poulsbohemian

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
5,179
Submissions
2,025
Member since
Jul 12
Spent 20+ years in software doing a whole lot of things. Now selling real estate. HN used to be a place for software entrepreneurs, now it feels like eternal September.
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 7 months ago
Jesus Christ the replies to this are stupid. Have any of you three spent any time in Olympia or working on housing? No? Then shut the fuck up.
Comment · 7 months ago
The problem is that in places like Seattle and the Bay Area, there are hard geographic limits to construction, even if you turn them into endless high-rises. Having watched the WA state legislature go through several years of attempts to fix housing by throwing random policy ideas into the void, I'm not convinced any of it matters nearly as much as a) more money in the state housing trust to help people with down payments and b) a robust economy so more people have more money that they can apply toward housing.

So, sure, yes, by all means do things like pass residential-in-repurposed commercial changes, ADUs, greater density in transit-oriented neighborhoods - do all the things. But, getting more people able to move to parts of the state (in my case, Yakima, the Tri-Cities, Spokane, etc) where there are houses just sitting around relative to King / Pierce / Snohomish... that's just as viable a solution and solves a whole bunch of other water / energy / land use / political / social type problems.

Comment · 7 months ago
>It’s not clear to me that we should necessarily massively subsidize their choice to live in the sticks these days.

Last year I had a chance to talk to Gregg Coburn, author of Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We agreed that remote work and improved public transportation were the real solutions to many of our housing problems, allowing greater distribution of population back into more rural areas. This is an area where rural broadband investment could make a difference. Likewise, when we talk about American competitiveness in manufacturing et al, that isn't going to happen in our cities, but rather in more rural areas.

Comment · 7 months ago
>These are commodity items now, not symbols of luxury.

Maybe I should have used the word "premium" rather than luxury.

Comment · 7 months ago
>If you just need to do your taxes or answer a Zoom call, why would you get a Macbook Neo?

Because it's a Mac. Maybe not to you, but to many people Apple signals luxury. It signals trust. You have an iPhone, an iWatch, and AirPods in your ears, why wouldn't you also buy a Mac? And at that price point, mom and dad don't think twice about buying one for the kids anymore where previously they might have gotten by without.

>macOS itself has been declining in quality since at least Mojave; people don't rave about it anymore.

Maybe because computing devices overall are just so good. The gains are to be had in services that are part of the Apple ecosystem, not the OS alone (for the most part).

>The Macbook Neo will 100% continue the trend of people showing up at Best Buy and comparing the Lenovo machine to the Mac that costs 3x as much. This will not sway the average Joe any more than the Macbook Air did. It's not even seriously competing with the iPad price bracket that might tempt students.

In the 2000s, Apple has not cared about competing at Best Buy. That isn't their customer. If anything though, the Neo is more of a foray into that wider market. Anyone with kids lugging home a crappy school-issued Chromebook though took one look at this device and knew this is a device Apple can position into schools -- a market they once dominated and lost. There are lots of markets where this will be a great device, where the customer wants a Mac and not "just" an iPad. In those cases, it isn't the end consumer buying this device, it's an IT manager - who can likely be tempted by that Mac ecosystem and a better grade of device relative to competition.

Comment · 8 months ago
What kind of project / prompts - what’s working for you? /I spent a good 20 years in the software world but have been away doing other things professionally for couple years. Recently was in the same place as you, with a new project and wanting to try it out. So I start with a generic Django project in VSCode, use the agent mode, and… what a waste of time. The auto-complete suggestions it makes are frequently wrong, the actions it takes in response to my prompts tend to make a mess on the order of a junior developer. I keep trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong, as I’m prompting pretty simple concepts at it - if you know Django, imagine concepts like “add the foo module to settings.py” or “Run the check command and diagnose why the foo app isn’t registered correctly” Before you know it, it’s spiraling out of control with changes it thinks it is making, all of which are hallucinations.
Comment · 8 months ago
I think back on the ten+ years I spent doing SRE consulting and the thing is, finding the problems and identifying solutions — the technical part of the work — was such a small part of the actual work. So often I would go to work with a client and discover that they often already knew the problem, they just didn’t believe it - my job was often about the psychology of the organization more than the technical knowledge. So you might say “Great, so the agent will automatically fix the problem that the organization previous misidentified.” That sounds great right up until it starts dreaming… it’s not to say there aren’t places for these agents, but I suspect ultimately it will be like any other technology we use where it becomes part of the toolkit, not the whole.
Comment · 9 months ago
>You seem to be under the impression that the word "screening" means TSA can do whatever it wants.

I assure you TSA thinks it can do whatever it wants. I say this as a white male and have certainly heard even worse stories that my own of egregious violations from people with other demographics.

Comment · 9 months ago
>RealID is unrelated to citizenship.

Except that it appears one of the primary reasons this has become a thing is that the Feds are angry at states like Washington that don't verify citizenship when issuing driver's licenses. The whole point was that Washington (as an example) wanted to make sure people were able to get an identification and driving with a license (IE: some degree of documentation, had achieved some degree of driver's education and testing somewhere along the line...) regardless of their immigration status - and that pissed off the Feds. So it shouldn't be related to citizenship but that's part of how we got here.

Comment · 9 months ago
I totally get and respect the perspective of the parent poster, I'm just keeping it real that the US is generally not a high-trust society. If it were, we wouldn't have disclosures and disclaimers and limits of liability for everything we do all day long.
Comment · 9 months ago
Great to see Boeshield in this thread - so much of what's happening in this thread is the wrong product for a particular application. As you point out, Boeshield is a great product for protecting cast iron
Comment · 9 months ago
Ahem. There are neighborhoods in the US where you leave nothing in your car because otherwise your car will become a target. It's often "the rule" in these places that you also leave the doors unlocked because that way "they" won't break your window trying to get in. They open the door, see there's nothing of value to steal and move on. In other places in the US it's (still but fading) normal to leave your car doors unlocked because "everybody knows everybody and no one would steal from each other." Code switching is knowing which of the neighborhoods you are in and how to adapt.
Comment · 9 months ago
Not sure I understand the point as my switching cost off Vimeo is negligible apart from finding a competitor.
Comment · 9 months ago
Educate me: How is the Canyon, Ranger, or Frontier not a modern equivalent to the S10? All small(ish) trucks available in a two door or extended cab configuration with basic options.
Comment · 1 year ago
That doesn't solve my issue at all, though it might be fine for some. I use my iPhone for everything - maps, podcasts, music, and of course phone and messaging. When I get in my car, I want it to instantly become my mobile office connected to my iPhone. Building those features into the car, regardless of the technology, does nothing for me if it duplicates rather than synchronizes with my out-of-car life.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton