Hacker News: matwood

New comment by matwood in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

matwood — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:24:57 +0000

I had people on teams who wrote like pre-LLMs.

New comment by matwood in "Blog about things you don't understand yet"

matwood — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:04:33 +0000

The problem with talking and arguing is that many people push/flood the discussion with low-quality arguments. This puts it back on the person trying have a good discussion to keep correcting or defending.

A public example of this is Trump who just overwhelms any discussion with bullshit. It's impossible to have a conversation where anyone learns something.

Writing lets all participants operate at their own pace, and the type of person who tries to overwhelm a discussion with bullshit often doesn't write very much.

New comment by matwood in "People who grew up with high economic connectedness earn more"

matwood — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:34:36 +0000

Hard work and productivity are table stakes. Connections are the next step.

New comment by matwood in "London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces"

matwood — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:29:32 +0000

Yep. Much like shopper cards and browser fingerprinting, it doesn’t take much to de-anonymize the data using the intersection of items.

New comment by matwood in "London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces"

matwood — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:27:23 +0000

Interesting. I always thought it was opioids that were the main problem in Europe.

New comment by matwood in "Dropbox is an obvious PE Target?"

matwood — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:20:36 +0000

In most cases you have the causal effect of PE incorrect. By the time PE comes in, the company has already peaked and is on a downslope. The original owners know this, want to get out and sell. Blaming PE is like blaming vultures for the roadkill they are picking over.

New comment by matwood in "We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled"

matwood — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:16:34 +0000

Yeah, people act like this style is new, when it absolutely is not. There's this weird romanticism of the time pre-LLMs where people imply all writing/code was perfect, and only now it's slop.

EDIT

I also read your linked comment and agree 100%.

New comment by matwood in "We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled"

matwood — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:52:05 +0000

Most companies would be best served picking MySQL or PG and only adding something else if absolutely necessary. Every piece of software added increases complexity.

New comment by matwood in "We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled"

matwood — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:48:35 +0000

Others are almost never as dumb as you hoped, and you’re rarely ever as smart as you think.

New comment by matwood in "Atomic Clocks"

matwood — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:43:44 +0000

For the kids out there, calling a number for recorded information was common in the 90s I guess? Movie times was a big one. Where I was locally, multiple surf shops did 3-4x daily surf reports. The later was a bit funny because if one of the usual update times was missed you knew the waves were good and the guy was surfing :)

New comment by matwood in "Anthropic CEO reportedly worried new hires only care about money"

matwood — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:39:38 +0000

I'm fine if leaders talk about mission and vision as long as it's to inspire and not in lieu of money. The right amount of money is table stakes. The problems start when leaders begin replacing money with mission, and people buy it.

I know a lot of people didn't like the harshness of the scene in Mad Men where Don tells Peggy, that's what the money is for, but people would be good to remember it. I tell people who work for me if someone offers you a lot more money than I can, take it!

New comment by matwood in "Anthropic CEO reportedly worried new hires only care about money"

matwood — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 06:12:05 +0000

I agree with you mostly, and it’s important for everyone to understand. With that said, not everyone maximizes for only money.

New comment by matwood in "Apple is getting this wrong"

matwood — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 07:41:37 +0000

Straight to unhinged speak is definitely refreshing /s

New comment by matwood in "Apple is getting this wrong"

matwood — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 07:40:49 +0000

> OpenAI, even after raising this much capital, had never anticipated that something like this could happen yet keeps digging it's own grave.

Hubris.

New comment by matwood in "Read the novels and forget everything else"

matwood — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:11:07 +0000

I'm not religious, but this quote often comes to mind in these situations, "he who is without sin, cast the first stone." Clearly everyone else is perfect, and only these authors had faults.

New comment by matwood in "The lost civic life of movie rental stores"

matwood — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 08:12:26 +0000

> The end of interest-based 3rd places

A good jiujitsu gym is pretty amazing for this. It's a melting pot of people from all socioeconomic and political groups. It's great exercise, can be done at any age, and at any level. It also cannot be done alone. After you spend 5 minutes trying to choke someone and them you, it's hard to not have a conversation after.

Unfortunately, because it's become so popular it's gotten expensive, sometimes >$100/month.

New comment by matwood in "The bond market isn’t buying what Fed Chair Warsh is selling"

matwood — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:49:38 +0000

Thank you for your comments. In short, it's complicated. The other piece which you didn't mention that other people bring up is cutting off the 4B-8B in military aid to Israel. In the past that might have given the US more leverage, but Israel has a 700B GDP economy now - they don't need that aid to buy weapons. The aid the US sends just ends up back in the US economy, and keeps Israel from buying arms from China.

New comment by matwood in "The bond market isn’t buying what Fed Chair Warsh is selling"

matwood — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:33:36 +0000

Maybe I missed it, but did Walsh explicitly say it's tariffs and the war driving inflation? There's a reason Trump was fighting with Powell.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/powell-says-tariffs-keepi...

New comment by matwood in "The AI trade now runs on borrowed money, and the lenders are repricing it"

matwood — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 06:48:24 +0000

> the first to fall will probably be able to liquidate their gpus at a profit

Meta and xAI announcing they are leasing out capacity is a version of this already happening.

New comment by matwood in "The bond market isn’t buying what Fed Chair Warsh is selling"

matwood — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 05:58:29 +0000

They are slowly elastic. The only way to speed up the re-pricing is a recession where people lose their jobs and are forced to sell. Otherwise, it's mainly young people entering their first house phase that get impacted - which is exactly what we've seen.