Hacker News: tbrake

New comment by tbrake in "65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform"

tbrake — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 15:03:39 +0000

HN is a beautiful lesson on the hard limits of a contrarian's usefulness.

New comment by tbrake in "Slowness is a virtue"

tbrake — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 13:39:25 +0000

unfamiliar with chess.com but correspondence chess(day/move) and rapid (game 30+0) should fall under two different rating classifications. Having different ratings between them is to be expected.

And while people tend to make __better moves__ in slower time controls, their rapid/blitz ratings are usually higher than standard ratings.

New comment by tbrake in "Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union"

tbrake — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:54:04 +0000

interesting to see in the replies such incredible pearl clutching on behalf of the poor, poor businesses whenever unionization gets brought up. brain folds lighting up like a fireworks show just to combat the idea of [checks scroll] uhh not exploiting workers.

New comment by tbrake in "End of Japanese community"

tbrake — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:56:08 +0000

Reframing someone's disagreement as them "struggling with something" is incredibly patronizing and condescending and dirty conversational pool.

New comment by tbrake in "The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh"

tbrake — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:22:59 +0000

Changing "cube" to "kube" would just look like it's pronounced "koob" (e.g. rube, tube, lube), so we swap a minor spelling aggravation for a minor pronunciation edge case. unless you want to go full kyube but we're not putting that on the table.

New comment by tbrake in "Leatherman (vagabond)"

tbrake — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 12:55:31 +0000

I don't know about romanticizing a hard life but I'll definitely get hit with a very strong sense of wanting to escape and leave it all behind.

It hits me every summer like clockwork tbh - leaving a nicely typed 2 minutes notice on my VP's desk and just taking my chances as a traveling beach bum. Akin to wanderlust, I'm filled with the urge to just go off into the unknown.

In my heart of hearts I know I'm a soft city boy though. I wouldn't last a week.

New comment by tbrake in "Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated"

tbrake — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 14:44:19 +0000

Kinda but kinda not.

I'd agree that 75% you speak of is generally hostile to the mere concept of PMs, but that's usually from a misapplication of PMs as proxy-bosses for absentee product owners/directors who don't want to talk to nerds - flow interruptions, beancounting perceived as useless, pointless ceremonies, even more pointless(er) meetings etc, and the further defiling of the definition of "agile".

But a deep conceptual product and roadmap understanding that helps one steer Claude Code is invaluable for both devs and PMs, and I don't think most of that 75% would begrudge that quality in a PM

New comment by tbrake in "Open office is giving you secondhand ADHD"

tbrake — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 12:25:28 +0000

I think you shouldn't presume to know better than the author what they meant.

New comment by tbrake in "Why are there so many rationalist cults?"

tbrake — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 19:34:33 +0000

having known dozens of friends, family, roommates, coworkers etc both before and after they started them. The two biggest telltale signs -

1. tendency to produce - out of no necessity whatsoever, mind - walls of text. walls of speech will happen too but not everyone rambles.

2. Obnoxiously confident that they're fundamentally correct about whatever position they happen to be holding during a conversation with you. No matter how subjective or inconsequential. Even if they end up changing it an hour later. Challenging them on it gets you more of #1.

New comment by tbrake in "Coffee-shop pitch change helped founder unlock traction for laptop campers"

tbrake — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:11:55 +0000

What if we're just not onboard with the premise that campers/squatters need to be pandered to in the first place?

The 'Contrarian Friend' Is Real, and They're Driving Everyone Crazy

tbrake — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 17:57:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.self.com/story/contrarian-friend-trend

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44801718

Points: 28

# Comments: 34

New comment by tbrake in "The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million"

tbrake — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 17:18:30 +0000

well, using larger denominations helps.

New comment by tbrake in "Sycophancy in GPT-4o"

tbrake — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 11:44:22 +0000

Well, almost always.

There was that brief period in 2023 when Bing just started straight up gaslighting people instead of admitting it was wrong.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/15/23599072/microsoft-ai-bin...

New comment by tbrake in "Oda Ujiharu: Why the ‘weakest Samurai warlord’ is admired"

tbrake — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:16:12 +0000

I'd say it's actually completely useless.

The definitions of "weak" and "strong" are extremely malleable depending on your own subjective assessment of the person/people.

It's an almost-aphorism; nearly useful, but not quite.

New comment by tbrake in "AI-designed chips are so weird that 'humans cannot understand them'"

tbrake — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 16:36:50 +0000

How would more AI help? "given this goal with these parameters, figure out if another AI will ever game it into eventual thermonuclear war. "

Feels halting problem-esque.

New comment by tbrake in "DoppelBot: Replace Your CEO with an LLM"

tbrake — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 16:27:45 +0000

I feel most bad for the other frogs in roles whose pots haven't even been put on the AI stovetop yet. I have general feeling they feel they're safe.

Looking at you specifically, Project/Program managers with little output other than attending meetings and asking for status updates and futzing with JIRA to get reports.

The dev frogs might not even be finished boiling before you notice your steam.

New comment by tbrake in "Cats appear to grieve death of fellow pets – even dogs, study finds"

tbrake — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 15:05:39 +0000

Deep down I believe such things about both dogs and cats to some degree.

But also this is also a survey of pet owners about their own pets' behaviors, and I can't shake the feeling there's more than a bit of projection/anthropomorphism involved.

The link from the article contained snippets but I can't access the full paper. For anyone who can (if you would be so kind) did they share similar concerns and/or control for them?

New comment by tbrake in "What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images"

tbrake — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 15:03:25 +0000

"Seeing" something in your imagination isn't a literal hallucination. It's an altogether separate form of visualization that doesn't interfere optically.

New comment by tbrake in "77% of employees report AI has increased workloads and hampered productivity"

tbrake — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 12:15:06 +0000

> They genuinely seem to think the age of employing people is ending which I guess isn't a shock since that's what Sam Altman and the media have been telling them.

I wonder if they have good answers as to who will buy their products after all the jobs are gone. Reminds me of https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars/ . An anecdote 70 years old at this point but seemingly evergreen in its applicability.

New comment by tbrake in "How fast can a human possibly run 100 meters?"

tbrake — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 14:37:18 +0000

Before you asked the first question did you try to put yourself in someone else's (running) shoes and figure out their motives? If you haven't, try. Steel man the case for running and getting better at running before you just declare it "useless."