Hacker News: sceptic123

New comment by sceptic123 in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

sceptic123 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:46:04 +0000

The plan is to replace the tier 3 reps too

New comment by sceptic123 in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

sceptic123 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 16:11:14 +0000

Yarborough is _also_ an English town so I should have got one more

New comment by sceptic123 in "Ryanair dark UX patterns summer 2026 refresher"

sceptic123 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:45:58 +0000

Or to look at it another way, they're perfectly happy to let you stand in a queue, outside, on the runway, in the cold/heat, waiting for them to unload/load the plane that has just landed and is often already late.

New comment by sceptic123 in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

sceptic123 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:14:46 +0000

Or in other words: https://noslopgrenade.com/

New comment by sceptic123 in "Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't"

sceptic123 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:54:51 +0000

> Atrophy. I've already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually. Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain. Largely due to all the little mostly syntactic details involved in programming, you can review code just fine even if you struggle to write it.

https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/2015883857489522876

New comment by sceptic123 in "Do agents.md files help coding agents?"

sceptic123 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:55:09 +0000

That is all the stuff that should be in the README.md of the project in the first place though.

New comment by sceptic123 in "Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other"

sceptic123 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:09:29 +0000

What a weird title for an article about something almost entirely unrelated

New comment by sceptic123 in "MacBook Pro Rival with the Nvidia Powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

sceptic123 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:23:40 +0000

But they pretty much just copied the MBP (and added USB-A)

New comment by sceptic123 in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

sceptic123 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:20:37 +0000

MS page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/surface/devices/surface-lapt...

New comment by sceptic123 in "When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident"

sceptic123 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:14:53 +0000

I’m sorry you feel that way — can you tell me more about what made you feel led on?

New comment by sceptic123 in "We should be more tired than the model"

sceptic123 — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:36:25 +0000

Reading all the code the model generates will tire you out pretty quickly

New comment by sceptic123 in "Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs"

sceptic123 — Wed, 27 May 2026 10:42:53 +0000

For me it is more that outsourced devs lack context and long term responsibility. Plus they are generally billing an hourly rate so their incentive structure is not directly aligned with the business that is outsourcing the work.

New comment by sceptic123 in "Don't answer the first question"

sceptic123 — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:55:36 +0000

In this context your question is likely a request for help, yet you're unwilling to take the time to include the relevant information in that question.

The fact you're complaining about the this, rather than modifying your own behaviour in a way that improves people's chances of helping you, seems quite extraordinary.

New comment by sceptic123 in "Don't answer the first question"

sceptic123 — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:48:47 +0000

What resonated with me in this article was that there's something about question itself that seems off. And that's even more the case if you answer a lot of people's questions on similar topics. This guy's post is obviously coming rom that standpoint, he's an expert on the software he's supporting people to use.

But if you genuinely find that you're often being guided to Y when your actual need is X then perhaps you need to think about how you approach it. For example, are you including enough context of why you're asking the question in the first place?

New comment by sceptic123 in "What the Hell Was Going on with Cigarette Ads in the 70s? (2024)"

sceptic123 — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:36:29 +0000

Life expectancy is a useful summary statistic but not really a guide to healthy.

The main reason for the increase there is a reduction in child mortality, not an increase in overall healthiness. Ironically, one of the main factors improving the adult population statistics is the decrease in smoking.

But look at something like HALE (Healthy Life Expectancy from WHO[1]) that's much lower and is currently decreasing.

https://data.who.int/indicators/i/48D9B0C/C64284D

New comment by sceptic123 in "I've sold out"

sceptic123 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:20:47 +0000

You're absolutely right ... it's strange that someone would post a personal message about something on their personal blog.

New comment by sceptic123 in "Anatomy of the .claude/ folder"

sceptic123 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:26:17 +0000

But why is it different? Why does it need to be? I don't write code the same as other devs so why would/should I use AI the same?

Is this a hangover from when the tools were not as good?

New comment by sceptic123 in "Why Sora Failed: $15M/day inference cost vs. $2.1M lifetime revenue"

sceptic123 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:29:48 +0000

but not if it's entirely made up

New comment by sceptic123 in "Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy"

sceptic123 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:52:09 +0000

Fun fact: you shouldn't have sensitive files with API keys, passwords, DB credentials, etc. in your repo

New comment by sceptic123 in "Goodbye to Sora"

sceptic123 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:10:05 +0000

translation: "we got all the data we needed"