Hacker News: novembermike

New comment by novembermike in "AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'"

novembermike — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 05:28:23 +0000

I think it's fair to call code LLM's similar to fairly bad but very fast juniors that don't get bored. That's a serious drawback but it does give you something to work with. What scares me is non-technical people just vibe coding because it's like a PM driving the same juniors with no one to give sanity checks.

New comment by novembermike in "Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears"

novembermike — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 22:05:05 +0000

Most growth is actually logistic. An S shaped curve that starts exponential but slows down rapidly as it reaches some asymptote. In fact basically everything we see as exponential in the real world is logistic.

New comment by novembermike in "How to be a -10x Engineer"

novembermike — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 01:25:21 +0000

Yeah, these things are all part of being a team of 1x engineers rather than a team of .5x engineers. If you have a single 10x (and I've worked with some) then it's not important but those guys have their own issues.

New comment by novembermike in "Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy"

novembermike — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 02:08:31 +0000

This clearly falls into "fraud waiting to happen" rather than "minimal risk" though. It's fairly simple to treat Amazon as the actual seller and just hold them liable if there is false advertising. There's a difference for a Shopify type system that gives individual sellers their own storefront or Ebay where the seller is clearly communicated, but Amazon often obscures the seller info and represents itself as the seller so it seems fair and reasonable.

New comment by novembermike in "Europe is investing heavily in trains"

novembermike — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 01:58:18 +0000

Typically everyone does both freight and passengers, but it'll be better at one or the other. Passengers want fast trains with few delays that get close to population centers. Freight doesn't care about speed as much but cares about the overall throughput and wants to end up in distribution centers.

New comment by novembermike in "Europe is investing heavily in trains"

novembermike — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 21:05:20 +0000

European trains don't really do that much freight though. They tend to be optimized to carry people. America is actually way ahead of Europe in terms of rail freight, something like 10x depending on the measurement.

New comment by novembermike in "How to get the most out of your 1:1s"

novembermike — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 18:10:29 +0000

One thing to keep in mind is that "expert on team's codebase" is a form of career growth. Not always the best or most prestigious kind but it's enough that the company finds you valuable and worth paying more.

New comment by novembermike in "One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions"

novembermike — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 01:03:44 +0000

One thing to remember here is that a senior dev might be at the beginner stage for org wide changes.

New comment by novembermike in "Code colocation is king"

novembermike — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 22:08:57 +0000

It feels like half the usage of inheritance is also just workarounds for mocking things in unit tests or being able to access things that are private/protected. Everything ends up with an interface and an impl just because of silly language decisions.

New comment by novembermike in "Software estimation is hard – do it anyway"

novembermike — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 21:07:39 +0000

The argument I've heard for T-shirt sizes is that if you go to numbers people try to add them together when that's just not how it works. I do agree that T-shirt sizes don't work that well though.

New comment by novembermike in "Against Hickelism"

novembermike — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 01:12:29 +0000

The issue is that the current direction that big data is going doesn't do much to help planned economies like that. The big issue is really calculating preferences, which a market economy does through prices. If you don't have prices set by markets it's extremely difficult to calculate preferences from first principles.

New comment by novembermike in "On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't"

novembermike — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 07:55:46 +0000

Sure, but there's another part of it where applying statistical averages to individuals promotes helplessness. Expecting people to suck it up and achieve despite adversity is not realistic at a population level and you should not promote that as a solution there, but individuals can and do achieve despite adversity. Telling people that they are real humans that can make decisions and do things is healthy and you don't want to take that away. It's a line you need to walk but only going with the population level approach has a lot of downsides.

New comment by novembermike in "My experience as a Gazan girl getting into Silicon Valley companies"

novembermike — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 01:34:05 +0000

How so? If they turned out to be amazing then I would have considered an offer, I just didn't go into it expecting to accept anything.

New comment by novembermike in "My experience as a Gazan girl getting into Silicon Valley companies"

novembermike — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 21:16:27 +0000

Yep. Last time I interviewed I did one interview at a random place I didn't care about just to get rid of jitters, one at a mid-tier place I'd actually accept if I didn't get another offer and then two at FANG companies. I easily passed all of them except one of the FANGs and then I was off the market. The time before that I did a single interview. The time before that though I wasn't as experience and probably interviewed at 20-30 places before I got a job.

New comment by novembermike in "The unusual ways Western parents raise children"

novembermike — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 19:42:59 +0000

Keep in mind that the research around this is very poor. It's in the realm of things where flipping a coin might be better.

New comment by novembermike in "When Engineers Were Humanists"

novembermike — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 07:01:30 +0000

Social services are not socialism. Socialism is about the workers owning the means of production. Social services are something that goes back to basically the dawn of human society (Roman bread and circuses are a classic example).

New comment by novembermike in "Vertical farming does not save space"

novembermike — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 20:03:16 +0000

This ignores nuclear power. It also ignores the fact that you can put solar panels in places that you can't put farms such as the desert.

New comment by novembermike in "Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets (2017)"

novembermike — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 18:52:36 +0000

TDD is more of a Java thing and it has a lot to do with the lack of a good type system in Java. TDD essentially lets you create a class that encapsulates a type and then enforce the contract for that type through the tests. Modern type systems tend to just let you do it directly so the unit tests are a little less useful.

New comment by novembermike in "Why Is Esbuild Fast?"

novembermike — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 18:42:08 +0000

Eh, it's a useful proxy. 1000 lines a day isn't better than 100 lines a day but both tell you that it's being actively worked on.

New comment by novembermike in "Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit"

novembermike — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 21:06:08 +0000

It really isn't. Most of the code is probably going to be uninteresting and you can do 10 lines a minute or more. Some of the code will be more relevant and might take a day for 10 lines. This would just be checking for accuracy though so you could probably just ignore a huge chunk of it.