Hacker News: sharpy

New comment by sharpy in "India's top court angry after junior judge cites fake AI-generated orders"

sharpy — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:24:09 +0000

What will that accomplish? Does it give license to developers to check in code that they don't understand/trust fully?

Ultimately, people should be responsible for the code they commit, no matter how it was written. If AI generates code that is so bad that it warrants putting up warning sign, it shouldn't be checked in.

New comment by sharpy in "California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years"

sharpy — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:49:39 +0000

We are having an unusually dry and sunny winter in PNW.. I wonder if it is related.

New comment by sharpy in "US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes"

sharpy — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 21:38:33 +0000

That sounds nice, but I think that increased tax will just be passed down as higher rent.

New comment by sharpy in "A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave"

sharpy — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:20:40 +0000

I wonder if US still manages to keep the most promising?

New comment by sharpy in "Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price"

sharpy — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 18:05:39 +0000

Once upon a time, our team was paying Oracle $6 million a year in DB licenses alone. We ended up building our own bespoke storage solution.

New comment by sharpy in "Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices"

sharpy — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 04:52:05 +0000

And decided that it was cheaper and easier to just outsource it to Microsoft. Because doing it in today's environment - different work computers, backend servers, mobile devices, etc - is much more complicated than just managing permissions on a mainframe.

New comment by sharpy in "Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?"

sharpy — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:31:48 +0000

I think AI can be really powerful tool. I am more productive with it than not, but a lot of my time interacting with AI is reviewing its code, finding problems with it (I always find some issues with it), and telling it what to do differently multiple times, and eventually giving up, and fixing up the code by hand. But it definitely has reduced average time it takes me to implement features. But I also worry that not everyone would be responsible and check/fix AI generated code.

New comment by sharpy in "High-income job losses are cooling housing demand"

sharpy — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 20:07:59 +0000

Probably a lot of private equity buying up homes to generate rental income? Usually, I am more pro market, but I think there needs to be some regulations on this. Although if you are an existing homeowner with low interest rate locked in, you probably want more private equity investments to drive up your property value...

New comment by sharpy in "Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?"

sharpy — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 17:10:37 +0000

Intellectually, I think people agree with that. But I think the weight of history works against it. When you have a history filled with war, and intense competition...

New comment by sharpy in "TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term"

sharpy — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 19:19:50 +0000

If they get things like PyTorch to work well without carinng what hardware it is running on, it erodes Nvidia's CUDA moat. Nvidia's chips are excellent, without doubt, but their real moat is the ecosystem around CUDA.

New comment by sharpy in "Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia"

sharpy — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:12:26 +0000

If it becomes a liability, wouldn't the onus be on the network operators for failing to support devices sold within X years?

New comment by sharpy in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

sharpy — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:36:40 +0000

When they added the CM bar raiser, I felt like it hit day 2. When was that? 2014ish?

New comment by sharpy in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

sharpy — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 20:33:53 +0000

Nah, I used to work for defense contractors, and worked with ex-military people, so...

Anyway, I actually loved my first time at AWS. Which is why I went back. My second stint wasn't too bad, but I probably wouldn't go back, unless they offered me a lot more than what I get paid, but that is unlikely.

New comment by sharpy in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

sharpy — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 16:48:52 +0000

The culture changed. When I first worked there, I was encouraged to take calculated risks. When I did my second tour of duty, people were deathly afraid of bringing down services. It has been a while since my second tour of duty, but I don't think it's back to "Amazon is a place where builders can build".

New comment by sharpy in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

sharpy — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 13:53:10 +0000

I have seen one promo docket get rejected for doing work that is not complex enough... I thought the problem was challenging, and the simple solution brilliant, but the tech assessor disagreed. I mean once you see there is a simple solution to a problem, it looks like the problem is simple...

New comment by sharpy in "TurboTax’s 20-year fight to stop Americans from filing taxes for free (2019)"

sharpy — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 15:25:04 +0000

As someone whose employer uses a broker that doesn't do cost basis correctly for RSUs, I was very surprised TurboTax was able to import the supplement and adjust it correctly for me.

Even without RSUs, I usually have hundreds of transactions across multiple brokers.

New comment by sharpy in "Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves"

sharpy — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 18:55:56 +0000

Once upon a time, a colleague from South Africa told me that they use fiber cable everywhere. I was surprised by this that they seem to be more advanced than us. Turns out that copper wire gets stolen, so they have no choice...

New comment by sharpy in "Introduction to Ada: a project-based exploration with rosettas"

sharpy — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 19:08:26 +0000

Worked in the defence industry for a few years in the 2000s. I worked on exactly one Ada project. The rest were C/C++. I presume the shift away from Ada has accelerated if anythinng.

New comment by sharpy in "I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform"

sharpy — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:04:22 +0000

100% agree with this take. I work in observability space. We use our own product to monitor our services, and being a daily user of the product helps us make it better. Our customers also agree. We get opportunity to talk to our customers doing product demos at conferences, etc, and all the feedback I have gotten is that they love the product! But wish it was cheaper.

New comment by sharpy in "Margin debt surges to record high"

sharpy — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:45:43 +0000

I do trade using margin account, but I don't borrow. The primary reason I use margin account is to be able to trade with unsettled funds. Probably don't need it now that the settlement times are T+1, but when it was T+2, it was kinda annoying.