Hacker News: philwelch

New comment by philwelch in "As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers"

philwelch — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:02:28 +0000

That's the law in Colorado, DC, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont, all of which are blue states.

New comment by philwelch in "As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers"

philwelch — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 02:58:12 +0000

Democrats opposed the Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003, and multiple blue states allow abortion at any point prior to birth.

New comment by philwelch in "As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers"

philwelch — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:59:23 +0000

> If you’re a single-issue abortion voter, yes the US democrats tend to propose fetal viability (22 weeks or so) as the limit

No, the standard Democrat policy is to allow abortion on demand at any point prior to birth—40 weeks or so.

New comment by philwelch in "As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers"

philwelch — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:54:42 +0000

In Seattle you’re considered conservative if you’re not a Marxist.

New comment by philwelch in "Leaking YouTube creators' private videos"

philwelch — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 02:44:03 +0000

If we're going to gatekeep the word "engineer", you're not in the most defensible position as a train designer. If you want to go back to the original definition, engineers were soldiers specialized in siege warfare, which has nothing to do with designing trains. Alternately, "engineer" can be broad enough to include someone driving a train, which presumably required some understanding of how the locomotive worked but was more of what we'd call a skilled technician.

New comment by philwelch in "Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration"

philwelch — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:00:53 +0000

“If the government pays for it, it’s free!”

New comment by philwelch in "A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)"

philwelch — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:39:25 +0000

The prosecution has the burden of proof to establish the basic accusation, and the defendant is always entitled to offer the negative defense of "I didn't do it". For instance, if I'm accused of killing Paul, I can always say "I didn't kill Paul" and the prosecution has the burden of proof to say that I did. On the other hand, if my defense is that I killed Paul in self defense, the burden of proof is on me to show that my actions satisfied the legal definition of self defense in my state.

New comment by philwelch in "A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)"

philwelch — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:03:59 +0000

Wise decision. If you did anything to the thief, odds are the cops would have cared.

New comment by philwelch in "A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)"

philwelch — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:01:45 +0000

> The burden is never on the defendant to prove their innocence.

False. Look up "affirmative defense".

New comment by philwelch in "A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)"

philwelch — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:00:32 +0000

> Anecdata is well known to be problematic.

Show me the data that backs that claim.

New comment by philwelch in "A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)"

philwelch — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:59:11 +0000

It's intentional on the part of the prosecutors, and the billionaire who funds their campaigns. I don't know what their actual motivations are--probably some combination of ideological derangement and ulterior motive. They just don't believe in prosecuting most ordinary criminals.

New comment by philwelch in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

philwelch — Sat, 30 May 2026 13:45:37 +0000

Licking asses to get grants has been the full time job of tenured faculty for decades. Peer review just means they lick each other’s asses.

New comment by philwelch in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

philwelch — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:10:45 +0000

Almost all of the YoY growth in the S&P500 is in a very small number of tech companies. If one of those fast-growing tech companies isn't in the S&P500, the index as a whole becomes obsolete.

New comment by philwelch in "Mythical Man Month"

philwelch — Sun, 10 May 2026 02:04:53 +0000

Sure but it’s still more affordable than it was for the vast majority of our ancestors, and they still had kids, so it’s not an explanation for declining TFR in developed countries.

New comment by philwelch in "Mythical Man Month"

philwelch — Sat, 09 May 2026 04:53:04 +0000

Life has never been more affordable than it is now. Virtually all of your ancestors were impoverished to a degree you can't even imagine.

New comment by philwelch in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

philwelch — Sat, 09 May 2026 04:46:54 +0000

Deregulation does benefit the people, at least if it's done in ways that lead to sustained economic growth.

New comment by philwelch in "Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?"

philwelch — Sat, 09 May 2026 04:42:52 +0000

No, I think AI actually gets us closer to the surgical team than before. The purpose of the surgical team is to maximize the value of a single individual contributor. Before AI, the only way to do that was to surround him with assistants, which is inherently hierarchical and never really caught on probably for that reason. The value wasn't in the surgical team being entirely human, it was in optimizing for the surgeon's output by offloading tasks that are less valuable for him to perform. Offloading those tasks to AI works just as well without offending our egalitarian sensibilities.

New comment by philwelch in "Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?"

philwelch — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:13:49 +0000

Yes and every AI-first development workflow worth its salt does exactly this, and it does it much more thoroughly than I’ve ever seen a team of meatbags do it.

My workflow, at a high level, is:

1. I write a high level spec. Not as high level as a single-sentence prompt, but high level enough to capture my top requirements.

2. I prompt the AI to interview me about the spec to clear up any ambiguity or open questions, then when I’m satisfied, the AI writes a longer spec, which I then review.

3. Then I prompt the AI to write an implementation plan based on the spec. I might just skim this, and by this point I might be asking the LLM more questions than it’s asking me.

4. Now I hand it off to the implementer agent.

This isn’t cowboy coding, it’s not even agile. It’s waterfall. The problem with doing waterfall was that it’s too slow, especially with the deserialization/serialization cost of routing all of this documentation through meatbrains. The LLM is doing just as much work, true, but faster.

The thing I found surprising was that, while LLM’s are still pretty awful at writing as an art form, they are better technical writers than I have the time to be, especially when writing for an audience of other LLM’s.

New comment by philwelch in "Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?"

philwelch — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:58:01 +0000

You’re reminding me a lot of those old assembly hackers who thought compilers were bullshit because they could hand-write better assembly. And I don’t mean that as an insult; those guys were probably right about their assembly code, just like an Amish craftsman will make better furniture than a factory in China. The problem is that the world needs more furniture and more software than skilled craftsmen can produce, and the skill gap between the craftsman and the mass production process is diminishing fast.

We’re still going to have handwritten software, just like we still have handwritten assembly. It just won’t be the norm.

New comment by philwelch in "Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?"

philwelch — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:44:25 +0000

As I recall, “No Silver Bullet” fundamentally rested on the assumption that the subroutine was the last word in abstractions to make programming more efficient, which probably wasn’t even defensible at the time because Lisp had already been invented, and is even less defensible after the past several decades of programming language research. Brooks was still onto something when it came to irreducible complexity, but offloading complexity an LLM can tackle to the LLM still saves time.

One of the lesser discussed Brooks essays is actually the best description of AI-first development: the “surgical team”. It just turns out the surgeon is the only human, and like many modern surgeries, the surgeon is controlling a robot instead of operating by hand.

It would be interesting to reread The Mythical Man-Month and see how each essay applies to AI-first development.