Hacker News: thundergolfer

Failure numbers every programmer should know

thundergolfer — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:16:55 +0000

Article URL: https://thundergolfer.com/blog/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48497743

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by thundergolfer in "Surprise, pay $1000"

thundergolfer — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:32:14 +0000

> Well, we tried switching back to GitHub Actions, and… yeah it still sucks. Blacksmith has grown explosively because it makes an increasingly frustrating bottleneck in the dev cycle faster.

Where's the "grown explosively" bit coming from? Google doesn't have growth news from 2026, only early 2025.

New comment by thundergolfer in "OpenAI Submits S-1 Draft to SEC"

thundergolfer — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:56:17 +0000

No a Ponzi scheme involves not output, but here there is very much output in the inference being sold by Anthropic. Pretty big difference.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

thundergolfer — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:18:13 +0000

> That means each employee's AI spending cap is ~11% of that median compensation package.

Probably better to use the fully-loaded cost of the engineer, which is much higher than their compensation package. The fully-loaded cost is the total cost paid for the labor power of the engineer, and it includes big ticket items such as office space, food, equipment, insurance, payroll tax, fringe benefits, recruiting costs.

If the median compensation package is $330k/year then the median fully loaded cost is probably around $450-500k.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Can we have the day off?"

thundergolfer — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:28:15 +0000

This is downvoted but's it pointing out a fundamental dynamic in capitalism. Labour activists had to intervene in this dynamic to protect workers from being exhausted by the constant need for capital to increase labour exploitation to increase profits.

Almost this entire thread is people discussing a labour issue with no reference to the fundamental antagonism between labour and capital.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Training our own AI models"

thundergolfer — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:28:00 +0000

“Opt-in by default” is just Opt-out. We already have the term.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

thundergolfer — Tue, 26 May 2026 04:04:38 +0000

https://teachyourselfcs.com/ is an excellent list

Safetykit: A small collection of safety demos for human-in-the-loop scripts

thundergolfer — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:59:03 +0000

Article URL: https://thundergolfer.com/safetykit

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48194235

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by thundergolfer in "Where Are All the Data Centers?"

thundergolfer — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:36:26 +0000

I just can’t handle this guy’s “it’s a tulip bubble!” approach when just yesterday Thinking Machines released a demo which would have been taken as literal magic if it was shown 20 years ago.

The tech is astonishing and Ed spends 98% of his writing acting like the industry is a scam.

New comment by thundergolfer in "To my students"

thundergolfer — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:45:44 +0000

Completely agree that it's off-putting. The author indeed has only ever worked in academia per his LinkedIn.

But disagree that this is a path to unemployment. At work we go very fast and yet I think fast is compatible with each of those points, just not in all situations.

Marc Brooker, distinguished eng at AWS, gives much more useful advice for industry, as you'd expect given his almost 30 years in industry.

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03/25/ic-junior.html

New comment by thundergolfer in "The Vercel breach: OAuth attack exposes risk in platform environment variables"

thundergolfer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:30:48 +0000

> AI-accelerated tradecraft. The CEO publicly attributed the attacker's unusual velocity to AI augmentation — an early, high-profile data point in the 2026 discourse around AI-accelerated adversary tradecraft.

Attributed without evidence from what I could tell. So it doesn't reveal much at all.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Sauna effect on heart rate"

thundergolfer — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:08:25 +0000

This article is a brilliant skewering of the 'em dash means LLM' heuristic as a broken trick deployed by those too-clever-by-half.

1. https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/em-dash-tool/

New comment by thundergolfer in "The paper computer"

thundergolfer — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:14:06 +0000

I think a bigger blocker is that this is a read-only environment for the computer when we need readwrite.

It’s fantastic that computers can be so effective at this read-only work but so much of what I do needs write feedback from the machine.

New comment by thundergolfer in "YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney"

thundergolfer — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:52:02 +0000

The comments pretending Marvel actors (e.g. Benedict Cumberbatch) are their Marvel characters in other movies (e.g. Sam Mendes' 1917) kill me.

New comment by thundergolfer in "YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney"

thundergolfer — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:57:47 +0000

Their algorithm has a toxic positivity problem where they weight positivity so much the most moronic, saccharine crap sits at the top and you'd be hard pressed to distinguish the comments from LLM slop.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute"

thundergolfer — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:59:51 +0000

Broadcom builds the TPU chip. Google designs it. You can’t avoid partnering with Broadcom if you want TPUs in significant volume .

New comment by thundergolfer in "The Joy of Numbered Streets"

thundergolfer — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 08:52:26 +0000

It’s a geographic legibility, but you could also say that “C. Chavez ave” provides a historical legibility or an ability to see what the city values.

In Melbourne the North-South street go: King, William, Queen, Elizabeth, Swanston, Russell. It communicates the commonwealth history and founding history of the city. Cute, but decidedly less useful and memorable than number avenues.

New comment by thundergolfer in "The Joy of Numbered Streets"

thundergolfer — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 08:48:03 +0000

Yea ok, but move to a numbered city and you notice the boost. I’ve lived in Melbourne, Sydney, and NYC and found Manhattan’s numbering is great.

Lower Manhattan also still has a large non-numbered area so you can get the old charm when you want it.

New comment by thundergolfer in "OpenAI Acquires TBPN"

thundergolfer — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:21:37 +0000

Dwarkesh gets far more technical and in the weeds than TPBN. It’s very different. I can’t listen to TPBN though it seems fun but I’ll relisten to Dwarkesh episodes more than once.

New comment by thundergolfer in "Harold and George Destroy the World"

thundergolfer — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 15:03:07 +0000

There’s a potential irony here that a commenter lamenting the decline of education in the West is leaning on the “critical thinking over memorization” trope in contemporary Western education, when that trope has contributed to a decline in educational effectiveness.

The massive success of information retrieval allowed people to trick themselves that they no longer needed to remember things, and remember them easily. They should instead turn focus on critical thinking.

But critical thinking is knowledge based. At least, I buy E. D Hirch’s argument that it is.