gen220

I mean, is it not possible to sell a small % of your shares to cover the tax?

Moreover, you could create a multi-tier share structure where controlling ownership belongs to the founder whereas financial interest in the business belongs to the holders of other equity flavors, which is fairly common (e.g. Meta, Snap are structured this way).

Then the founder can [choose to] sell those cash-flow-stocks while holding on to the ownership stock.

It's utterly hyperbolic to suggest that a wealth tax would kill privately-controlled corporations.

No no don’t listen to ramesh31!! nyc is dangerous and has terrible weather and limited/terrible outdoor activities on offer!

I deeply regret moving here from California over a decade ago and am eagerly awaiting to one day return soon.

(:

I'd encourage you to actually run this exercise! I think you'd be surprised.

I've proctored some interviews where we give people an LLM, and a fairly open problem (similar to "Build a game where you do X").

The first couple of iterations are a similar, but it diverges pretty quickly depending on where the human is focusing their attention. The logical bugs of different subsystems are a bit predictable, but the final results pretty reliably contain the "fist" [1] of the human.

Of course they're similar in the ways that all software are similar. But every human is knowledgeable and/or cares about specific things more than others, and that absolutely shows up in each iteration final product.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code

When I'm using an LLM to program these days, I increasingly feel like I'm directing one of those renaissance-era painting schools that were sort of like painting-factories, where some Great Master would direct the output of a dozen or more painting-technicians to construct unreasonably-large and detailed paintings on unreasonably-brief time-scales.

They would still come in at the end of the day to add their brush strokes to pieces of the canvas that they thought needed extra attention. We still refer to those paintings as if they were made by the Great Master, and justly so because their artistic imprint is felt in the final work.

In the same way where if you and I were asked to write the same game with an LLM, they would come out looking pretty distinct from each other. And if we wrote them by hand, they would be distinct from each other and the LLM-assisted ones again. All of them are still art and games, though, it'd be silly to call them anything else.

I agree with you that polish and fine-tuning is faster to do by hand when you are well-appraised of the foundations. I think a lot of the challenge of developing Real Software with LLMs today is maintaining the appropriate proximity to the work, when we are no longer holding the paint brush ourselves, so to speak.

We were discussing this classic at work today...

How do you all think LLM-assisted coding has interacted with the thesis of this deck?

This is perhaps in contrast to this recent blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-con...

In normal times, choosing to roll your own source control would be akin to spending all your innovation tokens at once. Obviously, Anthropic is now a google-esque corporation so they have many tokens to spend. But one of the implications of that blog post is that non-google-esque corporations may now actually have more innovation tokens than we had previously.

Curious what the wisdom of the HN crowd thinks!

I can confirm! I have an eARC setup with an AppleTV, 2 big homepods, a gaming PC and a projector.

I had to buy a special HDMI switch because my projector is eARC-naive, but my understanding is that a lot of modern TVs are eARC-aware and a special switch is not required. The one downside to my setup is that I have to press a button on the HDMI switch to toggle between the PC and the AppleTV, no remote control, but hey it's good to stretch your legs now and then right?

Re audio quality, I really like my big HomePods and find they fill the room quite well and have a solid low range to them. I'd also agree that the HomePod Minis are not suitable for a living room entertainment experience.

Just be wary that if your app is a high-write-throughput or high-update-frequency system, this is not a free lunch!

The indices will bloat in size (postgres does not vacuum them in the way a table is vacuumed), and begin to bottleneck primary writer latency.

You should repack the indices every once in a while (you can set up monitors on index bloat) with something like pg_repack, and make sure that your indices are minimally-sized (i.e. omit rows that are never scanned, use pg_stat to verify which indices are actually used by the primary or read-replicas).

There’s this really quirky and interesting book on this topic, called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Basically this (totalitarian agriculture genociding alternative cultures) has happened everywhere and his thesis is that the total extermination aspect in particular is a novel aspect of farming culture, which did not exist for hunter-gatherers or herders. Not that violence didn’t exist, but exterminating violence was very rare.

He also connects it to the founding myths of Adam and Eve (who are cursed to practice agriculture, instead of being hunter-gatherers, and who believe they have the power of good and evil to know what plants and animals should live and which should die), and Cain (who sacrifices wheat, representing agriculture and land ownership) and Abel (who sacrifices a goat, representing a herding lifestyle).

If that sounds at all interesting to you should totally read it, it’s a really clever book!

archived article: https://archive.ph/YRYU9

Founders swim in the incentive pool of VCs, who swim in the incentive pool of LPs, who swim in the incentive pool of capital-c Capital.

When you architect your industry around "number goes up" as the number one priority that everybody agrees on, and then add multiple layers of abstraction separating capital from labor, you end up with the Ouroboros-style arrangement we have today. The head forgets that it is the tail, and vice-versa.

I think we used to (in, idk, the era of the Roosevelts) have a very different leadership class, with competing interests that were more complicated than "number go up", even in the corporate class.

Since the Kennedy assassination(s!) in the US, I don't think we've had a single leader (corporate or political) who has publicly and sincerely questioned that narrative. At this point we struggle to imagine a civilization with alternative priorities, but history is littered with examples.

Yes I tweaked it! The number and copy were mismatched and are no longer!

That worst day is likely an overlapping incidents accounting issue; I tried to account for overlapping incidents in another view but probably failed to port it over there.

Should be fixed soon!

Hey! isgithubcooked.com is my site; I made this site in February '26, I think

The contribution graph as an outage calendar idea is a commonly recurring one :). I definitely saw it somewhere else as a static asset first before I made this site.

Also, isn't it a major plot point that replicants are not allowed on Earth?

So Deckard being a replicant operating on Earth is illegal; making his status as a replicant "obvious", by endowing him with superhuman traits (or even self-knowledge) would be ill-advised!

I think it's challenging to disentangle the effects from AI from the cyclical supply and demand cycle of junior engineers in a post-ZIRP world.

People who are currently junior engineers (i.e. graduating class of 2024+) chose their majors in a ZIRP economy (2021 and earlier) that could not hire enough engineers fast enough, but graduated into an economy that was post-ZIRP and is still actively trimming software engineers from the work force (2024 and beyond).

LLMs only became a factor in hiring in the summer of 2025. But by then there was already a massive oversupply (relative to demand) of fresh CS graduates.

My personal opinion is that the market is not (yet) rough because of AI, it's actually mostly just rough because we're not in ZIRP anymore. AI is maybe making it worse on the margin, and is a convenient excuse, insofar as its easier to both scapegoat and reason about.

[1]: Software dev job postings on indeed in the US. Peaked in 2021, before falling off a cliff. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

[2]: % of CS grads relative to all college enrollments; which peaked in class of 2026 (enrollment as of '22). https://www.reveliolabs.com/news/social/computer-science-has...

To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that this project is ecologically beneficial or neutral (I think that part is beyond debate for many reasons including the noise pollution you've identified)

I was just trying to say that the marshland restoration stuff is likely not lip service, insofar as they actually do need wetland buffer zone to keep their launchpads above sea level.

Building multi-decade service life infrastructure on the coast in this era of the Anthropocene actually requires you (from an engineering point of view, not merely a regulatory one) to have a buffer zone of wetlands, marshes and sea walls to absorb storm surges.

You can still choose to read that cynically, but I think the cynical angle is taking moral ecological credit for a pragmatic engineering reality :P

Really cool to see the difference in token usage across different harnesses.

These kind of independently-verified data points will be super important for companies (and individuals!) trying to measure RoI on token spend as they recover from letting people go wild on token usage in the past year.

Yea to be clear I think >70% of the information is not profession specific.

I just think about all the content I’ve consumed in my life to become a professional software developer and I would be very surprised if it couldn’t be adequately represented by <30GB of uncompressed text. Most of the work was in “training”, not really in data.

The “foundational overlap” of K-12 education is identical for most professions with 2-8 years of “finishing” on top.

My mental model is that the budget is spread across maybe 20% genetics (most of our instinctive/genetic information is surely pretty useless), 50% k-12 education, 30% for professionally-specific knowledge.

IDK, 30GB is a lot of data when we're talking about text!

Moby Dick, uncompressed, is ~1MB. Compressed, it's around 500KB.

I feel fairly certain that one could fit all of the textual knowledge required to cultivate a world-class <insert name of preferred professional knowledge worker> in <60,000 Moby Dicks. (Arguably in <5,000 Moby Dicks with intense effort/pruning).

just curious; which fable/opus versions are you using?

Fable-1m-max-thinking output, despite being incredibly slow and expensive, feels like it bucked a trend towards superficial loquaciousness in their models that had been building since 4.6.

I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to upgrading models, fable was the first one to make me give up Opus 4.6-1M-max.

On your second part:

Many of the most valuable companies in the world (who, incidentally, are spending the most money on frontier model inference), already have "the expensive part", the labeled dataset.

The cost of maintaining the datasets and the models is getting commoditized by startups like braintrust and huggingface.

Thank you to the HTMX-folks for keeping software fun! I've been a happy HTMX user and Grug essay forwarder since it first made the rounds here on HN. This was an instant purchase :)

And another nontrivial one, in compound indices it’s really important that you order your columns in descending selectivity order. I.e. the column with the most unique values should go first.

In degenerate table/index situations, this could lead to index scans that are as slow as table scans, or not using an index at all! Especially common in SaaS schemas where you’re dealing with a tenancy key in many of the indicies: that tenancy key should almost always suffix the composite key not prefix it!!

If you have a horizontally scaled app (many 100s of API servers and async workers) you’re also probably going to need a connection pooling proxy like pgbouncer! with separate pools for separate connection configs (lower/higher timeouts, reader/writer). There’s a section on this that’s a bit of a stub right now, but IME tuning and configuring these connection poolers is pretty nontrivial and worth an expanded section!

I’ve seen this pointed out in other comments but I’d also strongly recommend expanding with a section on monitoring and alerting. One could write a blog post almost of this length just on monitoring :)

> It's different now and children are being encouraged to transition. They aren't just told that some are naturally uncomfortable with their gender, but that conforming to a gender is abnormal. Way more are doing it than before, and even afterwards are committing suicide at high rates

The range of human (mis-)behavior is extremely wide, so I wouldn’t doubt that some doctors and patients are doing what you fear here. I don’t think we should form opinions on such a broad situation on the basis of a few extreme people and situations.

The question I would ask is would you rather have more people suffer from not having care, than some people suffer from receiving care that they later regret? The latter is something that’s incredibly sad, no doubt, but it’s an intractable and tragic side effect of offering major medical treatments and interventions in general; the “false positive” aspect is not unique to gender affirming care, either in its existence or its magnitude. (The politicizing of the false positive is, though, because gender in general is incredibly politicized).

Gender dysphoria solved by one-way-door gender affirming care is quite rare (there are many intermediary steps people can try and ultimately be helped with), but education about the issue and the availability of treatment helps people like my friend. I think it’s pretty unambiguously positive to universalize the availability of that care in the same way as any other form of healthcare and education, because it’s genuinely the only way some people can feel comfortable in their skin. And although there may be problems with the standard of care, the standard for care can only improve with time and experience.

I’m curious, do you personally know anybody who’s gone through gender-affirming-care?

For me it was a really confusing issue until I became close friends with someone whose childhood best friend is trans.

If he was born a decade earlier, he probably would have killed himself (this was the path he was on, which is incredibly tragic and all too common); the gender dysphoria invoked depression was unbearable.

Instead, he was able to work through therapy and medical care to understand his gender dysphoria and receive gender affirming care in his late teens.

Now (over a decade post treatment) he’s among the most cheerful people I’ve ever met. He inspires joy as a band teacher, is inspiringly happily married, and is raising a beautiful baby girl.

I often think about him when people talk about the issue in the abstract. The hundreds of children whose lives he’s impacted for the better, let alone the lives of his friends and family. Removing gender affirming care is implicitly saying you don’t want any of that to happen, because the logical conclusion of removing is people like him in a pit of depression and despair that often ends in suicide, all over an affliction that they did not choose.

This is where the “medically necessary” part of gender affirming care comes from.

I didn’t understand it before I knew him and his story so I don’t begrudge people who are in shows I used to walk in. But I’d encourage people to try to understand and lead with empathy and meet people where they are.

Disclosure that I work for Graphite->Cursor->??? :^)

FWIW, Origin is owned by the Graphite folks inside of Cursor: the project was announced by Tomas, Graphite co-founder, at Cursor's Compile conference today.

https://graphite.com/ if you're not familiar, is a tool built on top of GitHub!

Amazon is a large Anthropic shareholder (>5% of the cap table).

I think it’s impossible to interpret the actions of their executives here without considering this information.