Hacker News: stiglitz

New comment by stiglitz in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

stiglitz — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:01:36 +0000

I’ll never forget seeing a girl in a cafe highlight, line by line, nearly an entire page of a textbook. Watching the page curl from the wetness, almost as if writhing in pain.

New comment by stiglitz in "A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering"

stiglitz — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 02:52:12 +0000

It's a Skinner box of productivity. Of course it's polarizing.

My own enthusiasm varies wildly day to day. I've been sick of squinting at punctuation marks and opening sequences of of tabs to trace through annoying abstraction layers for a long time; so I'm really excited to see those activities effectively automated away. But the same tools enable some really bad behavior (in myself and others), which really gets me down.

New comment by stiglitz in "A grumpy screed about AI in software engineering"

stiglitz — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 02:47:32 +0000

Kudos to the lucky few artisans that the modern economy will support, but becoming a stocker at Ikea will probably be more lucrative than picking up a saw and plane.

New comment by stiglitz in "A better way to tie gym shorts (or any drawstring) [video]"

stiglitz — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:49:46 +0000

I disagree- when I googled this knot I came immediately to https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknothistory.htm where this “Ian” fellow goes to great lengths to establish himself as the inventor. Screenshot of a davinciesque yellowed inventor’s notebook and so forth.

New comment by stiglitz in "Meta pauses AI training program tracking employee keystrokes after internal leak"

stiglitz — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 05:18:35 +0000

Facebook is widely thought to cause significant societal damage; anyone who thinks so, would probably consider employees of Meta to be the ones lacking empathy.

New comment by stiglitz in "We've made the world too complicated"

stiglitz — Sun, 17 May 2026 18:48:05 +0000

I think the two concepts are not easy to disentangle. It isn’t the craftsman who decides the chairs should be built in an assembly line- it’s the owner, who wants to maximize the number or consistency of chairs. And the abstraction of that assembly line is what keeps the craftsman from saying, “that is the chair that I built.”

New comment by stiglitz in "We've made the world too complicated"

stiglitz — Sat, 16 May 2026 23:25:17 +0000

Described by Marx (in too many words, unfortunately) as “alienation”

New comment by stiglitz in "The quiet resurgence of RF engineering"

stiglitz — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:16:24 +0000

As someone with a EE degree followed by 12 years of SWE work, that pivot is quite daunting. A degree is just a piece of paper to get you an entry level job to do some real learning IMO

New comment by stiglitz in "Should QA exist?"

stiglitz — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:20:54 +0000

In the Windows team (back before the test org was decimated) I saw the described "class divide". Anybody who was good enough would switch from SDET to SDE [disclaimer: obviously there were some isolated exceptions]. The test team produced reams of crappy test frameworks, each of which seemed like a "proving project" for its creators to show they could be competent SDEs. After the Great Decimation my dev team took ownership of many such frameworks and it was a total boondoggle; we wasted years trying (and mostly failing) to sort through the crappy test code.

This was all unfortunate, and I agree in principle with having a separate test org, but in Windows the culture unfortunately seemed to be built around testers as second-class software developers.

New comment by stiglitz in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

stiglitz — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:17:43 +0000

I’ve always been bothered by instances of your first example, and I mostly use “XD” instead of “:)” to sidestep the issue in my own writing.

New comment by stiglitz in "Terence Tao focused on fundraising after federal funding to UCLA was suspended"

stiglitz — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 16:01:54 +0000

That doesn’t seem like an accurate synopsis of the article at all.

New comment by stiglitz in "Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI"

stiglitz — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 02:23:45 +0000

As a Windows driver developer: LOL

New comment by stiglitz in "AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?"

stiglitz — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:10:02 +0000

Another possibility: your teams are working less now.

New comment by stiglitz in "Dull Men’s Club"

stiglitz — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 05:22:54 +0000

Speaking of paying close attention to the mundane, it’s an escalator.

New comment by stiglitz in "Quantum mechanics provide truly random numbers on demand"

stiglitz — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 18:41:17 +0000

I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced that there’s some kind of fundamental “randomness” (as in one that isn’t a measure of ignorance) in the world. Claiming its existence sounds like claiming to know what we don’t know.

New comment by stiglitz in "I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud"

stiglitz — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 22:57:48 +0000

Why make it work with a mobile app at all? How is that even a convenience? This is an appliance you need to be physically present at to load and unload.

New comment by stiglitz in "Why TCP needs 3 handshakes"

stiglitz — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 13:07:04 +0000

TCP Fast Open does you one better:

A: If you can hear me, what time is it?

B: Yeah I can hear you; it’s 5.

New comment by stiglitz in "Optimizing global message transit latency: a journey through TCP configuration"

stiglitz — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:49:38 +0000

FYI quic is compatible with bbr, and at least the google and msft quic implementations have bbr (albeit not by default afaik).

New comment by stiglitz in "Reflection for C++26"

stiglitz — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 23:36:31 +0000

By ”stagnation” do you mean “not getting new features”?

New comment by stiglitz in "Reining in America's $3.3T tax-exempt economy"

stiglitz — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 17:02:13 +0000

> The median operating margins for hospitals is around 0% or some times negative

I found this page that seems to agree- https://www.definitivehc.com/resources/healthcare-insights/h...

That shows a negative median operating margin for the last 5 years. How can an industry carry on losing money like this? This must be only part of the story, right?