HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

lee

1,115 karma · joined March 25, 2007

submissionscomments
lee··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
A friend of mine runs a 6 person company where they specialize in maintaining WordPress sites for SMBs.

It's definitely a viable business!

lee··on Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
There is a saying I've heard: "Silicon Valley is powered by Waterloo Grads"

The problem with Canadian innovation is that our best and brightest tend to complete their education in Canada, then emigrate to the US. The brain drain is a real issue for us.

One of the "positives" of Trump's hostilities towards Canada is that perhaps this would slow the brain drain for the current generation.

lee··on Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
In an interview, Yann mentioned that one reason he left Meta was that they were very focused on LLMs and he no longer believed LLMs were the path forward to reaching AGI.
lee··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
This is a war of attrition.

Russia is expending its soviet cold war materiel. Its trade embargo is seriously undermining its ability to continue to fight. It may be sooner than we think that they'll run out of weapons and equipment so long as Ukraine has support from its allies.

lee··on Show HN: I built an app to stop me doomscrolling by touching grass
You can probably expand your user base to Canadians by also adding a "touching snow" feature.
lee··on Weight-loss drug found to shrink muscle in mice, human cells
From the article: "...explains this rate of muscle decline is significantly higher than what is typically observed with calorie-reduced diets or normal aging and could lead to a host of long-term health issues..."

The warning isn't that you're losing muscle during weight-loss with these drugs. It's that the ratio of muscle vs fat loss is much greater with the drugs compared to traditional weight loss methods.

It's been well studied that if you exercise and eat enough protein while losing weight, you can retain more muscle.

Losing a lot of lean mass is incredibly detrimental to your longevity and quality of life.

lee··on How to build quickly
I think it's the opposite. I think quality often comes from evolution and iteration.

There've been so many projects where I get stuck because I want to maximize quality, so I get writer's block. The worse, is that sometimes you'll try to perfect something on your project that ultimately isn't of great value.

Building something quickly, and then iterating to perfect it seems to work for many people.

lee··on Ask HN: Struggling with poor memory and executive function. What to do?
Have you optimized for sleep and exercise?

If you haven't, there's no other drug or behavior that can boost your cognitive abilities without first optimizing those two things.

lee··on Claude 3.5 Sonnet
I'd still prefer to have an intern.

However, it's because I'd empower the intern to use Claude or GPT to be even more productive.

lee··on Ship Something Every Day
I've experienced being on teams where PRs and commits happen infrequently, resulting in massive PRs and merges/rebases that constantly have conflicts.

The spirit of pushing small incremental changes on a team really helps address that.

This can be sustainable if everyone on the team realizes that every PR is expected to be small and incremental. It shouldn't be a large push every time.

lee··on Show HN: Domino Fit – Domino Tiling Puzzle
I love this game! It's really satisfying and addictive. Nice work.

One suggestion: I have a friend who is color-blind and has a hard time seeing the red and green numbers. Maybe add a visual indicator? Thanks!

lee··on Eating fewer calories can ward off ageing
If we're being pedantic, you'd need to eat 500 extra calories over your what your body burns daily.

But over a 6 year period, you would definitely accumulate 300 pounds of extra weight this way.

lee··on The right to use adblockers
I'm totally fine with this.

Content is paid with your eyeballs or with money. If you're not willing to pay with your eyeballs, then you shouldn't get the content. I think that's fair.

In China where copyright laws aren't enforced, there's simply no economic incentive for producers to create content...let's not go there.

lee··on Never say no, but rarely say yes (2011)
I have a similar anecdote in my career as a developer.

At the height of the financial crisis I was just 2 years out of school and working for a small startup. Our first child was just born, and I got fired from my job as they discovered I was trying to bootstrap my side-project. There was no non-compete clauses in my contract but the company used it as an excuse to avoid paying me severance as they laid off a quarter of the staff the following week.

So there I was, anxious that no one would hire a young developer who has a tarnished work experience with a newborn at home.

I was desperate to just find some work. I eventually got two offers with the exact same salary as the job I had gotten fired from. One job sounded more appealing and offered me a chance to learn and grow. The other was for a job to maintain an existing legacy codebase for a struggling company that just went from 100 employees to 10. My wife suggested to just counter-offer with a 50% increase for the unappealing job. If I didn't get it, it was no big loss as I had another in hand. Sure enough, they accepted and the job wasn't actually that bad in the end.

Strangely, when I look back everything turned out in the end for me. I got a 50% pay raise and I also got to spend 3 months at home with my newborn child while unemployed.

lee··on A daytime nap is good for the brain
One of the positive things that came from the pandemic for me was that we were forced to work remotely, and that gave me an opportunity to nap at noon.

It's made such a big difference in my life in that I no longer feel completely dead in the afternoon or require that second cup of coffee to keep going. It's almost like I get a second "day".

lee··on Everything must be paid for twice (2022)
I'm in a situation where my partner loves to acquire things whereas I have a minimalist mindset.

I have felt like every item I own is a burden, and when I live in a house where the vast majority is "owned" by the both of us, it can be overwhelming.

I've learned to cope though by simply internally "letting go" of ownership. They're just inanimate objects and they're not "mine". I simply possess them as a mental/legal construct.

lee··on Why 'Atomic Habits' may not be working for you
For me it, the drive to be more disciplined stems from the fact that I live my life so compulsively and I want to experience more things in life that require discipline.

As an example, video games and mindless doomscrolling eat up an inordinate number of hours. Hours that are precious and could be used towards a goal that I would feel proud of experiencing or achieving.

lee··on Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?
It feels like so many of these complaints on your list are things that have existed for decades in western culture. I'd argue things are getting better.

Greed has always existed.

Anecdotally I find people less loud these days compared to when I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Remember boomboxes?

No one's really cared about quality when it comes to low skill labor. Western culture typically doesn't carry that kind of value or pride in work.

Police don't give a shit? Crime has been steadily falling over time.

Pollution: look at the industrial revolution.

lee··on The myth of the myth of the 10x programmer (2020)
If you've been in the industry long enough to experience working on a variety of different projects and teams it's an easy sell to understand the concept of a 10x programmer, but the 10x programmer also isn't as exciting or "sexy" as we make them to be.

They aren't mythically smart and intelligent and can recite api features off the top of their heads.

No, the 10x programmers I've mostly encountered are "boring":

* They write solid code that's maintainable and relatively bug free. Fixing bugs is an incredibly time consuming activity. A developer who can reduce their bug rate is incredibly efficient not just for themselves but for the entire team and project.

* They aren't going to prematurely optimize in terms of code or design. How many of us have seen development grind to a halt due to an incorrect use of a design or architectural pattern? The worst grievances I've seen are using Microservices when it's not needed...leading to huge slowdowns of productivity due to overhead costs. And that's just one example.

* They understand the value of good software engineering practices that lead to long term success of the product/project/team. Many of those practices are "boring" but are necessary such as writing effective automated tests.

I guess another way to put it, many of the 10x developers I've seen are ten times more effective because they can avoid common mistakes that the average developer makes.

lee··on Argentina Wins the World Cup
On the feed I was watching it showed that only attacker's hand was passed the line. Hands and feet are exempted for the offside rule.
lee··on The positive effect of walking on creative thinking (2014) [pdf]
I discovered the 12 hour walk from a podcast (https://12hourwalk.com/) where the idea is to really contemplate and analyze your life by walking alone, without any music or distractions, for 12 hours. I've yet to try it, and am thinking maybe doing a shortened version at first (3 hours maybe?).

But I could see how it would be a way to wrestle with your thoughts.

lee··on Ask HN: Comment here about whatever you're passionate about at the moment
I'm pursuing my passion to climb mountains.

I grew up in Alberta and my favorite childhood memories are of camping trips in the mountains. I always dreamed of climbing peaks. I never had the opportunity financially to pursue that as my family was poor, and once done university I got a job and raised my own family.

Now that my kids are a little older I have the opportunity to chase that dream before I get too old to do so.

I'm obese and almost 40, and this gives me motivation to transform myself. My goal is to lose weight to be able to take a mountaineering course next August.

lee··on Psychedelics: A Personal Take (2021)
I LOVE listening to Tool while on psilocybin.

This song especially gives me frisson even when I'm sober.

There's something so beautiful about listening to the right music on psychedelics.

lee··on The SAFe Delusion
I worked for a company that adopted SAFe and sent me to get certified as a SAFe Program Consultant. So I worked to set up "Agile Release Trains" and coached a few teams that had never used any Agile methodology before.

I can absolutely understand the frustration that many have with SAFe, especially when it's pushed from a top-down manner. However, It's not entirely terrible as it provides some tools that can be address some organizational problems.

I think at best if a large organization is already doing well and is "agile" overall, SAFe won't provide a lot of value and is unlikely worth the investment. If an org is highly siloed, dysfunctional, and lacking inter-department coordination then SAFe it at least offers some tools to address those issues.

lee··on 75% of the time we spend with our kids in our lifetime will be spent by age 12
My kids are older now (10 and 13) and I really enjoy these years than when they were younger whereas my wife really enjoyed them more in the earlier years.

That period of enjoyment really varies between individuals, and I think in the aggregate men tend to enjoy hanging out with older kids compared to women. There was also a moment when I shifted my own personal attitude towards spending time with them that made it more enjoyable. Instead of seeing time with them as a time-suck where I could be doing something else, I saw it as fleeting moments that I could never get back when they're older. I became more grateful for the time I had with them.

lee··on 75% of the time we spend with our kids in our lifetime will be spent by age 12
> Or because you are just better in being a parent and biological getting satisfaction out of it?

It is totally this. We are biological creatures and we cannot escape that.

Love, sex, friendships, relationships, parenting, happiness, and so forth are all aspects of our biology. We are not automatons living a purely rational life. Satisfaction in life depends on those biological mechanisms and shouldn't be seen through a purely rational lens.

Kids aren't a scapegoat for a meaningful life. They do absolutely make life meaningful. Much in the same way eating a delicious meal brings pleasure. We depend on our biological wiring to feel such things.

lee··on Preparedness Paradox
When the trains are running smoothly no one celebrates the train engineer.
lee··on A little exercise each day improves muscles more than one big weekly workout
Why do you care how others powerlift?

If someone wants to do an ultra wide sumo DL or quarter squat 500 pounds how does that effect you?

lee··on Hacking the Hedonic Treadmill
Dr. Huberman had her on his podcast. She dives into a lot of her work.

https://hubermanlab.com/dr-anna-lembke-understanding-and-tre...

lee··on Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?
Find a balance for all aspects of your life, and recognize when to shift that balance.

The first few days of being a parent you'll focus on your newborn and the mother, as you should. But as the pressure decreases, find moments of self-care for yourself and encourage mom to do that too.

Don't lose yourself completely to being a parent, because then you won't be the best parent you could be. Find ways to still be a husband and friend. Try to keep some of your hobbies. All while still cherishing and appreciating the moments you have with your child. There will be enough time for it all if you know what to give up.

Page 1 of 9Next →