Hacker News: lesam

New comment by lesam in "The engineering that allows articulated buses to bend"

lesam — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:49:18 +0000

Why is it that this and similar ad-filled pages constantly crash/reload? On mobile safari in reader mode, if it helps. I would have expected reader mode to be more stable since it removes a bunch of junk, but sadly no.

The article seemed cool but I was only able to read 20 seconds at a time between crashes.

New comment by lesam in "Do dentists know what they're doing?"

lesam — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 11:22:12 +0000

If this was true, this PE strategy would eventually stop working as business buyers realize PE businesses aren't good to buy, so the PE firm can't sell them, and it becomes unprofitable to run the whole playbook.

But generally PE does greatly improve 'efficiency', meaning they take for themselves (the owners) any 'extra' value that used to accrue to customers, lenders, employees, etc and the company becomes exactly as painful to deal with as market pressures allow.

New comment by lesam in "I wish you the best in the Offline"

lesam — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:38:09 +0000

OP isn't dismissing the zine idea, he just is curious how the zine author is able to buy food and shelter.

New comment by lesam in "Why didn't anybody tell me about Redis hash slots?"

lesam — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:54:58 +0000

I'm confused how you find the data again in this cache? It seems like you're randomly salting your cache keys, so I don't understand how subsequent requests find cached data.

New comment by lesam in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

lesam — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 23:32:16 +0000

Note that I believe this comment was substantially edited after I replied.

New comment by lesam in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

lesam — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 23:27:12 +0000

Do you have data for this? The data I've seen in the past is that landlords are not in aggregate able to pass on mortgage rate increases as rent increases, possibly because their tenants are already squeezed to the limit and there is simply no more money to be had. So when mortgage rates go up rents stay roughly constant and property values go down.

New comment by lesam in "What even is an OS now?"

lesam — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 23:23:17 +0000

If the phone injures or defrauds you, does it have to make restitution? If so, how?

'Transacting' requires not only identity but accountability, a completely controlled-by-you phone cannot meaningfully transact separately from you.

New comment by lesam in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

lesam — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:23:45 +0000

You would sell the development for as much as you can get, regardless of tax. The people buying from you aren't going to pay you more just because the government raised your taxes.

New comment by lesam in "Jev Can't Be Calibrated"

lesam — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:42:20 +0000

So you want the probability that the answer is correct, but Jev is providing the probability that its answer is optimal?

New comment by lesam in "Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode"

lesam — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:40:25 +0000

Why do you need jj for this? I'd usually make incremental commits with git, and I'm wondering how jj levels it up.

New comment by lesam in "Gloomberb"

lesam — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:13:24 +0000

It's really useful to have a chat app that is gatekept behind a 20k/year+ subscription. It's a particularly useful signal if someone is offering you a million+ dollar asset for sale.

New comment by lesam in "Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?"

lesam — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:39:31 +0000

Early in my career, I had to babysit our FX quoting app through the July 2015 leap second.

And some things do trade 24/7 (though I wish they wouldn't, one auction per minute during US east coast business hours would be totally sufficient for most US markets).

New comment by lesam in "Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?"

lesam — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:10:36 +0000

Until you work in financial markets and you want to measure latency vs a bunch of other servers you don't own, all of whom pick different smears (and some of whom aren't sure in advance which smears).

New comment by lesam in "The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level"

lesam — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:35:26 +0000

Assuming your labour contribution to these agents is 'minimal':

Why would you own them, instead of some well capitalized billionaire?

To the extent that you do have capital, why do you assume that your 'minimal direction and guidance' would outcompete a full time specialist working for that billionaire?

New comment by lesam in "Screen time can damage under-twos' development, landmark study suggests"

lesam — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:42:05 +0000

'can damage' means 'sometimes causal'.

If there's no causal link, they should say 'associated with' or 'correlated with'.

New comment by lesam in "An oral history of Bank Python (2021)"

lesam — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:04:00 +0000

Poetic that the most recent update is 6 months ago, a one line change adding a 'Lifecycle: Active' emoji to the Readme.

New comment by lesam in "Granularity comes at a cost"

lesam — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:44:32 +0000

I'm pretty skeptical of the market argument - reading the linked article, it seems low granularity subsidizes market makers when there are many small orders (which often get worse prices than they would otherwise) and this subsidy allows market makers to be deeper, which subsidizes large orders. Which is a difference, but not an unalloyed good.

Surely price competition is more economically valuable than the queue position game, which is measured in economically meaningless nanoseconds.

New comment by lesam in "Smudging the game disc to make speedrunning 'SpongeBob' faster"

lesam — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:30:18 +0000

'tech' in speed running is a reference to "technique" rather than "technology". https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Tech

New comment by lesam in "The Last Technical Interview"

lesam — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:42:37 +0000

Why would you design a hiring process that scores unprofessional people (by your own definition) higher than professional ones?

New comment by lesam in "The Last Technical Interview"

lesam — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:32:40 +0000

If you run an interview process where candidates who take 6-8 hours and claim to have taken 4 hours score highest, those are the candidates you will hire.