HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

sdn90

42 karma · joined June 23, 2020

submissionscomments
sdn90··on Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
I think we are in a price discovery phase overall for human labor.

Just like financial markets, this phase is very volatile. But today’s price can look much different in 1, 2, 5, and 10 years.

Right now there’s a lot of opportunity to disrupt companies who are moving much slower since adoption can vary greatly.

But I think in a few years this meta will be overcrowded. The overall skill/productivity gap across companies will be reduced and the bar for productivity will be raised.

There’s room for taking profits now from the productivity gains but I don’t think it will last long.

If AI is really increasing productivity enough to reduce headcount right now, it won’t be in future. If all your competitors are using AI as effectively as you are, can you still do this?

The world’s demand for productivity is limitless. As of right now you still need someone to at least install Claude Code and run the binary.

sdn90··on Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR
Agreed.

I constantly see people saying Apple displays are a terrible value. Last Apple display I had was the Thunderbolt 27 but from now on I'm sticking with Apple.

I've had nothing but issues with non-Apple monitors as well. Customer service ime is non-existent if you need a repair. For something I rely on to get work done, I'm starting to think the premium is worth it.

sdn90··on The peculiar case of Japanese web design (2022)
I'm an American that has been living in Asia for a years.

I actually hated the web design at first but now I much prefer it and find it difficult to use American apps with the modern tech aesthetic now.

I noticed that I started to get annoyed doing things like filling forms. I feel like American apps tend to reduce complex flows into simpler decisions but requiring more steps. It feels like my brain is wired to want to see as much information at once now.

sdn90··on Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
Go into planning mode and plan the overall refactor. Try to break the tasks down into things that you think will fit into a single context window.

For mid sized tasks and up, architecture absolutely has to be done up front in planning mode. You can ask it questions like "what are some alternatives?", "which approach is better?".

If it's producing spaghetti code, can you explain exactly what it's doing wrong? If you have an idea of what ideal solution should look like, it's not too difficult to guide the LLM to it.

In your prompt files, include bad and good examples. I have prompt files for API/interface design, comment writing, testing, etc. Some topics I split into multiple files like criteria for testing, testing conventions.

I've found the prompts where they go "you are a X engineer specializing in Y" don't really do much. You have to break things down into concrete instructions.

sdn90··on Mozilla Monitor Plus: automatically remove your personal info from data brokers
Does this support adding family members on a single account? I have some non technical family members who I'd like to manage it for them and giving them their own account is most likely going to be a major headache.
sdn90··on Ask HN: What are your Favorite Things?
Washlet / bidet with seat warmer and dryer.

I used one for the first time while traveling and bought one as soon as I got home.

Probably one of the best quality of life upgrades I've ever made.

sdn90··on Elixir is now a gradually typed language
Very excited for this.

I used Elixir for a period and loved the language but I got fed up with using Dialyzer so I switched to other typed languages.

When this is done, I'll be coming back as I think Elixir does pretty much everything else better when it comes to writing web apps vs other languages.

sdn90··on Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer
Same use case for me.

Laptops have terrible ergonomics it’s near impossible to get proper posture while traveling.

- Laptop stands help but introduce a new set of problems around the distance of the screen and keyboard height

- Hard to find adjustable office chairs anywhere

- If you’re in a city where you’re walking for hours a day, carrying a larger laptop gets tiring

sdn90··on Ask HN: HN for Finance?
Not a professional but I think I follow markets pretty closely for a retail trader.

Twitter / FinTwit is the best

Level of discussion is not always great but I find its way better than anywhere else. Twitter Spaces usually have great discussions since people are less likely to troll vs tweets.

One thing I've found though is if the person is getting too cocky and going on victory laps, it's pretty much always a good time to counter trade them.

You'll be able to find some great Substack's, Podcasts, Youtube channels from Twitter as well if you're following the right people.

Some that I follow

  - @fedguy12 - macro  
  - @JulianMI2 - macro  
  - @biancoresearch - macro  
  - @acrossthespread - Japan macro  
  - @anasalhajji - energy  
  - Pretty much any central bank, government official  
  - Fund managers. Many of them aren't too active and just crosspost links to videos. Cliff Asness is one that is active though
Podcasts:

  - Forward Guidance
  - Odd Lots
Reddit I find is usually not much better than SeekingAlpha, Zero Hedge, etc. even on the more "serious" subreddits. Most of the posters are John Bogle acolytes or post the Warren Buffet quote on buying index funds. A lot of the threads don't have much besides "you should buy a broad based index fund with a lump sum [link to Vanguard whitepaper] [link to backtest starting from year 2000-2010]".

HN is still way better than Reddit on the rare finance/economics post. Every finance thread you'll get a few people who have unique insights/opinions but I think the majority is still a lot of retail market participants who just regurgitate the Reddit stuff.

sdn90··on U.S. credit card debt jumps 18.5% and hits a record $930.6B
You can get 1 month Treasury Bills for 4.55% at the moment which are state/local tax exempt and you can sell at any time.
sdn90··on Guide to Using YubiKey for GPG and SSH
Anyone know if its possible to use a Yubikey for sudo as well?
sdn90··on Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?
I'm very curious to see how this plays out over the next year:

1. BTC dominance seems to be getting lower

2. Ethereum PoS seems very likely to launch this year IMO

3. Alt chains which run on PoS like AVAX and SOL have been eating into Ethereum's market share of the smart contract space. Newly onboarded retail users to crypto have been priced out of Ethereum due to fees over the past year. The alt chains running PoW seem to have no real usage.

4. Fed raising interest rates could dampen the growth of crypto asset prices

If I put myself in the shoes of a miner running GPU's, once the merge happens I only see these options:

1. I switch to a chain that is still profitable for GPU's. None of these have much demand for block space and unless that changes, other profit minded miners will be dumping the token.

2. Switch to some kind of P2P GPU-aaS like Render or Livepeer. I haven't been following this space to closely but I doubt it would have the same returns as mining Ethereum over the past years.

3. Exit out of mining and sell GPU's

sdn90··on Keep the web free, say no to Web3
The criticism of catering to early adopters and whales is a bit weird to me. How is this different than any project that receives funding? What's the ideal solution for this?

Personally, I'm curious to see a project like Mastodon or Peertube fund itself using a token. I don't think those projects will ever get any meaningful use aside a few nerds and outcasts that got booted off of Web2 properties. You'll probably get speculators in it purely for profit, but to me it sounds better than the alternatives.

sdn90··on Black Friday/Cyber Monday Live Map
You can do this with the Shop mobile app (it's an official Shopify product). I think stores are defaulted to showing up but they have are able to opt out.
sdn90··on An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities
I think if you take a Western/developed country centric view, all of crypto seems pretty useless. In the rest of the world, you probably dealing with some or all of the following:

- Dysfunctional government - Hyperinflation - Limited access to financial/investment products if any

The crypto space does have a huge amount of problems, but I think there's some innovative stuff going on in crypto. You'll end up writing it off if you just fixate on the speculators and the "blockchain everything" people.

sdn90··on HomePod has been jailbroken with checkra1n
I think what OP meant is that Homepod only works using the Airplay protocol, where the delay is 2 seconds. Very few macOS apps support Airplay 2 which cuts it down significantly.
sdn90··on First Impressions of GitHub Codespaces
I'm pretty excited about what Codespaces is going to bring to the table. I can already see a lot of good use cases.

I've been using an iPad Pro as a laptop replacement for the past year and Codespaces makes it a pretty viable development machine. I'd been mulling over switching back to a laptop, but I'll probably stick to the iPad for now.

Before I was using Blink shell to ssh into my desktop and run Emacs. Not really ideal for me since I mainly use VS Code on my desktop (which is my main computer) and hardly touch Emacs anymore.

sdn90··on Show HN: IHP, a batteries-included web framework built on Haskell and Nix
Great work!

I wasn't able to find anything on deployment in the docs. What does it look like?

I've been looking for a framework with the following requirements:

  - Functional-ish language
  - Statically typed with Result<T, E> error handling. 
  - Garbage collected. 
  - Compile time checked HTML templates, with autoformatter  and IDE support (like working with JSX/TSX in VS Code). 
  - Some kind of SQL DSL that has decent IDE support (like Ecto on Elixir, Diesel on Rust).
This framework checks off more of those than any framework I've seen. I'll definitely be giving it a try.