Hacker News: rossdavidh

New comment by rossdavidh in "Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)"

rossdavidh — Sat, 16 May 2026 14:02:41 +0000

True that, but it could be both cause and effect. There are reports that gut bacteria can induce depression, which benefits the bacteria because it sends more calorie-rich, highly processed food down the gullet (think ice cream binges when depressed). Not hard to believe that gut bacteria optimized for a particular kind of food could evolve the ability to induce their host to eat that food exclusively. It would have the side-benefit (for the bacteria) of reducing competition from other microbes that aren't optimized for that, by starving them out. Things aren't always just cause or effect, especially in biology.

New comment by rossdavidh in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (May 2026)"

rossdavidh — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:08:48 +0000

Working on a framework for factory management systems.

Emotional regulation is a dying art

rossdavidh — Wed, 06 May 2026 14:17:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/emotional-regulation-is-a-dying-art/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48036584

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by rossdavidh in "Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment"

rossdavidh — Fri, 01 May 2026 23:49:27 +0000

Do they mean, the moment when everyone realizes it's not as useful as they at first thought?

Wintering

rossdavidh — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:30:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/on-wintering/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47948190

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by rossdavidh in "San Diego rents declined following surge in supply"

rossdavidh — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:00:34 +0000

Should note that "top US markets" really means "most expensive US markets", not for example the largest by population.

New comment by rossdavidh in "Amtrak's "1MB" National Route Map PDF Is a 574MB File"

rossdavidh — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:44:26 +0000

It's somewhat akin to how documentation inside code is so often inaccurate; it may have been fine when it was written, but it doesn't get updated.

Fisherian Runaway in the Modern Economy

rossdavidh — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:41:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/fisherian_runaway/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47854266

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by rossdavidh in "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]"

rossdavidh — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:24:39 +0000

Sorry, didn't know/remember that a GR account was required just to read...

New comment by rossdavidh in "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]"

rossdavidh — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:46:22 +0000

One of the authors of this paper, David Reich, has written a book called "Who We Are and How We Got Here", which is worth reading. My thoughts on it: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2605841954

New comment by rossdavidh in "Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds"

rossdavidh — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:25:02 +0000

No matter what your politics, sooner or later someone you don't agree with will be in charge at the national level.

There are also cases where states take on cases that the national government never pursues in the first case. IIRC, states pursued the tobacco companies when the national government would not (Democrat or Republican).

Of course, it happens in federal courts, so you also need separate and independent branches at the national level. But states that can act independently are important as well.

New comment by rossdavidh in "Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds"

rossdavidh — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:42:17 +0000

In case you wondered what the point of the federal (i.e. states not totally controlled by federal government) system is, here's a good example. If only the federal government were allowed to pursue this case, it would have ended when the administration changed. 30 states chose to keep the case alive, and good on them.

New comment by rossdavidh in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

rossdavidh — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:26:44 +0000

I'm building a framework for making small-to-medium sized factory management systems.

New comment by rossdavidh in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"

rossdavidh — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:23:58 +0000

True enough, but I think that a lot of "actually programming the thing" turned out to be "figuring out what exactly needs to be programmed". Afterwards, people did not want to admit that this was the case, perhaps even to themselves, because it seemed like a failure to plan. However, in most (nearly all?) cases, spending more time prior to programming would not have resulted in a better result. Usually, the best way to figure out what needs to be programmed, is to start doing it, and occasionally take a step back to evaluate what you've learned about the problem space and how that changes what you want to actually program.

In other words "figuring out what needs to be programmed" and "actually programming the thing" look the same while they're happening. Afterwards, one could say that the first 90% was figuring out, and only the last 10% was actually doing it. The reason the distinction matters, is that if you do something that makes programming happen faster, but figuring out happen slower, then it can have the surprising affect of making it take longer to get the whole thing done.

New comment by rossdavidh in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"

rossdavidh — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:58:31 +0000

All of this article, both the good (critique of the status quo ante) and the bad (entirely too believing of LLM boosterism) are missing (or not stressing enough) the most important point, which is that the actual programming is not the hard part. Figuring out what exactly needs programmed is the hard part.

For reasons which it would take a while to unpack, if is often the case that the best (or sometimes only) way to find out what programming actually needs to be done, is to program something that's not it, and then replace it. This may need to be done multiple times. Programming is only occasionally the final product, it is much more often the means of working through what it is that is actually needed. This is very difficult for the people who ask for the software, to understand, and it is quite often very difficult for the people doing the programming to understand.

Most of what is being done, during programming, is working through the problem space in a way which will make it more obvious what your mistakes are, in your understanding of the problem and what a solution would look like. Once you have arrived at that understanding, then there are a variety of ways to make what you need, but that is not the rate-limiting step.

New comment by rossdavidh in "Installing every* Firefox extension"

rossdavidh — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:51:43 +0000

My favorite line: "I got basically all the extensions with this, making everything I did before this look really stupid."

Not at all; all good developers succeed by finding ways to make their past work look unnecessarily complicated.

New comment by rossdavidh in "The back story behind the first "$1.8B" dollar "AI Company""

rossdavidh — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:06:54 +0000

So, "BS-as-a-service" allows you to make more money off BS, including deepfake before-and-after, and falsifying doctor profiles at scale. I mean, fraud is definitely one application where "hallucinations" are not so much of a problem, that is a valid point.

New comment by rossdavidh in "How to make a sliding, self-locking, and predator-proof chicken coop door (2020)"

rossdavidh — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:44:41 +0000

I don't understand; where is the cloud connection to an LLM agent? I don't even see how you could get Kubernetes or React in this thing.

Axios Hacked, Anthropic Leaked [video]

rossdavidh — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:08:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W79cCY0T_as

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47627534

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by rossdavidh in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

rossdavidh — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:43:47 +0000

If the algorithm (whatever it is) evaluates its own output based on whether or not the user responds positively, then it will over time become better and better at telling people what they want to hear.

It is analogous to social media feeding people a constant stream of outrage because that's what caused them to click on the link. You could tell people "don't click on ragebait links", and if most people didn't then presumably social media would not have become doomscrolling nightmares, but at scale that's not what's likely to happen. Most people will click on ragebait, and most people will prefer sycophantic feedback. Therefore, since the algorithm is designed to get better and better at keeping users engaged, it will become worse and worse in the more fundamental sense. That's kind of baked into the architecture.