it’s too obvious.

New comment by leoqa in "Idempotency keys for exactly-once processing"

leoqa — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 22:40:47 +0000

Durable workflows are just distributed state machines. The complexity is there because guaranteeing a machine will always be available is impossible.

New comment by leoqa in "Go Cryptography State of the Union"

leoqa — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 21:13:21 +0000

What’s up with all these bots posting 3-4 sentence summaries in the comment section?

New comment by leoqa in "We chose OCaml to write Stategraph"

leoqa — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 14:00:03 +0000

Yeah I get the sense that terraform change application is solved by just serializing all changes? The concurrent applies isn’t that big of a deal?

New comment by leoqa in "Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial"

leoqa — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:20:03 +0000

I’m also fine with git, and have used mercurial and p4 before. I think simplicity is better in this case. I do think with more and more generated code inflating the codebase with high velocity, we need to find a better way to merge conflicts.

New comment by leoqa in "Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach"

leoqa — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 14:09:03 +0000

I was entertaining an offer from Discord and also stumbled upon the founder’s former company debacle. The platform vision pitched to me in the interview seemed similar and seeing as how he started to implement spyware I decided to bail.

New comment by leoqa in "The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit"

leoqa — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 15:56:23 +0000

You’re probably correct (I’m 30 and don’t have a policy) but I can’t think of any financial instrument that would guarantee skilled nursing ($4-8k/month in MCoL) for 10-20 years. No one in the bottom 90% of American earners can afford that drawdown even if they saved considerably.

New comment by leoqa in "The sordid reality of retirement villages: Residents are being milked for profit"

leoqa — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 15:03:31 +0000

I’m not particularly sympathetic to retirement home narratives that paint each person as a lonely, incompetent senior wasting away. I witnessed first hand how my mother spent her adulthood partying instead of providing and now it’s become a critical issue for our family to provide for her. Ultimately I don’t expect my children (or staff-journalist) to project pity on me for my circumstances.

I run a weekly route with MealsOnWheels and deliver food/perform wellness checks to many people whom are homebound. There are much worse fates for seniors than a community home with social programs and meal service.

I think it is everyone’s duty to buy long-term care insurance (perhaps the government should provide this, as we will all need it). I also believe you must provide for the retirement you expect.

New comment by leoqa in "Lab-grown salmon hits the menu"

leoqa — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 01:55:30 +0000

Wait until you hear about Gummy Bears.

New comment by leoqa in "Go 1.25 Release Notes"

leoqa — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:42:30 +0000

I quite frankly will just read the code. Go generally discourages abstractions so any code you jump into is fairly straightforward (compared to a hierarchy of abstract classes, dependency injected implementations, nested pattern matching with destructuring etc etc).

Regarding your IDE issues- I’ve found the new wave of copilot/cursor behavior to be the culprit. Sometimes I just disable it and use the agent if I want it to do something. But it’ll completely fail to suggest an auto complete for a method that absolutely exists.