Hacker News: ro_sharp

New comment by ro_sharp in "Reviewers rarely talk about reliability. Owners bring it up twice as often"

ro_sharp — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 02:46:33 +0000

Here was me thinking this was about code ownership ;)

New comment by ro_sharp in "The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI"

ro_sharp — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 09:19:51 +0000

What if there’s many more POCs they don’t like than those they do?

New comment by ro_sharp in "Proton to 'Re-Interview' Staff About AI to See Who Gets to Keep Their Job"

ro_sharp — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 23:33:01 +0000

So what? There’s only so much interview time, and you need the fundamentals before you can safely use LLMs to speed up.

IMO if you’re going to run an interview that uses coding agents etc it belongs at the end of an interview pipeline.

New comment by ro_sharp in "Proton to 'Re-Interview' Staff About AI to See Who Gets to Keep Their Job"

ro_sharp — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 23:27:16 +0000

> These re-interviews are consequential

An open process with a clear rationale is better than a secret process, e.g. company wide surveys that are later used to determine whether you keep your job…

Whether this actually leads to improved productivity and better products is TBD, of course.

New comment by ro_sharp in "Mark Zuckerberg Pushed Meta to Shield Him from California's Proposed Wealth Tax"

ro_sharp — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 03:12:57 +0000

“Some people still died in car crashes, so seatbelts shouldn’t be required in cars”

New comment by ro_sharp in "Does Georgism work? Five years later"

ro_sharp — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:24:39 +0000

Yes, pricing negative externalities is a good idea. Unfortunately some are more or less expensive to price/enforce

New comment by ro_sharp in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

ro_sharp — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:44:05 +0000

This is already required for new books published in the US, and has been for more than one hundred years.

It’s called “mandatory deposit”

New comment by ro_sharp in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

ro_sharp — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:36:22 +0000

You’re equating something being ubiquitous and affordable with it not being valuable.

Yes, there are plenty of books, many were printed, many have lasted a very long time (plenty over 100 years!).

That says more about the success and utility of the technology than it does about whether individual books should be shredded.

New comment by ro_sharp in "The Rise of Million-Dollar Companies with Just One Employee"

ro_sharp — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 23:46:14 +0000

This sounds great until a businessman arrives with a trawler, takes all of the fish, and buys all of the land in your town.

New comment by ro_sharp in "Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026"

ro_sharp — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:06:36 +0000

This is the ideal, but in practice you need to own the business to live this way..

New comment by ro_sharp in "A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown"

ro_sharp — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:35:38 +0000

As long as the pollution is a negative externality and the polluting option is (immediately) cheaper, people (especially poorer people) will choose the cheaper option.

New comment by ro_sharp in "Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”"

ro_sharp — Wed, 27 May 2026 07:07:30 +0000

All of these may result in you bringing in less $ overall, so it really depends on how much each fraud case costs you, but you could (off the top of my head): - Enable always checking CVV - Require 3DS - Ban a card after N disputes - Ban an email/other identifier after N disputes - Ban certain payment methods, banks etc - Add a visible or invisible captcha to fight automated abuse/card testing

I suspect Stripe walks a fine line where they want to help you prevent fraud, but they also want to avoid vendors complaining to them that their customers can’t pay.

Context: I worked on a payments team for a short while.

New comment by ro_sharp in "Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists"

ro_sharp — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:29:48 +0000

You can sell the asset, so how does anyone inherit nothing?

Someone who wants to spend an inheritance is going to do it, whether it’s liquid (cash) or marginally less so (real property)

New comment by ro_sharp in "SQL or Death? Seminar Series – Spring 2025"

ro_sharp — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 08:49:33 +0000

Not sure I follow. In a world with CTEs and views, what do you think is missing for composability?

New comment by ro_sharp in "No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)"

ro_sharp — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 13:42:38 +0000

I don’t know why we call having a mortgage “ownership”: it’s not. Across the western world mortgages are getting larger and longer relative to income.

More people are in more significant debt bondage than in the past, that’s not an improvement.

The proportion of owned outright homes has been declining in the western world for 30 years.

New comment by ro_sharp in "Apple and Google deliver support for unwanted tracking alerts in iOS and Android"

ro_sharp — Tue, 14 May 2024 09:36:51 +0000

Great, now I’ll get more than two or three of these every day just because I live in a mildly dense city centre…

New comment by ro_sharp in "Google's First Tensor Processing Unit: Architecture"

ro_sharp — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 04:34:42 +0000

> GPT-4 doesn't seem profitable (if it was, would they need to throttle it?)

Maybe? Hardware supply isn’t perfectly elastic

New comment by ro_sharp in "Why is it so hard to build an airport?"

ro_sharp — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 07:05:53 +0000

> Curious minds wonder what you do to be able to have that kind of time for travel

In developed countries outside the US annual multi-week vacations are routine for the middle classes

New comment by ro_sharp in "Why is it so hard to build an airport?"

ro_sharp — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 06:59:22 +0000

Yep, it’s an international embarrassment

New comment by ro_sharp in "The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)"

ro_sharp — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 09:36:26 +0000

The doomsday clock is closer to midnight than it’s ever been https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/ and now we avoid another 1929 by inflating away the gains of the middle class and siphoning value off to the 1%