Hacker News: stevepotter

New comment by stevepotter in "Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI"

stevepotter — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 17:25:04 +0000

I made a small change a while back that resulted in a lot of fat loss. I'm a startup CTO, kids, wife, 2 dogs, etc. Every Sunday I prepare lunch meals for the week. I make a big vat that consists of spinach, kale, riced cauliflower, peas, beans, and some ground meat. Then I put it in glass containers and eat that for lunch every day. Before I leave in the morning, I pull one out and put on whatever sauce and toppings I feel like. The hardest part is the initial cooking. I eat dinner with my family, I eat dessert sometimes. I lost weight so fast I was actually concerned for a while, but it leveled out. Meal prep is common and it fits in nicely with a busy job (no more running out to Jimmy Johns or whatever). Highly recommended

New comment by stevepotter in "200 Milliseconds"

stevepotter — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 01:12:54 +0000

I once asked a question like this for an interview. "Tell me what happens when you press the Buy button on a web site". It really helped me gauge a sense for the person's interests and expertise. Like some folks just talked about javascript and some node code. Others talked about tcp a bit, some got into cloud stuff. It was really telling. Not bad or good, just a great way to learn where someone's head is at and was a fun back-and-forth conversation.

This web site is basically a cheat code for that question lol. So well done, kudos to the author. Bookmarked and shared

New comment by stevepotter in "Shadcn/UI now defaults to Base UI instead of Radix"

stevepotter — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:34:12 +0000

I never understood the copy paste thing. Shadcn just reeks of a fad, and even after doing copy paste and trying it, I didn’t see what the big deal was. But enjoy it, y’all. One of the benefits of AI is that HN isn’t clogged with talk of JavaScript frameworks as much

New comment by stevepotter in "Shadcn/UI now defaults to Base UI instead of Radix"

stevepotter — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:29:37 +0000

Love love love mantine.

New comment by stevepotter in "Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries"

stevepotter — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:25:13 +0000

It's inevitable that someone will build a good robot to do these mundane chores. But is that a good thing? I vacuum every night and during that I get some great thinking done. If I had a robot vacuum, I can said with certainty I would make good use of that time.

New comment by stevepotter in "Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony"

stevepotter — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 01:57:19 +0000

Same. I got spooked after a car pulled out on the country highway I was doing 160 on. Then ran out of money and sold it. I just rode my Dads Harley, first ride in 20 years. Was nice but I’m good. I have a longboard and a little hill once in a while gives me the occasional adrenaline rush I crave.

New comment by stevepotter in "Three of our worst VC stories"

stevepotter — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:58:51 +0000

All I ever hear are horror stories. Can someone tell me a good story about VC that isn't Facebook or something?

New comment by stevepotter in "Does anybody like React?"

stevepotter — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:53:48 +0000

Svelte is cool although I didn't have some big epiphany. I'm not going to use Svelte because "it compiles" and "is faster" when my existing React app performs very well. Plus there are some libraries for my specific use case that didn't exist in Svelte. I know people love things besides React, and I would be happy to see it unseated. Sure I'm part of the problem but it's been good to me and I have bigger fish to fry.

New comment by stevepotter in "Does anybody like React?"

stevepotter — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:39:19 +0000

I remember in 1999 being so psyched about changing a button image on mouseover. Went hard on jquery, little bit of angular and bootstrap. React was big for me because it’s one way data binding solved the kinds of bugs I had spent years dealing with. Vue svelte and others are cool but they are all very similar to me. I always encourage people to work at first without any framework because then you gain an appreciation for why these things exist (or you stay vanilla and constantly blog about it)

New comment by stevepotter in "Texas woman arrested for Facebook post about town water quality"

stevepotter — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:09:36 +0000

You are mixing local and federal politics. This is a town issue and would likely have happened regardless of who occupied the Oval Office

New comment by stevepotter in "Show HN: Gaussian Splat of a Strawberry"

stevepotter — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:50:38 +0000

Others have provided details about how it works. I suggest zooming way in on that image and you'll start 'breaking though' the surface and that'll help you get an idea of how it works. Important thing is there is no defined geometric surface ("mesh"). Also important to know is that it's very, very hard to get a good splat without taking a ton of photos at different angles. It's also really, really easy to create a crappy looking splat. But when it's done right, it's a marvel

New comment by stevepotter in "Who will buy your services if you fire us all?"

stevepotter — Tue, 19 May 2026 02:01:12 +0000

Maybe not at first. Regardless of when they get replaced by tech, you’ll see those jobs get saturated and wages go down. Which sucks because they are already low

New comment by stevepotter in "Who will buy your services if you fire us all?"

stevepotter — Tue, 19 May 2026 01:54:14 +0000

This is a good take. I’d like to know how you think this is going to shake out over the next few decades

New comment by stevepotter in "AI is making me dumb"

stevepotter — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:42:20 +0000

I'm the same way, which makes sense because for 20 years I've done things by hand, tediously managing every line.

I hired a few fresh grads and they have no problem just going with the default AI output. As long as it works, they are good.

For me, it comes down to the ability to properly test. If the code works, is covered by tests, and its performance is measured for regressions, and the high level design is sound, it's hard to argue with vibing. The problem is almost nobody has such a testing system. They are still hard to find and/or build. So that's what I'm putting my effort into because otherwise I'll have trouble sleeping at night (for good reason)

New comment by stevepotter in "Claude for Legal"

stevepotter — Fri, 15 May 2026 11:43:05 +0000

I’m working on ways to evaluate and give feedback on surgical techniques. But you just helped me find a new pivot. Thanks! And yes I’m on the toilet.

New comment by stevepotter in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

stevepotter — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:02:10 +0000

I couldn’t quite understand exactly how it was exploited. It sounds like there is some cache that is shared across action runs and they took advantage of that. Is that at the core of it?

New comment by stevepotter in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

stevepotter — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:21:57 +0000

Be careful there. The whole "just wait 6 months" thing is problematic. It gives you an excuse to make a mess now, because "in 6 months" AI will magically fix it.

It also belittles the human resources. "I heard that 6 months AI will do everything, so why would I hire new engineers or promote the ones we have?"

New comment by stevepotter in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

stevepotter — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:09:30 +0000

I also love to build. And I'm mourning the loss of coding as a craft that is sought after and well compensated. I like to get my hands dirty and it feels wrong that I can basically write specs and the real labor that I love is done for me. But it also allows me to build some pretty amazing stuff that I would have never been able to do otherwise. So I'm slowly accepting it and want to come up with ways to coexist. I code for several hours a day because and will continue to do so because even after 36 years I still get joy and comfort from it

New comment by stevepotter in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

stevepotter — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:35:14 +0000

I wasn’t talking about unit tests. Was talking about tests that accelerate development, where you can setup everything and test a feature by just pressing enter vs clicking around or whatever. The tests are how you build features, so I don’t consider that boring

There is problem solving in coding, but the bigger problems exist at a higher level and that’s still on you to solve.

Also I’ve been messing with “ai-only” files recently. You make a markdown file that basically tells it what the file does, how it’s used, and point to an API contract in some other file. Then you can run async ai that will try things and only submit a PR of all the tests pass and the perf improves. The files become almost unreadable to be, but I decided to embrace it because they were already unreadable. But so is the output of, say, the protobuf code generator and I never had a problem accepting that

New comment by stevepotter in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

stevepotter — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:21:14 +0000

Which to me is why it’s so important to build cooler and crazier shit. A web app to facilitate some business process was always boring, but at least you got to code. Now it’s just boring. The thing I’m building right now is pretty wild, involving computer vision, robotics, and surgery. It’s super complex and without AI, the development would have bankrupted us. But because of ai, we did it and the product is going to FDA this year.