Hacker News: sunshowers

New comment by sunshowers in "Does Georgism work? Five years later"

sunshowers — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:20:29 +0000

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't associate Rand with LVT.

New comment by sunshowers in "New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore"

sunshowers — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 02:52:11 +0000

I'm responding to the argument made in general, yes, if you read the post I was responding to.

> Bad immigration policy can and does negatively affect opportunities and salaries.

It is true by definition that some immigration policies are worse than others — for example, a policy of no immigration at all (which is a kind of immigration policy) would be very bad for opportunities and salaries.

New comment by sunshowers in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

sunshowers — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:27:16 +0000

Well, the general economic consensus is that for income taxes, the revenue-maximizing peak of the Laffer curve is around 65-70% [1]. Revenue maximization isn't necessarily the right primary goal, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve#Income_tax_rate_a...

New comment by sunshowers in "New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore"

sunshowers — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:13:25 +0000

You understand that people get better at things over time?

New comment by sunshowers in "New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore"

sunshowers — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:08:44 +0000

I came in on an H1B as an IC3 at Meta. Now, with the skills I gained during my career, I maintain core infrastructure that has a massive benefit to the industry and is critical to tech companies of all sizes (I learned last week that a major auto manufacturer uses my infrastructure as well). Immigration's benefit to society is tail-distributed, which is why it's important to have broad-based immigration (you can't predict who will be at the tails).

New comment by sunshowers in "New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore"

sunshowers — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:03:47 +0000

Unlike offshoring, immigration increases supply and demand at the same time.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

New comment by sunshowers in "New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore"

sunshowers — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:03:08 +0000

all H1B posts turn into Klan rallies.

New comment by sunshowers in "The revolt of the reader"

sunshowers — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 16:07:30 +0000

My complaint is directed at the Rust Foundation, not the authors, to be clear. Yes, it's free labor, but the Foundation ought to have standards.

I showed Bryan the post while in a meeting room with him, left the room, and a few minutes later heard a very loud, very exasperated primal scream coming from the room!

New comment by sunshowers in "Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI""

sunshowers — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 18:54:50 +0000

Well, one example is that patterns in code now can make you recall bugs you've seen in the past. I had this realization where I used an LLM to do a big refactor, and it fixed a bug along the way that I should have realized was much more urgent than the refactor, having seen an identical bug in the past (it was related to prefix-checking in a set that wasn't constructed to do that kind of prefix-checking). Had I done the refactor by hand I'd likely have realized it much quicker.

New comment by sunshowers in "Software engineering is about managing complexity"

sunshowers — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:58:47 +0000

Right, when used incompetently. When used competently they can carefully reason through every edge case and flag things no human would have picked up on.

One example: in some old code I wrote I had assumed that the Rust Hash impl for a type is stable over time. This is not the case in general, but writing a custom hasher for a complex type is incredibly annoying, so I took that shortcut. That was fine for years, but came back to bite me this week as I was trying to update a dependency.

How much incidental complexity is due to that kind of thing? An LLM code review would flag this instantly, and one would also write a stable hash function for you.

New comment by sunshowers in "Software engineering is about managing complexity"

sunshowers — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 16:17:21 +0000

This whole week I've been dealing with incidental complexity created by shortcuts taken and edge cases not handled in code written in the before times, both in mine and in others'. I realized at some point yesterday that these kinds of shortcuts would no longer be accepted with competent LLM use.

New comment by sunshowers in "Trade (and Tariffs)"

sunshowers — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:40:31 +0000

Are you aware of comparative advantage? What matters is opportunity cost, not raw output. (Also, unit labor cost is wage per hour divided by output per hour, so the number of hours worked is not really relevant. In other words, longer hours make workers richer and not their output cheaper.)

This was worked out by David Ricardo 200 years ago. You still benefit from trade even if (granting the argument) you are worse at producing everything.

New comment by sunshowers in "hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate"

sunshowers — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:43:57 +0000

This is only tangentially related, but libuv and mio's Windows implementations use the undocumented AFD readiness-based poll interface [1], since there isn't a documented readiness-based interface on Windows. The undocumented interface is now effectively stable since, among other reasons, Microsoft uses Tokio in some of its products.

[1] https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio/blob/master/src/sys/windows/...

New comment by sunshowers in "hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate"

sunshowers — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:36:36 +0000

> Can I get non-interger display scaling yet?

I'm using 1.25 scale on Niri + DMS right now, on a dual 4k monitor (G9 57) at 240Hz. Probably the most demanding single monitor setup right now.

New comment by sunshowers in "Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload"

sunshowers — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 04:32:31 +0000

By security scanners, the moment a crate is uploaded to crates.io. The way forward here is dependency cooldowns enabled by default for ordinary users (and crates.io changed to show the old version until the new one is a day or two old). Essentially, security scanners get to vet a package for a day or two before ordinary users see it in everyday development.

New comment by sunshowers in "Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload"

sunshowers — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:41:29 +0000

Every Rust crate is heavily scrutinized these days using LLMs (which also caught this issue). The days when no one looked at dependencies are gone.

New comment by sunshowers in "Splitting a Git Commit"

sunshowers — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:29:53 +0000

BTW not sure how you feel about LLMs but merge conflicts are not really an issue with them any more.

New comment by sunshowers in "Kubernetes on Oxide: How customer needs shaped our integrations"

sunshowers — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:09:20 +0000

Lots of people want to buy our stuff!

New comment by sunshowers in "Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)"

sunshowers — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:34:01 +0000

I mean, really no one is fully independent — we are all dependent on each other for the necessities of life. But in this context "independent" means "not a subsidiary of another company".

New comment by sunshowers in "Oxide Computer raises $445M (SEC Form D)"

sunshowers — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:51:52 +0000

Right -- customers don't have to port their stuff to a new platform or arch or anything. It's just normal x86_64 Linux/Windows VMs, or Terraform if they're so inclined.