Hacker News: sethev

New comment by sethev in "NYC families need over $125k in income to live in any borough"

sethev — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:41:33 +0000

I don't doubt that number, but it's always a bit baffling to look at the median income in expensive cities. New York city's median household income is $87k, which means that the majority of households are well below the income level it takes to live there.

That stresses me out just to think about it.

New comment by sethev in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

sethev — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:52:01 +0000

Of course they’re paraphrases. And since when does 37 warrant constantly mentioning how old you are?

New comment by sethev in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

sethev — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:28:41 +0000

I apologize for not quoting you directly “Then go get some!”. That’s what you said in response to there being no evidence. Would you like a link to your comment?

New comment by sethev in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

sethev — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:38:49 +0000

I worked at a company once that posted h-1b jobs on a piece of paper on a board next to a restroom at the office. That was technically a publicly accessible area (if you had a guest pass).

New comment by sethev in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

sethev — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:41:46 +0000

You're the one in this thread claiming people are responsible for "going and finding the evidence" of other people's unsourced claims. You could have just not replied since you didn't have something to contribute.

New comment by sethev in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

sethev — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:16:52 +0000

IMHO, people making claims should provide the evidence for them. One link is behind a paywall and the other clearly states that it is making informed speculations.

I could make all sorts of claims on the spot here. It doesn't create a duty for people reading this thread to go investigate them.

New comment by sethev in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

sethev — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:13:08 +0000

> They clearly did something crazy at corona

They acquired Cerner, which had ~30k employees.

New comment by sethev in "Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English"

sethev — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:06:35 +0000

Sure, but Joel isn't saying that's impossible or that people who do that are crackpots. In fact, he was an advocate of writing specs ahead of time [1] - for people.

At the time "generating a program from a spec" was an idea floating around that you could come up with a "spec language" that was easier than regular programming languages but somehow still had the same power and could be compiled directly into a program. That's the crackpot idea that Joel is referencing - but that's not what a spec language used with an LLM is doing.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/10/02/painless-functiona...

New comment by sethev in "Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English"

sethev — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:56:18 +0000

Program generation from a spec meant something vastly different in 2007 than it does now. People can and are generating programs from underspecified prompts. Trying to be systematic about how prompts work is a worthwhile area to explore.

New comment by sethev in "Beagle, a source code management system that stores AST trees"

sethev — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:37:13 +0000

It leans on tree-sitter for language handling, so i wonder if they're actually Concrete Syntax Trees.

New comment by sethev in "Filesystems are having a moment"

sethev — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:37:37 +0000

Yeah, but "it's not X. It's Y" is a common idiom that LLMs picked up from people. That's the point i was making. And it's starting to feel like every post has at least one comment claiming that it was AI generated.

New comment by sethev in "Files are the interface humans and agents interact with"

sethev — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:21:46 +0000

LLMs were trained on stuff that people wrote. I get there are "tells", but don't really think people are as good at identifying AI generated text as they think they are...

New comment by sethev in "Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is killed in Israeli strike, ending 36-year rule"

sethev — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:22:29 +0000

>There's always a growth phase but then there's a bell curve of age vs competence

A bell curve tracks the distribution of a single random variable. You're mixing statistical metaphors.

New comment by sethev in "Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is killed in Israeli strike, ending 36-year rule"

sethev — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:39:08 +0000

And gain experience

New comment by sethev in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

sethev — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:13:28 +0000

>Contained conflagration, short targeted exchanges, probability of contamination low, material possibility of nuclear escalation.

That's describing something that's not a world war, though. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is already far worse than what you're describing as WW3. (setting aside nuclear escalation)

New comment by sethev in "Layoffs at Block"

sethev — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:27:23 +0000

Folks at Jack's level are just as susceptible to flawed reasoning and trend following as anyone else. Sometimes it feels like more so, possibly because they have so much buffer to absorb the consequences of bad ideas (see how Twitter ended up). A person living paycheck to paycheck has less leeway to veer too far away from reality.

All of this to say. I suspect a lot 10k person companies made up of white collar workers could significantly cut their staff and still survive. By the time you get to that size, there's a large middle management that is constantly looking for reasons to increase their 30 person org to 40, and who will be overbooked whether they have 20 people or 100.

New comment by sethev in "The Tears of Donald Knuth (2015)"

sethev — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:40:00 +0000

I don't know why but it makes me smile that he did this experiment by having a grad student type the questions for chatgpt and copy the results.

New comment by sethev in "An Unbothered Jimmy Wales Calls Grokipedia a 'Cartoon Imitation' of Wikipedia"

sethev — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:30:11 +0000

He's not. But he just dismissed a question at a conference, that then somehow got turned into a whole article and a front page story on HN.

New comment by sethev in "Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse"

sethev — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 11:46:03 +0000

The registry did come up, as soon as they had enough information for it to be useful. They were looking for a specific child, starting just from the images that her abuser was sharing on the internet (in which he intentionally tried to hide identifying details).

The registry is just a big list of names and addresses.

New comment by sethev in "How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?"

sethev — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 15:01:38 +0000

Your case #2 doesn't have nearly enough information to say whether it's obviously better for a population of patients. There are a lot of other variables you would need to know:

    - The accuracy of detecting a mass
    - The true distribution of masses in the population
    - The likelihood that of falsely detecting a mass in the same place twice (you seem to implicitly assume that false detections are uncorrelated with each other)
    - The likelihood that a real mass is cancerous (you stipulate that this is 95% in your scenario, but you don't say what other factors are used to determine this - as opposed to just knowing that there's a mass that grew.)
    - The positive effect of treatment in the case of true-positives.
    - The negative effect of treatment or further diagnostics in the case of false-positive.

Saying that doctors are lying about over diagnosis to cope with the fact that diagnostic techniques are too expensive is absurd. They have to actually make decisions in the real world, where your two neat little categories can't be known even if they hypothetically exist.