Hacker News: mgh95

New comment by mgh95 in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

mgh95 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:54:59 +0000

Also in OFAC compliance. It just comes up in a lot of places where workflows are compliance heavy.

New comment by mgh95 in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

mgh95 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:35:28 +0000

Compensating controls also come up in the context of BSA/AML.

New comment by mgh95 in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

mgh95 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:52:08 +0000

Not really. Social security is a defined benefit plan that requires new payors to fund todays expenses. 401ks are a defined contribution plan. Very different.

New comment by mgh95 in "Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute"

mgh95 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:19:57 +0000

This is true in a "yes but" sense. Typically equities of the mega caps benefitted from debt issuance on the expectation it would accelerate growth. The change to equity value loss is what is interesting: the market no longer sees this as generating growth, at least not like it used to.

New comment by mgh95 in "Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute"

mgh95 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:17:36 +0000

Sure but people are no longer expecting these kinds of actions to generate equity gains. Before it was expected the growth would outpace the cost of capital, leading to equity appreciation. The directional change is what is interesting.

New comment by mgh95 in "Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute"

mgh95 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:05:55 +0000

Interesting how the market has reacted to this news (down 1.7% after hours)

New comment by mgh95 in "Private equity bought America's essential services"

mgh95 — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:32:53 +0000

In practice this is exactly how they work, whether it was intended or not. Otherwise it would look a lot less like a defined benefits plan and more like a defined contribution plan.

New comment by mgh95 in "Private equity bought America's essential services"

mgh95 — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:31:35 +0000

> You seem to be quite confused about pensions, not only "old people" have pensions. Actually the vast majority of contributions to pensions funds come from people who aren't old at all and are actively employed.

This is exactly how pensions work: newer members to the defined benefits plan pay for older members. This isn't surprising.

> Where would they "scream"? On the internet? And who'd hear them? The answer is nobody in any PE cares about anyone screaming.

At the ballot box. There is a reason that public pensions are exempt from the PBGC reserve ratio requirements. People with pensions aggressively vote their interest.

New comment by mgh95 in "Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing"

mgh95 — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:29:59 +0000

Blockbuster actually did try to beat everyone to streaming. Notably, Blockbuster and Enron [1] entered into a 20-year partnership for online video delivery.

Sears was a different story, in that they were a real estate company with a store front and retail real estate took a nosedive due to ecommerce. But that's a different discussion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

New comment by mgh95 in "Hawaii just found a way around Citizens United. Other states are following"

mgh95 — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:26:03 +0000

Not necessarily. Unions are typically organized as a not-for-profit. The legislation acts on all entities including unions.

New comment by mgh95 in "The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100"

mgh95 — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:19:48 +0000

> It's a privilege to come into this country, its a privilege to live in Sydney. If you don't like it, you can leave.

I hate to put it like this, but that's exactly what the poster is doing.

New comment by mgh95 in "Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API"

mgh95 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:52:47 +0000

if it's judged only by the time it is expected to be in use (work hours), reliability is likely even worse than the 24/7 measure.

New comment by mgh95 in "Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston"

mgh95 — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:31:01 +0000

Likely a combination of business-friendly policies (low tax, no employer payroll tax, etc.) and proximity to ports. Houston is the 6th [1] largest port in the USA.

[1] https://pangea-network.com/busiest-and-biggest-ports-in-the-...

New comment by mgh95 in "Google and Microsoft Paying Creators $500K+ to Promote AI Tools"

mgh95 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 02:30:33 +0000

I wasn't around for the .com bubble, but this is what I imagine it was like.

New comment by mgh95 in "OpenClaw is basically a cascade of LLMs in prime position to mess stuff up"

mgh95 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 05:48:25 +0000

> The most important question is whether they make or lose money on each customer, independent of their fixed R&D costs.

The ZIRP era called and wants its business strategy back. Half the problem is as frontier models are released free as in free beer models with "good enough" performance pop up. Half the arguments about LLMs are "you're not holding it right", which borders on indicating that it's unable to distinguish between two sufficiently close LLMs.

New comment by mgh95 in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

mgh95 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 21:41:40 +0000

> But you still won't get with 170k in the Bay Area, what you get in Paris, Madrid, Nantes or Barcelona with 80k.

Note the 170k eur is in Spain -- not the bay area. I compared salaries of Google in Spain to the average salary of a senior SWE in Spain. The point isn't that the big tech pay more in the bay area compared to Spain. The point is the big tech companies pay more in Spain compared to other Spanish companies.

And 170k eur in Spain is much more than 80k eur in Spain.

New comment by mgh95 in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

mgh95 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:21:08 +0000

I don't think I am. Spanish employees of Google benefit just as much from Spanish employment law as Jose's Web Dev Shop. It's the purest comparison considering it's within the exact same country.

New comment by mgh95 in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

mgh95 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:42:23 +0000

> Higher salaries aren't always better, especially when you're almost willfully ignoring more important things like purchasing power and quality of life.

Senior SWE salaries I'm finding in a quick google search in Spain are 80k eur. According to levels.fyi [1] Google (and presumably the other clouds) are paying 170k eur. The comparison isn't even "is 4x the salary better in the US?" it's "is 2x the salary better in the same place?" which is obviously yes.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...

New comment by mgh95 in "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."

mgh95 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 10:52:53 +0000

The figures I provided are for 2024. You would need to compare USD/CAD ratios for 2024 versus 2025. Annual GDP figures for 2026 are not yet available as 2026 has not yet come to pass, so usage of 2026 data is not accurate in this context. To compare, I would consider USD/CAD on December 31, 2024 which was 1.386 [.72] and USD/CAD on December 31, 2025 which was 1.4359 [.69] which are both less favorable than the .73 given.

As stated above, the usage of more accurate figures would render Ontario with a lower GDP than more states.

New comment by mgh95 in "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."

mgh95 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:58:24 +0000

The dollar strengthened against the CAD in 2025 compared to the figures I used. It really only weakened against the EUR and RMB.