Hacker News: valzam

New comment by valzam in "The revenge of the data scientist"

valzam — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:13:34 +0000

I don't disagree that very numerical tasks like revenue forecasting are not a good fit for LLMs. But neither did a lot of data scientist concerns themselves with such things (compared to business analysts and the like). Software to achieve this has been commoditized.

New comment by valzam in "The revenge of the data scientist"

valzam — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:28:37 +0000

Do those use cases need LLMs? Probably not. but if good results can be had with a day of prompting (in addition to the stuff mentioned in the article, which you have to do anyway) and a smaller model like Haiku gives good results why would you build a classifer before you have literally millions of customers?

The LLM solution will be much more flexible because prompts can change more easily than training data and input tokens are cheap.

New comment by valzam in "Gone (Almost) Phishin'"

valzam — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:19:38 +0000

As others have mentioned, one big issue is that every company does these things differently and just because someone texts you a link doesn't mean it's phishing, even though it feels shady. In Australia I have had calls by immigration officers on supressed numbers that wanted PII over the phone without being able to tell me what the purpose of the call is.

New comment by valzam in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"

valzam — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:28:34 +0000

The average person self hosts literally nothing, why would it be different for inference? Which benefits severely from economies of scale and efficient 24/7 utlization

New comment by valzam in "Apple Business"

valzam — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:43:15 +0000

Ok but "Business Email" wasn't exactly invented yesterday...

New comment by valzam in "AirPods Max 2"

valzam — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:55:50 +0000

I think people are mainly confused because the AirPod Pros are quite competitively priced compared to other higher end offerings. The Max are so far off the market that it doesn't seem to make any sense and it seems unlikely that apple couldn't make up for lost margins with higher volume. Maybe they just literally can't/don't want to produce many of the Max and price them accordingly.

New comment by valzam in "Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked"

valzam — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:34:38 +0000

Uff, COBOL written in Norwegian, talk about a narrow target to hit for hiring :)

New comment by valzam in "Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter"

valzam — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 10:07:44 +0000

I mean it's not like Stripe was founded yesterday. Stripe: 2010 Paypal: 1998

I'd argue that 99% of the "internet gdp" happened after Stripe was founded

New comment by valzam in "An Update on Heroku"

valzam — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:47:56 +0000

I mean I know what it means but how can you corpo speak so hard that it's pretty much unclear what the change even is

New comment by valzam in "Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability"

valzam — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:11:17 +0000

We have an airtag in our cargo bike, connected to our ipad (neither my wife nor I have an Iphone). It never actually makes a sound and we can reliably track on the ipad. what gives? I never thought about this.

New comment by valzam in "Everything as code: How we manage our company in one monorepo"

valzam — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:21:15 +0000

Except of course rollout will not be atomic anyway and making changes in a single commit might lead Devs to make changes without thinking about backwards compat

New comment by valzam in "Unifi Travel Router"

valzam — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 06:52:14 +0000

Do you have a pixel? On Samsung you cannot share WiFi, Hotspot only works with mobile connections. I learners above that this is possible with pixel phones, makes me want to get one...

New comment by valzam in "OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI"

valzam — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 11:47:59 +0000

Id argue that this isn't so much a fault of the MCP spec but how 95% of AI 'engineers' have no engineering background. MCP is just an OpenAPI spec. It's the same as any other API. If you are exposing sensitive data without any authz/n that's on the developer.

New comment by valzam in "Europe to decide if 6 GHz is shared between Wi-Fi and cellular networks"

valzam — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:36:11 +0000

I mean given the computing devices most people use are you suggesting a large majority of the population switches to ethernet adapter's for their tablets and phones?

New comment by valzam in "PyTorch Monarch"

valzam — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 11:59:31 +0000

I assume this is similar to Ray?

New comment by valzam in "Go subtleties"

valzam — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 09:26:00 +0000

I guess as a corollary, Go really rewards writing the dumbest code possible. No advanced type shenanigans, no overuse of interfaces, no complex composition of types. Then you will end up with a very fast, resource light system that just runs forever.

New comment by valzam in "Go subtleties"

valzam — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 09:24:33 +0000

Great list of why one can love and hate Go. I really did enjoy writing it but you never get the sense that you can be truly certain your code is robust because of subtle behaviour around nil.

New comment by valzam in "Privately-Owned Rail Cars"

valzam — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 13:57:00 +0000

And during downtime you could sell space on your train car. Maybe even have an app for it, like uber for trains. Or as commonly know, regular trains.

New comment by valzam in "I asked four former friends why we stopped speaking (2023)"

valzam — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 19:07:22 +0000

I very much agree with all of this but do you find your friends reciprocate? Also mid 30s, I keep in touch with a few friends but arguably only 1 or 2 consistently reach out on their own.

New comment by valzam in "MCP: An in-depth introduction"

valzam — Sat, 17 May 2025 11:54:02 +0000

Isn't MCP just an OpenAPI spec that everyone agrees on? I don't really get the confusion around it