Hacker News: waisbrot

New comment by waisbrot in "The Chauffeur Problem (1999)"

waisbrot — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:59:13 +0000

It's written from the perspective of one of the masters.

> The role of the head coachman was well defined. Toward his superiors, he was deferential and obedient.

So the chauffeurs and typists are not as deferential and obedient as the author would like.

New comment by waisbrot in "Google replaced Git tags for certain source code with obtaining via Google Drive"

waisbrot — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:52:32 +0000

Don't they force you to sign up for a Google account to be able to gate access to a Google Drive file?

New comment by waisbrot in "Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions"

waisbrot — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:08:24 +0000

That's an interesting topic you might meditate on. Microsoft would never hold such a vote. Would you be better off with their OS? Debian is one of the more free-as-in-speech distributions; would you rather run your VMs on one that had tighter integration with for-profit groups?

New comment by waisbrot in "Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm"

waisbrot — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:20:33 +0000

The article appeared to state both the facts and the assumptions being made off of them pretty clearly.

New comment by waisbrot in "I Championed Prediction Markets. Look What They've Become"

waisbrot — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 02:00:44 +0000

> Insurance was illegal at different times in history because it was considered gambling.

And it was, in fact, gambling. You could take out a life insurance policy on anyone without any relationship with them.

New comment by waisbrot in "If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?"

waisbrot — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:50:30 +0000

I want the setting to steal YOUR focus

New comment by waisbrot in "The startup's Postgres survival guide"

waisbrot — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:02:55 +0000

In my experience, ORMs save a little bit of writing SQL and then cost an unbounded quantity of time in debugging mysterious problems because knowing why a query is slow now requires understanding the DB, your own code, and also the ORM.

New comment by waisbrot in "The startup's Postgres survival guide"

waisbrot — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:00:31 +0000

This is an excellent distillation.

Yes, in practice you may find that one or two of these don't apply to your own special start-up. But probably they all actually do.

New comment by waisbrot in "Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now"

waisbrot — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:17:10 +0000

Developer community. "Open source" historically implied that an interested developer might hack on the code and submit their changes. But if the entire code-base is rewritten by the maintainer every year, then there's no developer community.

New comment by waisbrot in "Ask for no, don't ask for yes (2022)"

waisbrot — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:51:52 +0000

An easy example: you need 5 minutes of planned downtime (which is entirely within SLAs) to execute a major upgrade, but the system is also used by Sales for demos to major new clients. "We're going to take 5 minutes of downtime on Wednesday evening for an upgrade. Contact me ASAP if this is a problem for you." If you don't hear from the team, then it's OK to go.

New comment by waisbrot in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

waisbrot — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:28:59 +0000

Are Seattle, the Rust Belt, and upstate NY examples of higher taxes driving wealthy job-creators out? I think they were the opposite: the market moved and then the wealthy people left to follow it.

NYC has always been extremely expensive, and people have largely decided that it's worth the price. I don't see how a little wobble in either direction changes that. Everyone could have already moved to Miami, or Salt Lake City, or even cheaper places if they were actually price-sensitive.

New comment by waisbrot in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

waisbrot — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:16:48 +0000

Most Americans cannot get a mortgage for $1M.

New comment by waisbrot in "New York passes pied-a-terre tax"

waisbrot — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:09:49 +0000

Now picture NYC, symbolic of wealth and power. Owning property there is a great way to show off.

This tax may make it more attractive to own a second home there, because it proves you're not one of the fake-wealthy who can't afford the price.

New comment by waisbrot in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

waisbrot — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:45:40 +0000

And "large" just means that AWS will assign an account manager to talk with you. I was at a start-up who spent $300k/year on AWS and that was enough to get special attention and discounts. Enterprise pricing is confusing.

New comment by waisbrot in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

waisbrot — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:18:54 +0000

Nowadays, the top Google result is probably LLM-generated blog-spam of lower-quality than whatever chatbot your company is paying for.

Back when most Google results were authentic web-pages, something like "here's a web page that I think solves your problem" was a fairly useful reply from a coworker.

New comment by waisbrot in "GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry"

waisbrot — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:37:37 +0000

I think the down-votes on this comment are too bad. It's legitimately funny to write a muli-paragraph rant in high dudgeon calling other people "exhausting".

New comment by waisbrot in "Haunt, the 70s text adventure game, is now playable on a website"

waisbrot — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:56:51 +0000

"Spider and Web" is quite short, pretty easy, mostly gives good hints. A great starter-game, I think. I also love Zarf's writing.

https://eblong.com/zarf/zweb/tangle/

New comment by waisbrot in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

waisbrot — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:37:19 +0000

That sounds like https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Rerere ?

New comment by waisbrot in "Copilot edited an ad into my PR"

waisbrot — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:16:21 +0000

Looking back, it would have been neat to have more metadata in my old Git commits. Were there any differences when I was writing with IntelliJ vs VSCode?

New comment by waisbrot in ""Over 1.5 million GitHub PRs have had ads injected into them by Copilot""

waisbrot — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:13:25 +0000

Claude adds "Co-authored by" attribution for itself when committing, so you can see the human author and also the bot.

I think this is a good balance, because if you don't care about the bot you still see the human author. And if you do care (for example, I'd like to be able to review commits and see which were substantially bot-written and which were mostly human) then it's also easy.