Hacker News: xhrpost

New comment by xhrpost in "The peril of laziness lost"

xhrpost — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:30:55 +0000

I've had this exact sentiment in the past couple months after seeing a few PRs that were definitely the wrong solution to a problem. One was implementing it's own parsing functions to which well established solutions like JSON or others likely existed. I think any non-llm programmer could have thought this up but then immediately decide to look elsewhere, their human emotions would have hit and said "that's way too much (likely redundant) work, there must be a better way". But the LLM has no emotion, it isn't lazy and that can be a problem because it makes it a lot easier to do the wrong thing.

New comment by xhrpost in "The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes"

xhrpost — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:03:49 +0000

VTI is market cap free-float weighted, as is VOO and SPY. So what ETFs would this IPO be an issue with if not these?

New comment by xhrpost in "The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes"

xhrpost — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:01:53 +0000

It's a good point, maybe? Even the smallest market cap is $22B though, hard to say.

New comment by xhrpost in "The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes"

xhrpost — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:58:40 +0000

I still want to be long in the market so my initial thought is switching to equal weight funds.

New comment by xhrpost in "AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder"

xhrpost — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:51:03 +0000

>The engineers who thrive will be the ones who can resist the temptation to over-engineer when the marginal cost of adding complexity drops to near zero.

I think this isn't being discussed enough in the SWE world. It wasn't too long ago that engineers on HN would describe a line of code as "not an asset but a liability". Now that code is "free" though, I'm seeing more excessively verbose PRs at work. I'm trying to call it out and rein it in a bit but until engineers on average believe there is inherent risk here, the behavior will continue.

New comment by xhrpost in "The Life Cycle of Money"

xhrpost — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 17:43:41 +0000

I'll read more of the articles but very first bullet point raised my eyebrows

>Freezing Russian reserves in 2022 introduced confiscation risk to assets previously considered risk-free

Is this actually new? Didn't we freeze Iranian assets back in 1979? Wouldn't be surprised if there were other examples.

New comment by xhrpost in "Unprecedented 'Jobless Boom' Tests Limits of US Economic Expansion"

xhrpost — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:14:05 +0000

I don't see how the rich don't understand this. Guess they just think it won't happen to them and they'll be smart enough to cash out of America and go elsewhere before everyone else looses.

New comment by xhrpost in "Claude Sonnet 4.6"

xhrpost — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 03:30:21 +0000

There's an older article that gets reposted to HN occasionally, titled something like "I hate almost all software". I'm probably more cynical than the average tech user and I relate strongly to the sentiment. So so much software is inexcusably bad from a UX perspective. So I have to ask, if code will really become this dirt cheap unlimited commodity, will we actually have good software?

New comment by xhrpost in "OpenClaw is changing my life"

xhrpost — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 04:27:09 +0000

> To be fair, I was able to get it to work pretty well after giving it extremely detailed instructions and monitoring the "thinking" output and stopping it when I see something wrong there to correct it, but at that point I felt silly for spending all that effort just driving the bot instead of doing it myself.

This is the challenge I also face, it's not always obvious when a change I want will be properly understood by the LLM. Sometimes it one shots it, then others I go back and forth until I could have just done it myself. If we have to get super detailed in our descriptions, at what point are we just writing in some ad-hoc "programming language" that then transpiles to the actual program?

New comment by xhrpost in "AI is killing B2B SaaS"

xhrpost — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:10:40 +0000

Reminds me of a blog post a while back saying that gigabit fiber at home would lead to everyone running their own email server.

New comment by xhrpost in "FBI raids Washington Post reporter's home"

xhrpost — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 16:11:51 +0000

If there's one thing both parties agree with, it's that you can't ever vote for a third party because that's effectively voting for the other major candidate. So the problem of not having more than 2 choices perpetuates indefinitely.

New comment by xhrpost in "Build Your Own 100TB NAS in 2025: Complete TrueNAS Storage Guide"

xhrpost — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 22:33:48 +0000

Very first picture even looks like AI

New comment by xhrpost in "Learning Fortran (2024)"

xhrpost — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:14:46 +0000

I was expecting Flow-Matic but your mention is even older. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOW-MATIC

New comment by xhrpost in "The Junior Hiring Crisis"

xhrpost — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:03:19 +0000

> AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.

Not disagreeing that this is happening in the industry but it still feels like a missed opportunity to not hire juniors. Not only do you have the upcoming skill gap as you mention, but someone needs to instruct AI to do these menial/easy tasks. Perhaps it's only my opinion but I think it would be prudent to instead see this as just having junior engineers who can get more menial tasks done, instead of expecting to add it to the senior dev workflow at zero cost to output.

New comment by xhrpost in "Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts"

xhrpost — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 20:14:32 +0000

If you were a dev selling a game years ago when physical distribution was the only method, you'd likely end up with a lot less than 70% after both the publisher and retailer take their cut.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/company-town-blog/sto...

New comment by xhrpost in "Long-term use of melatonin to support sleep may have negative health effects"

xhrpost — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 22:42:26 +0000

I don't have access to the actual study but I wonder if they had access to any metrics for the individuals that could quantify the intensity of the insomnia. Chronic insomnia/sleep deprivation is already correlated with heart disease. Could it be that the people with worse insomnia were more likely to take melatonin but also more likely to have heart issues due to the insomnia alone?

New comment by xhrpost in "Facts about throwing good parties"

xhrpost — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 03:30:15 +0000

I feel like hosting in NYC is even more of a public service given that space is limited and not everyone has a living situation suited for it. Props to you for making it happen. Been doing what I can here as well. Cheers!

New comment by xhrpost in "The fight between doctors and insurance companies over 'downcoding'"

xhrpost — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 20:46:14 +0000

Yup, I agree HSA is superior but depending on your situation (and plans offered), the HDHP can be much more expensive out of pocket[1], even if you're paying with after tax dollars. Sweet spot I think is using a good low deductible plan when it makes sense but having a spouse with an HSA which both spouses can use for expenses.

[1]: or so it seems, I tried to figure this out earlier in the year and the data is just lacking in order to make a perfect decision.

New comment by xhrpost in "OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss"

xhrpost — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 19:51:20 +0000

> OpenAI paid Microsoft 20% of its revenue under an existing agreement.

Wow that's a great deal MSFT made, not sure what it cost them. Better than say a stock dividend which would pay out of net income (if any), even better than a bond payment probably, this is straight off the top of revenue.

New comment by xhrpost in "Gold hits all time high"

xhrpost — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 21:12:01 +0000

I understand what you're saying but I don't think I'm conflating. OP specifically said "USD assets", which I took to mean things like stocks.