HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

olsondv

151 karma · joined September 24, 2025

submissionscomments
olsondv··on Where Each U.S. State Gets Its Tax Revenue From
Turn off your adblocker and experience auto-playing and unmuted video ad popups that cover most of the display.
olsondv··on New iPad mini
I’ve seen enough parents at graduations and tourists to know people use it. Assuming they need the big screen because their vision is bad which undermines the need for a high res photo in the first place.
olsondv··on Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs
Maybe tab groups would be enough? One group per product. Close the whole group with one click, and you can reorder them based on preference. It’s what I use for different tasks since they all have their own repo, pipelines, docs, etc
olsondv··on Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?
She claimed she didn’t know what “wiping a server” meant 10 years ago. I’d bet she’d say anything once the check cleared.
olsondv··on It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs
For dogs, it moves from civil to criminal with circumstances such as what the owner knew about the dog’s behavior, how serious the injury was, whether the owner intentionally or recklessly allowed the dangerous situation, and any prior incidents. Same can easily be applied to AI labs.
olsondv··on English: A vs. An
Which region? I’d say it’s more tied to African American vernacular.
olsondv··on English: A vs. An
Haven’t seen much discussion of “a” changing between “uh” and “ay”. “Uh RV” is hard to say. “Ay RV” is not so bad. I still prefer “an RV” as well.
olsondv··on English: A vs. An
Speed changes it for me too. However, emphasis can also mean using thee. An obnoxious US example is people saying “THEE Ohio State University”, often with a pause after thee as well. It’s not “thee Ohio River”. You would use “thuh”.
olsondv··on Can we stop with the uptime percentages?
Exactly. If my build and test CI takes several hours and it gets interrupted, it really doesn’t matter how long the interruption was. It impacts me all the added time of realizing it stopped, investigating and confirming why it stopped, triggering another run, and continued monitoring.
olsondv··on More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
And then the second question was: “How often would you base decisions on reported statistics if you understood it better?”

Talk about a leading question. I get that they were tacking on their “study” to a larger question pool, but they could have put more effort in to the questions or done some actual testing.

olsondv··on Why some US restaurants are banning tips
He probably looked at you strangely because you don’t seem to know much about beer. Do you think all beer called a pilsner is imported from Czech Republic or all Vienna Lager is from Austria?
olsondv··on AI didn't erase the junior engineer's value, it increased it it
It largely depends on the person. We have several junior engineers who cannot solve a problem without AI. When AI can’t solve it, they just keep trying and failing. And I mean weeks to months late. Then rinse and repeat on the next task. It used to be that they would have been forced to seek help from a senior engineer. Combine the teaching with a real struggle is what makes them better.

As it is now, they aren’t being taught and they’re not learning from what the AI is producing because they don’t understand it. The produced code is a black box, and the AI’s development is a black box too. All they know is that running it produces something like what they asked for. They have no idea about failure modes which is a fundamental concept of engineering. The worst part is that AI is covering up their deficiencies. They don’t know what skills they lack. They don’t even know what skills are required because they haven’t put the effort in.

There are obviously good junior engineers that are using AI judiciously and not as a crutch. They’re the ones who still interact with seniors to get help and actually learn. They would have been successful without AI too. These are the ones the author is talking about. In my experience, the momentum is moving towards the worse type of junior the more AI is adopted. Unless that changes, it will erase their value.

olsondv··on And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
It’s a common tale in English speaking world as well, but we don’t use it as a bedtime story because of the ending.

Edit. Didn’t realize it might just be an English version where the boy is killed and eaten. Aesop’s original didn’t have that. Just the sheep killed.

olsondv··on Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions
After having used Codex for a promotional month, and now using Claude, Claude is not as efficient with finding relevant information. I can give it the one file it should be using and then it goes off and greps parent directories for more context. It’s also incredibly slow at producing results because of this side work. In this article, it seems like they are catching up to what GitHub copilot users had already been doing since the cost restructuring in June.
olsondv··on It's a shame what's happened to radio
Or at a stop light and the car next to you is listening/singing to the same song. Never happens anymore.
olsondv··on The ACLU Is Arming Lawyers to Expose State Surveillance Secrets
Alright, that makes sense. I’m following now. Not at all opposed to making these transparent and accessible to defense attorneys.
olsondv··on The ACLU Is Arming Lawyers to Expose State Surveillance Secrets
Is the concern that the police will use these tools as a scaffolding and then use other evidence to build the case, then not mention the scaffolding? I’m not a lawyer but couldn’t a defense attorney just ask in cross examination about the evidence sources? If there is other independent evidence, that would have to stand on its own.
olsondv··on Never argue with your boss (2009)
Never been a manager, but there comes a point when you realize that you do not have the full picture as a subordinate. Your boss isn’t just managing you. They have a whole team to coordinate with and against the priorities of the rest of the business to stay on track. If you’re not helping them and are even making more work, it will not help your career.
olsondv··on Why write code in 2026
TL;DR: Write it so you’re actively involved and not a passive reviewer. Then a sign up link for his course.
olsondv··on AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn
These are different to me. An ask is when you expect some action from the person. A question is for an answer.
olsondv··on Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
It’s human nature to pattern-match experiences. As the number of experiences grows, more fit into something seen before. So, yes, we’re just getting old.
olsondv··on Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new
Every student is forced to read the same materials and books. Tests are designed to test how close they remember the same correct answers. It’s always been rare that a novel interpretation or idea has come out of a classroom. The modern, structured education has never been designed to generate creative people.
olsondv··on The Doorman's Fallacy in action
Taking the restaurant ordering app, it’s certainly better than a server. Each individual picks what they want and pays for what they got on their own bill. It removes any chance of communication error between the customer and the kitchen. Appetizers to share easily split across who wanted them. No bill splitting discussions. OP just had to use a bad implementation.
olsondv··on Doing a masters while working in Spain
Physics is applying math to Model phenomena. Finance is already numbers so it’s a good fit. If you are insinuating the money corrupts it, they’re paid for the skills they developed. Are medical doctors less noble because they make massive salaries?
olsondv··on Job application asked for my SAT scores
Noise doesn’t have to be broadband. 60Hz is a common noise in US from the AC line frequency. Then there are harmonics of that due to rectifiers.
olsondv··on CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
Yeah, that didn’t make any sense. If it’s functional, it impacts the system. 15k lines sure sounds like a lot of bloat.
olsondv··on CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
Github copilot has filters for enterprise that remove the GPL code before it gets returned. At least that’s how my company has been covering itself.
olsondv··on CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
Has that not been what a senior SWE is? You’re making it sound like engineers need to be asked to implement features rather than contribute to design. At my company, if you are not coming up with new features or applications, your days are numbered.
olsondv··on CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt
Allowing non-technical PMs to ship code is fine if they’re the one getting called up in the evenings and weekends when it breaks. Maybe it’s a good exercise to show how much has effort must be applied to each commit.
olsondv··on Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
Felt the same way. Set aside the hyperbole, and it’s coming from the very real fear that data labeling does not have long-term job security. If the company continues to run after you’ve been moved, it’s pretty obvious you were redundant. Tough realization for people that see themselves as having been successful career-wise.
Page 1 of 2Next →