Hacker News: yCombLinks

New comment by yCombLinks in "Show HN: OnKey – I'm a bad singer, so I built an app to show where I'm off-key"

yCombLinks — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:34:17 +0000

Tom Brady got 28 rushing touchdowns in 20 years. Josh Allen has 8 in the last 6 games. Weird how famous Tom Brady got.

New comment by yCombLinks in "The last time my family was replaced by technology"

yCombLinks — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:53:27 +0000

Adapt, sure, but is my life better or worse after adapting? It's a fair question and a fair worry. The goal of most AI companies seems to be to replace some amount of labor with AI. Look how that worked out for our factory workers. They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.

New comment by yCombLinks in "Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)"

yCombLinks — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:47:18 +0000

Computers are many thousands of times faster and more efficient than they were 50 years ago. Airplanes still fly at the same speeds, and with only marginal safety improvements. Fuel efficiency has doubled however. Overall significantly less changes.

New comment by yCombLinks in "A beginning for mathematics"

yCombLinks — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:40:11 +0000

Are you always an ass? He had a great comment, and you respond with this low effort hostile bullshit.

New comment by yCombLinks in "Shopify acquires Tailwind"

yCombLinks — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:29:19 +0000

When the layoffs happened they said tailwind usage was way up. Just the paid products weren't getting used.

New comment by yCombLinks in "Early 2000s were peak of humanity"

yCombLinks — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:16:54 +0000

Despite the article title, it's clearly about technology usage patterns roughly 25 years ago being a lot better than they are today. Its obviously from the PoV of someone in a developed western country, probably America. Every single time someone brings up positive things about the past there's always some 'Nuh uh, look at how bad this thing you weren't a part of was at that time.'. Boring, pedantic, and not even relevant to what the article is about.

New comment by yCombLinks in "The Future Belongs to the Weird"

yCombLinks — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:46:56 +0000

Ridiculous. When Ellen Degeneres came out as gay in the 90s it was a groundshaking media event. Being gay was incredibly stigmatized, far more than today. The other groups at least have public supporters today, instead of being nearly universally rejected.

New comment by yCombLinks in "Write code like a human will maintain it"

yCombLinks — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:05:10 +0000

No, you've created a generic condition checker, which is where all of your complexity comes from. Further, you've left the actual check to be duped in all callers.

New comment by yCombLinks in "Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)"

yCombLinks — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 01:48:32 +0000

Not seeing how this makes sense in terms of the article? A function is an abstraction. Extracting duplicate code into a function is the same concept.

New comment by yCombLinks in "Did my old job only exist because of fraud?"

yCombLinks — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:48:54 +0000

But what if you need to save up to buy something that you can't afford in one year? Or you're trying to reduce cost in one place enough to hire a team to do some other project?

New comment by yCombLinks in "I used sound waves to make espresso"

yCombLinks — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:58:31 +0000

There's probably 10 types of ready to drink coffee at Costco. Someone is drinking them, in bulk. Including my wife and daughter (different people)

New comment by yCombLinks in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

yCombLinks — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:04:14 +0000

Way to miss the point. Bob on the other side of the room didn't train the model

New comment by yCombLinks in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

yCombLinks — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:17:46 +0000

Users visited the site and couldn't even begin the form, nor get seen as a visitor, due to javascript metrics and rendering failing.

New comment by yCombLinks in "CEOs who think AI replaces their employees are just bad CEOs"

yCombLinks — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:28:24 +0000

That sounds like 5 humans got replaced by AI. I don't think most people worry about whether all humans will be replaced, simply whether or not they will be replaced, or people they care about.

New comment by yCombLinks in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

yCombLinks — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:29:04 +0000

Or perhaps there is a 3rd explanation, spending all of your time with people much less intelligent is frustrating and unsatisfying, and being such an outlier, it's how most of your time is spent. Someone with a 142 IQ is to the 100 average in the same way that 100 average is to someone with a 70 IQ. We don't expect people with average IQ to spend all of their days with 70 IQ people (in a peer situation). (BLAH BLAH BLAH Multiple intelligences, IQ isn't a good measurement, etc)

New comment by yCombLinks in "GTA 6 Developers Unionize"

yCombLinks — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:34:55 +0000

Sorry, I didn't make the point I was aiming for initially

New comment by yCombLinks in "GTA 6 Developers Unionize"

yCombLinks — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:24:06 +0000

They want it on their resume primarily to make more money and have a better career in terms of getting hired, etc. Very different motivation. They'd only work at a FAANG for free long enough to get that bump. Game devs however would work for many years underpaid because they like what they're creating.

New comment by yCombLinks in "How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?"

yCombLinks — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:00:16 +0000

I've got no problem with your concept, and even think it's useful. I just don't think that concept and AGI are the same thing. Economically useful has no relation to what has been called AGI before.

New comment by yCombLinks in "How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?"

yCombLinks — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:58:33 +0000

Well, let's look at someone like Einstein. Just for argument's sake let's say he has a flat salary demand of $5 million dollars. It's not cost effective to hire Einstein to write your CRUD apps in this situation. That doesn't mean there isn't somewhere that he would have a value of $5 million.

New comment by yCombLinks in "How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?"

yCombLinks — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:47:39 +0000

> The overlapping AGI definition I use here is "Most purely cognitive labor is automatable at better quality, speed, and cost than humans".

That's a poor definition. Nowhere have I seen cheapness as being a requirement to count as AGI. If we have something that can do everything people can do and more, but it costs a lot means it's not AGI?