Hacker News: spjt

New comment by spjt in "Grok 4.5"

spjt — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:06:30 +0000

As an American that stuff is fairly inconsequential to me, although I am already aware of those things so I wouldn't even have a reason to ask. Likewise a Chinese person probably wouldn't have much interest in topics that a US-based model would censor. I guess the answer is just for everyone is that if you are going to talk politics with a chatbot, don't use one from your own country.

New comment by spjt in "How to Earn a Billion Dollars"

spjt — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:59:50 +0000

Of course he presents a hypothetical person who honestly earned a billion dollars, because he can't name an actual example. All you have to do is double your million dollar business every month for a year and a half! I'm sure this genius would take me up on my offer to work for him for $1 on the first day and doubling it every day for a month, right?

New comment by spjt in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

spjt — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:52:07 +0000

Why would remote working have anything to do with the amount of junior hiring? You can maybe make the case that remote work isn't as helpful for juniors etc etc. but that has absolutely nothing to do with the decision to create a job requisition or not.

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

spjt — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:07:05 +0000

As if the reason people don't like Windows is because the ads on their desktop weren't loading fast enough.

New comment by spjt in "Is Python Becoming Pinyin?"

spjt — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:01:32 +0000

Why teach people bad habits starting out? Probably dating myself specifically but I started out with Pascal, and I'm glad I did.

New comment by spjt in "AI sticker shock hits corporate America"

spjt — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:54:52 +0000

I wish I could do the same thing. Coworkers would be allowed to ask me X number of questions per month, and once they hit that limit I get the rest of the month off.

New comment by spjt in "Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you"

spjt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 04:53:14 +0000

I'm one of those cowards that always succumbs to the pressure and ends up tipping, but it bothers me enough that I just won't buy anything if I know I'm going to get asked. This is good training.

New comment by spjt in "Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you"

spjt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 04:49:10 +0000

Walmart InHome is $40/year and no tips.

New comment by spjt in "Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations"

spjt — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 19:31:38 +0000

Let's ban it before anyone finds out if it's useful

New comment by spjt in "Is it a bubble?"

spjt — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 12:23:03 +0000

But it is being continually refueled. The output of an LLM, at least in the process of generating code, is a combined product of human creativity and the LLMl. I have told it what to do, fixed what it got wrong, and verified the solution was correct through testing.

New comment by spjt in "Is it a bubble?"

spjt — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 12:13:06 +0000

Yeah if they thought unions were bad, they really won't like dealing with another company larger than them.

New comment by spjt in "US seizes oil tanker off coast of Venezuela"

spjt — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:48:40 +0000

Interesting that I read elsewhere that most Venezuelan oil goes to China due to the sanctions. Would be nice to see them put a carrier group down there to guard their shipments...

New comment by spjt in "US seizes oil tanker off coast of Venezuela"

spjt — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:43:46 +0000

Because it has oil on it, you can sell oil for money.

New comment by spjt in "DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says"

spjt — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:41:57 +0000

No shit. My question is the real question, how can I make money straw-buying GPU's and smuggling them to China?

New comment by spjt in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

spjt — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:49:22 +0000

Is the new Gemini really that good? The "AI Overview" stuff on the google search page is so incredibly bad that I have never even given it a look. If so, the AI Overview is horribly bad negative advertising because it's so useless and frequently completely wrong.

New comment by spjt in "Leaving Intel"

spjt — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:47:24 +0000

I always made sure to include "Time spent on time tracking" when I had to do it.

New comment by spjt in "10 Years of Let's Encrypt"

spjt — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 13:45:09 +0000

> Let's Encrypt was _huge_ in making it's absurd to not have TLS

I still find it too much of pain in the ass to deal with to justify for my personal stuff. Easier to just click through the warning every time.

New comment by spjt in "If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?"

spjt — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:12:43 +0000

Why not do it in English? I have a "program" that exists entirely as the history of an AI chatbot session. To "run the program" I load the history and a file into the message context and say "Now do this file." It kind of reminds me of a Smalltalk VM in a weird way.

New comment by spjt in "Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners"

spjt — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 22:29:37 +0000

I've always seen estimates as trying to guess the highest number the PO will accept, the time or effort involved in actually completing the task is irrelevant. I have never had a PO or anyone else complain that a task was completed more quickly than expected. However I do have to be careful to not tell them it is complete too early, lest they start expecting shorter cycles.

At least in my company we've stopped calling them "estimates". They are deadlines, which everyone has always treated "estimates" as anyway.

Unfortunately in the real world deadlines are necessary. The customer is not just mad that they didn't get the shiny new thing, especially in the case of B2B stuff, the customer is implementing plans and projects based on the availability of X feature on Y date. Back to the initial point, these deadlines often come down to how quickly the customer is going to be able to implement their end of the solution, if they aren't going to be ready to use the feature for six months there's no reason for us to bust our asses trying to get it out in a week.

New comment by spjt in "Leaving Intel"

spjt — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 21:09:05 +0000

In my experience, having to track my hours absolutely destroys my performance. Thinking about how I need to pay attention to how long I spend on everything is a constant distraction in the back of my head while I try to do anything useful, and then I spend the rest of the day procrastinating having to fill out the paperwork. I know I'm not the only one because the entire dev staff was ready to mutiny the last time I was at a company that tried to get devs to start tracking their hours.