Hacker News: morelandjs

New comment by morelandjs in "Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's"

morelandjs — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 12:58:14 +0000

Worth mentioning that controlling for confounders is hard, a reasonable prior is the null effect, and any time a researcher makes a mistake it produces a publication claiming a novel effect. You observe a set of publications concentrated with false positives as a form of selection bias. I wonder how many of the causal studies are reproduced by independent teams using independent datasets.

Plausible scenario. Individuals predisposed to Alzheimer’s experience different mental sharpness from birth and this makes them enjoy taxi driving less (more intense than long-haul trucking), and so they pursue taxi driving as a career at lower rates. Under this scenario, driving has no effect, it just induces a selection bias.

New comment by morelandjs in "Don't ask an LLM for a confidence score"

morelandjs — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:23:29 +0000

Maybe confidence is a loaded term, but LLMs do have a sense of procedural uncertainty. Couldn’t you ask it to respond y/n in response to a question and look at the next token sampling probabilities?

New comment by morelandjs in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

morelandjs — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:36:27 +0000

Unsolicited endorsement, but I bought a “Brick” device recently, and I can’t recommend it enough for cutting back on social media. Infinite scroll really destroys your ability to concentrate.

New comment by morelandjs in "OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future"

morelandjs — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:24:26 +0000

Would love some kind of randomized A-B test where CEOs are replaced with AI and the outcome measured. Would not at all be surprised if it’s far better than the bottom quartile or more.

More practically, I think you could give a board of directors access to an LLM that sees all levels of company operations and let them talk to that chatbot as a stand-in for the CEO on a 24/7 basis.

New comment by morelandjs in "I Put My Son in a Swamp"

morelandjs — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:50:58 +0000

Immediate page abandonment for me. I would appreciate more pledges of “this is entirely human writing, my own thoughts, imperfect as they may be”.

New comment by morelandjs in "AI changes the economics of software rewrites"

morelandjs — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:19:56 +0000

Using a better tech stack also provides opportunities to simplify.

New comment by morelandjs in "FAANG Simulator"

morelandjs — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:04:09 +0000

Man, I hate that tech has just become money. Content like this perpetuates it.

New comment by morelandjs in "Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck"

morelandjs — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:26:06 +0000

I published in Nature Physics and the copy-editing process was quite embarrassing, to the point where we had to repeatedly nag them to stop them from making the manuscript presentation worse.

To be clear, I’m not talking about subjective style issues, I mean conforming to their own spec and avoiding careless bugs.

All remaining work fell on the backs of the physics referees. I’m not sure what value Springer provided from an editorial standpoint. It was disappointing to say the least after all that hard work.

New comment by morelandjs in "You're probably using Agent Skills wrong"

morelandjs — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:30:30 +0000

Agree on article frustrations. Perhaps a better explanation, skills are just disk-cached prompts conditioned on verified success. The conditioned on verified success part might seem inconsequential, but it’s the whole thing that gives skills their value. Also the fact that their loading can be scoped to a certain calling context.

New comment by morelandjs in "Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence"

morelandjs — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:28:29 +0000

If anyone from Kalshi or Polymarket is reading this: your advertising is reprehensible. Dumb bros bragging about getting rich betting on the weather. Cringey get-rich-quick influencers. No one believes for a second your claims that prediction markets serve the public good. I’ve never wanted an industry to fail so badly.

New comment by morelandjs in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

morelandjs — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:57:53 +0000

It’s my opinion that societal rules should be derived from more fundamental virtues and notions of morality. AI is a capability, and it can be used in moral or immoral ways, but it’s more like a knife than an assault rifle. I don’t want AI forced down my throat by SF bro evangelists, but I also don’t want to see it banned as a useful technology. I wish people didn’t feel the need to adopt extreme positions on this topic and were capable of advancing more nuanced perspectives.

New comment by morelandjs in "Claude for Small Business"

morelandjs — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:21:13 +0000

This, creating order from chaos (reducing entropy) is difficult and requires real intelligence. Inflating some small prompt into a wall of text and creating a bunch of entropy in the process is not as useful as it appears.

New comment by morelandjs in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

morelandjs — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:21:32 +0000

Yes, we can crawl our entire internal documentation via LLM. Want to know if someone is already working in the space of your latest idea? Ask Claude, it hits the internal search APIs and finds docs and references directly relevant to your query. There are a lot of separate document stores so this took a lot of effort previously. I can also query Slack, Outlook, etc. I don’t understand the cynicism in your comment.

New comment by morelandjs in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

morelandjs — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:09:44 +0000

I have mixed thoughts on this. These thoughts are my own. On the one hand, it’s objectively silly to pretend like we’ve solved the age old problem of measuring developer productivity. Metric-obsessed leadership can also be intolerable, counterproductive, and it’s a good way to paint yourself into a corner undervaluing your best talent and overvaluing your mediocre talent.

That said, I’m kind of having a blast using CC in corporate with all the connectors available at our disposal, and I baffled how little some of my coworkers know about what’s available and what the capabilities are. So it’s clear that perhaps some encouragement is prudent for those who are slower to embrace new technologies, but I’m not sure tokencounting and tokenmaxing are the answer.

New comment by morelandjs in "Show HN: Curate and Nurture a Friend Roster"

morelandjs — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:35:28 +0000

There’s nothing wrong with that and perhaps this isn’t useful for you. Reflecting on my own socialization, some of it is spontaneous and some of it is “it’s been a while since I’ve seen so and so, I should reach out”. This app is more for the latter.

It’s also a good ledger of exactly how much I socialize and with whom. Often I find that I think I hangout with certain friends more than I do, and this helps me confront the reality that I need to put in more effort.

To be clear the catchup frequency is not meant to promote “hangout every X days” but rather to encourage me to be more mindful with who I hangout with and how often (roughly).

Show HN: Curate and Nurture a Friend Roster

morelandjs — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:55:22 +0000

I built Chumlord, a little iOS app to help me stay in touch with the people I care about. Set a catchup cadence for each friend, and it shows you who you’re overdue to reach out to. No accounts, no data collection, just open it to check the health of your friend roster!

The app is technically trivial, but withering social circles is a topic I see routinely discussed on HN, and I decided I wanted to take a stab at giving the problem a physical form and a tool to shape it. Been using this for a week now, and I really like it!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chumlord/id6767711584

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48108370

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

New comment by morelandjs in "The bottleneck was never the code"

morelandjs — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:51:13 +0000

I understand your sentiment, and there’s absolutely some truth to it, but I don’t think the path forward is throwing more management resources (or layers) at the problem. And I don’t think the management technology industry is the answer either.

I think the solution will be small (1-5 person) teams where product and engineering sit next to each other and have clear authorization to launch directly to prod at their discretion. The gripes about performative work tracking mechanisms and the realization that non-tech considerations are now the bottle neck are not mutually incompatible.

New comment by morelandjs in "Diatec, known for its mechanical keyboard brand FILCO, has ceased operations"

morelandjs — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:54:29 +0000

Loved my Filco stealth, thanks for the great products!

New comment by morelandjs in "Amazon is adding a fuel surcharge to fees it collects from third-party sellers"

morelandjs — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:21:27 +0000

I physically twitch every time I hear a flywheel mentioned. Intended to be evocative of certain physics without actually substantiating any of it.

New comment by morelandjs in "Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit"

morelandjs — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:45:31 +0000

I’m not fully subscribed to the idea that all public scraping of websites is bad, or that this project is a productive contribution. It would be nice to have search engines other than Google, and that necessitates bots being able to index your website (in some respectful manner).