HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

gedy

5,884 karma · joined July 8, 2015

submissionscomments
gedy··on Why Clip Art Was Everywhere Until It Wasn't [video]
Reminds me of a surreal 2000-ish clip art comic 'My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable':

https://theslingsandarrows.com/my-new-filing-technique-is-un...

Got a lot of laughs from the bizarre humor and clip art usage

gedy··on Jobless tech workers are being left out of San Francisco's AI boom
Same thing could be said of dot com era. Sure the Internet changed everything, but not every company was a winner, quite the contrary.
gedy··on Jobless tech workers are being left out of San Francisco's AI boom
It's gambling, and semi random. Don't feel bad. Same as stock picks, etc.
gedy··on UK Green party drops longstanding opposition to nuclear power
Sometimes it takes the older generation of members and leadership to die out for these beliefs to shift.
gedy··on American views of higher ed decline, once again
Businesses aren't hiring as many new grads, and many "thought leader" business types are actively snorting at not needing many or educated employees. So what do we think the "American views" would do in that situation?
gedy··on Why are good developers so wary of agentic development?
It's just one "Buy Now" button. How hard could that be? /s
gedy··on Why are good developers so wary of agentic development?
There's agentic development where you've designed, even at a high level what the goals and constraints are. Within reason, as doing 10 things at once is not compatible with actually thinking about a problem, no matter what your Adderall says.

Then there's... management forcing "agentic development" on you to basically hurry up, and actively don't want your design input or even to think about the problem. Just 'review it' and be expected to own the problems after. Outsourcing basically.

The first is fine, second is not sustainable for any happiness unless you are offering top compensation.

gedy··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
I'd love to see you successful, so wanted to comment:

The app feels very vibe-coded, and gives impression it's not well tested and polished for a new user/project.

I appreciate PCBs aren't the usual the consumer-level type of user, but I felt confused by a lot compared to JLCPCB. Hope that helps.

gedy··on New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6
It's great aside from no usb-c display, mine has an HDMI port though.

It's been my primary dev machine for 2 years

gedy··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
Biggest issue that gets lost is the slower mundane parts of development were/are a very valuable forcing function to think about wtf you are even doing and making.

Even with AI, you need that time. So I've drawn a line in sand with management that, no, I won't be rushed along and hurry up on those important parts, even with AI speeding some things up.

gedy··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
I think that's why you keep hearing about all these tech stack rewrites.

Many of these companies have no idea what to do to begin with, so improving dev throughput is not really the business problem to begin with (even though frequently blamed).

gedy··on We should be more ambitious with the software we build
> A truly skilled developer who makes a genuine attempt should be expected to solve 99% of their tasks within the same business day as of October 2026.

> Quite the contrary. It will create a vacuum that the business will fill with new work that may incidentally increase the developers' compensation packages.

This seems very disconnected with the reality of any company I've worked at in 25 years.

"Tasks" frequently are not spelled out, or if they are, they are wrong. There's almost no value to a company to blaze through all this.

Similarly, no one is getting rewarded for that type of speed, especially if the company has no idea how to uptake it.

gedy··on America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
I’m not a fan of many progressive causes, but this is absolutely more an issue with globalization and easy ability to move jobs overseas to cheaper areas.
gedy··on Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology
This is the case throughout the West, including the US. A generation ago the powers at be decided they would invest in China for this.
gedy··on Does Ruby on Rails still make sense?
Never personally liked Rails, but I see folks in my circles now convincing themselves they are 100x productive having Claude write web apps with no frameworks in whatever random combo of tech they chose. The end result looks like they should have just used Rails and done this in a few days instead of weeks or months of tokens.
gedy··on The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines
To be honest, I really think some people use the “I'm so productive“ as an excuse for why they’re doing drugs and cover for addiction (even if mild). A lot of this so-called productivity is spinning wheels and jumping around.
gedy··on Sixteen Years After Deepwater Horizon, Deep Sea Life Shows Few Signs of Recovery
So can I work from home then instead?
gedy··on SIGSALY: Churchill's top secret hotline to the president
No, inflation it's $19,476,300 in today's dollars. 19 million not billion.
gedy··on Microsoft and CMU team up to train early career software engineers
Dude we have enough hacks in this industry. We need more people actually curious about understanding problems, and not just "shipping".
gedy··on Ask HN: Thoughts on hiring junior engineers in 2026?
It sounds like you want to hire people to just be your fingers, and not build a team of people who care about what they’re trying to do, and who find and solve problems you aren't aware of. LLMs are not good at solving meta problems like this, teams are.

If you’re the type of person or company that would hire an outsourced team overseas without hesitation, then LLMs would probably be fine for you.

gedy··on Gemini 4 Argon
It's the smaller training data /s
gedy··on AI is a tool and using it well takes skill
This is absolutely the case in my company. The CTO is rabidly pro-AI and single-handedly trying to rewrite our SaaS company system. Hearing the "no human can understand this", "my agents are better than hiring developers", etc type talk. Months of work. No limits on tokens for him.

When you look at the new system? It's the same damn thing company has now, with ill chosen tech stack for the domain, same blind spots that the system now has, weird API, etc. I guess the CSS is cleaner?

Call me unimpressed if this is the best agentic frontier models can do.

gedy··on Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search
You might be shocked that we say "red heads" instead of ginger as well.
gedy··on Scandinavia's first farmers slaughtered hunter-gatherer population, DNA suggests
How does this jive with the inland Papuan tribes in Papua New Guinea? They were quite isolated and from what I read they can be just as violent (of course, not on the scale of mechanized slaughter by moderns)
gedy··on Claude Code’s suggested message feature: I think the real customer is the model
One annoyance I have is the suggested prompt is not a bad idea, but not what I want to do next. But it interrupts me and sometimes I go with it. So I don't think it's a accurate prediction, more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
gedy··on JetBrains reported a net financial loss first time in its tracked history
> Does a system need the knowledge of the full works of Shakespeare to be able to output Javascript?

That's needed to interpret the 10000 monkeys typing requirements in the various corporate product roles /s

gedy··on Jonathan Haidt: AI Is the 'Neutron Bomb for Education' [video]
Difference is AI involves offloading most thinking. AI may be cool for already intelligent, but it is not going to form intelligent brains leaning on that from a young age.

I don't mean "AI" like generating quizzes or whatever. But people fooling themselves that LLMs are a "bicycle for the mind" with little kids are delusional.

gedy··on Pi 1.0
> Here I am with Claude Code and Codex in a terminal like a caveman

There's definitely a class of folks who like to "polish their tools" per se vs tools just being as a means to an end.

It's fine and cool, sort of like the desktop ricers do with Hyperland, Niri, etc showing off desktops, but never seem to do anything with this cool tech.

gedy··on California bans child marriage, a practice still legal in 32 US states
Ban is under age 18. Many states allow 16 & 17 with parents permission.
gedy··on Nicholas Polson has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 (so far)
I’m only half joking that someone will come up with a LLM text to speech synthesizer that pauses and plays depending on if your mouth is closed/jaw is moving. Analysizes your voice to synthesize as well.
Page 1 of 34Next →