rhines

Joined 5 years ago

Karma
239
Submissions
125
Member since
Jan 18
meet.hn/city/ca-Halifax

Interests: Programming

---

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 14 days ago
Yeah this is the difference between personal projects or being a team lead with serious influence, versus being a typical developer employee.

The typical employee is not given the leeway to spend time building up the infrastructure needed to enforce good output from LLMs. Previously understanding the codebase was just part of doing the work you were assigned, but now it requires that side effort of creating infrastructure. And unfortunately a lot of teams won't approve letting developers spend their time on that infrastructure, they just want the deliverables they're asking for.

Comment · 18 days ago
Yep, a family member asked for a second opinion after being recommended post-treatment medication, and her doctor dropped her.
Comment · 1 month ago
Isn't this the default in Cassandra?
Comment · 1 month ago
I'm using Opus 5.5 at work extensively, have also used Kimi 3 and Deepseek 4.1 for stuff outside of work, and I can't deny that the tools aren't capable. They solve problems, surface issues I wouldn't have considered, and largely do write better code than I do.

The one exception is for stuff that I care very deeply about. For a very small subset of projects where I'm willing to spend hundreds of hours ensuring that what I build is the best possible thing, AI still hasn't been able to match my work unless I micromanage it, but at that point just writing the code myself is actually faster.

For almost all jobs though AI is probably the future, most software developers never cared that much about their company's code anyway.

Comment · 1 month ago
I'm not a big LVT fan - pushing for maximally productive use of land is going to result in displacing people, displacing small businesses, displacing artistic/cultural/environmental spaces, etc.

I would much rather see an overall assets tax that scales with the value of the assets. That would incentivize more smaller businesses, long-term thinking, and wealth distribution. It would hit big corporations in the same way a LVT would, forcing them to be more and more productive with their assets the more they have, without pricing out smaller entities.

Comment · 1 month ago
How is this different from just having higher taxes on capital gains? (Obviously higher capital gains taxes would also impact other assets, but I mean in the context of land. Seems like both result in the same effect if you're able to defer LVT until sale.)
Comment · 1 month ago
Never be generous with the product itself. In consulting, the product is your time - you can't give that away. In textiles the product is the physical textiles - you can't give that away. In tech start-ups the product is a growing userbase - you can't give that away.
Comment · 1 month ago
It just has oil. While it is nice having low taxes because of all the oil money, it can also be draining being surrounded by people who want to be annexed by Trump, or hold socially regressive views. But economically yes it's a great province.
Comment · 3 months ago
It is interesting to consider what will make AI generated works great, if we reach a point where they're seen as such.

For painting, realism was really what made works great for a long time. Then photography came along and realistic depictions of things were no longer novel, so painting became about representing things in a more surreal way, and novel representations of perspective and emotion became great. Meanwhile with photography initially just capturing a clear image was impressive but now you need to capture something truly rare to have a great photo.

With AI I'm struggling to imagine what will be hard enough to achieve that it remains novel.

Comment · 3 months ago
Interesting. I'm 29 and hate downloading apps on phone or pc, if I can use a website I'll choose that every time. Unless performance matters like a game or media editor.
Comment · 4 months ago
That's the thing, they will be on unceded land. As I understand it Canadian settlers signed treaties which allowed indigenous people to retain rights to the land. Canada then violated those treaties and built on land they didn't own. Today Canada is trying to respect the original treaties while also appreciating that they can't undo what's already been done.
Comment · 4 months ago
The system is pretty fucked. You have the liberals (who are conservatives), the conservatives (who are increasingly taking inspiration from America but have always been even further right than the liberals), and the NDP who are unfortunately now rather irrelevant and also have a tendency to focus too much on identity politics.

If Trudeau had actually pushed for election reform like he'd promised to, maybe we'd be in a better place. But people forgave him for that because he made weed legal...

Comment · 5 months ago
I wish these companies didn't need to make billions in revenue. There's no reason why a small company couldn't manage a site like Discord, make enough to pay their developers, and be successful. But instead every company needs to become a unicorn and pay investors billions.
Comment · 5 months ago
The goal is to encourage people to join ycombinator, not advocate for a healthier world.
Comment · 5 months ago
Stuff where all the info isn't available online.

For example, I used to do integrations for sports betting sites. AI is going to help with the basics, like understanding the default puck line is 1.5 in hockey. AI is not going to realize that Bet365 changes their API endpoints for each season, so you need to be ready to fetch the updated ones before the new season starts, whereas most other sportbooks have consistent endpoints that you don't need to keep updating.

How much domain knowledge is actually unavailable to AI is going to vary by domain, as will the value of that. Chess is probably one extreme, where all knowledge is public, whereas something like military R&D might be the other extreme where domain knowledge is tightly guarded.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton