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vogelke

111 karma · joined March 7, 2017

vogelke+ycombinator@pobox.com
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vogelke··on Attention is all you have
1. Price tracking over time.

2. MPG tracking by brand -- I get about 1.5 MPG better with BP.

vogelke··on Devil's Arrows: Ancient builders hauled 55k-lb stones 11 miles for UK stone row
Lovely.
vogelke··on On Really Trying (2009)
+1. One of my favorite quotes:

No one hates so bitterly as the lazy and poor contemplating the energetic and prosperous. --Dale Worley

vogelke··on The revolt of the reader
> in, say, two years, we will be all writing and talking like this

Shoot me now.

vogelke··on Product Backlog Problems: Why Your Hierarchy Is Broken
If they can't justify why this is a bug, and why it's worth your time to fix this as opposed to something else, you should be able to revoke their permission to touch your backlog.
vogelke··on Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV
This is perfect.

Since AI makes it easier for incompetent people to look smart, AI can help us expose those people for what they are.

vogelke··on I Remain a Skeptic
By checking the diffs carefully, you're showing how to use an LLM to add value instead of creating a 17000-line PR that nobody with any sense will read.

LLMs are really good at making it harder to ignore ignorant people, and you've demonstrated that you're NOT part of the problem.

vogelke··on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?
This is right on the money. It's not that we have way more bad engineers than before; it's that the damage they do is out of all proportion to their numbers.
vogelke··on The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
> I can't give them any sort of answer that makes sense ...

Pride of workmanship. For those who understand, no answer is needed. For those who don't, no answer will work.

vogelke··on Evidence of inconsistencies in evaluation process and selection of winners
> ...management is making strategic decisions after snorting a long line of social-media-psychosis and TED talks.

+1. Straight into my quotes file.

vogelke··on AI changes the economics of software rewrites
I love this. Straight into my quotes file.
vogelke··on Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
Matt Stoller has written some excellent articles about Ticketmaster's monopoly crap.
vogelke··on Declining America
Probably. As an American, I have to agree with you -- it's been the case for many years (WAY before Trump) that within 50 miles of our border, your rights go to wherever last year's snow went.

It's too bad so few people can say "My country, if right to be supported, if wrong to be corrected."

vogelke··on Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling (2025)
I have a Dell 2208 monitor with 4 USB-2 ports. If I bought three of these switches, would I be able to share keyboard/mouse/monitor between two machines? My monitor does not have HDMI, just VGA.
vogelke··on Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]
Best part about open source -- Mercurial is still around, I use it for my home servers, and it's being maintained. I can use git, but Mercurial's workflow just makes more sense to me.
vogelke··on Colossus: The Forbin Project
The "Demon Seed" book was creepier (and a lot more pervy) than the movie.
vogelke··on Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
I hope you're kidding. I've seen lots of 'Net people claim to be experts, and I wouldn't trust most of them to feed my cat.
vogelke··on Linux 7.0 Broke PostgreSQL: The Preemption Regression Explained
https://lwn.net/Articles/343828/ describes Alan Cox trying to fix the TTY layer, being trashed by Linus, and removing himself from the maintainer page.
vogelke··on The operating cost of adult and gambling startups
Exactly. Legal drugs get weaker because you can exchange information about minimum required dosages (saving money) without risking arrest.

Illegal drugs get stronger for exactly the reason you stated in your first paragraph.

vogelke··on Advancing human gut microbiota research by considering gut transit time
> It's a one lane road and "over taking" is not possible.

Best poop-related comment I've seen.

vogelke··on The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
Your core skills are fine. Unfortunately, appreciation for those skills has already been blasted into orbit by the AI-BS bubble.

This tech has made it easier for second-handers to pass off inadequate work as the equal of your work. They're too lazy to exert the effort to read/think/write, and being second-handers, they're fine with the APPEARANCE of reading, thinking, and writing.

This has been going on for millenia, and the only fix I've seen is to call it out every time it rears its head.

vogelke··on Stop picking my Go version for me
Thank you for this article. If I want to be told when to upgrade, I know where to shop, i.e. Bill's Bloatware in Redmond.
vogelke··on Personal Encyclopedias
Great example of a commonplace book. Jillian Hess has written extensively about this -- her books are well-researched and organized.
vogelke··on Building docs like a product
I've read at least 8 articles this week about LLMs having massive hallucinations/brain-farts when writing testbeds for code. Unfortunately, the author didn't see the problems until he tried adding a test; then he had a huge WTF moment.

The fact that the LLM you mention gave good answers is probably more a reflection of YOUR documentation than any particular "brilliance" on the LLM's part.

vogelke··on Reading Without Limits or Expectations
If I treated reading like a chore, it would start to feel like a chore.

I'm not being graded. If I start a book and I don't care about the subject or the characters after 50-100 pages or so, it goes in my Goodwill pile. The only decent exception to that for me is Stieg Larsson -- his "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" books take their time getting started without being boring.

vogelke··on A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom
> I don't think I've ever seen a school essay back then that wasn't obviously written by a parent.

That's when you discuss the essay with the kid, and if he can't understand something that presumably he wrote, immediate consequences. First time == suspension, second time == removal from that class.

vogelke··on Ask HN: Best codebases to study to learn software design?
I'd recommend the book "Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think". Published by O'Reilly, ISBN-10 ‏ : 0596510047
vogelke··on What if we made advertising illegal?
> millions of victims from false advertising of Big Tobacco

People have known that smoking is bad for your health for around 400 years. You can't fix stupid, not even by making advertising illegal.

vogelke··on Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained
I use it for two things:

* saving webpages as text with the links nicely organized at the bottom, and

* calling it from mutt (MUA) to display HTML parts of mail messages.

It works great and it's consistent.

vogelke··on Yash: Yet Another Shell
I keep my history in a format showing the current working directory next to each command. If you're interested, have a look at

https://bezoar.org/src/dotfiles/README.htm#command-history

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