ivanech

Wow, that’s an egregious chart crime. Surely there’s a way to make a chart that isn’t so dishonest. Just plotting the SPR level would make the same point honestly.

Hmm in my experience (I've done a lot of head-to-heads), Opus 4.6 is a weaker reviewer than GPT 5.4 xhigh. 5.4 xhigh gives very deep, very high-signal reviews and catches serious bugs much more reliably. I think it's possible you're observing Opus 4.6's higher baseline acceptance rate instead of GPT 5.4's higher implementation quality bar.

This feels similar to March 2020 when COVID was in Seattle. “It’s in the US but maybe it’s just a one-off.” We’ll see, I guess.

this was really delightful. The Easter eggs in particular made it feel like someone was actually on the other side

I find Opus 4.5 very, very strong at matching the prevailing conventions/idioms/abstractions in a large, established codebase. But I guess I'm quite sensitive to this kind of thing so I explicitly ask Opus 4.5 to read adjacent code which is perhaps why it does it so well. All it takes is a sentence or two, though.

I believe the new grad DOGE employees were GS-15s. So yes, it seems likely that they plan to hire at GS-14 or GS-15.

tried replicating w/ a slightly different system prompt w/ sonnet-4.5 and got some different results, esp w/ progressive to conservative questions. Prompting seems pretty load-bearing here

AI tools have been so good for me for making home-cooked software. As a new-ish parent, it’s so much easier to do stuff. I don’t need to go into extra-deep focus mode to learn how to center a div for the hundredth time, I can spend that precious focus time on the problems that matter / the core motivation.

I had a good laugh at the image showing that 2018 had a “quality focus”

I think Jonathan Blow gave his “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” talk (much stronger treatment of the subject matter) around that time, also about how software quality was only going down

Gold has reached all time highs

this is true

US debt (ie T-bills) selling at all time lows

this is not true unless you’re doing some kind of adjustment. For t bills, us03m yields were much higher 30-40 years ago.

US equities are at all time highs

this is true

USD falling day over day, month over month, year over year

if falling means inflation, yes in banal way. If falling means relative to other currencies, that’s the last 9 months or so. Previously the USD was quite strong

US debt is falling in value because no one wants to buy it

this appears to be the hinge of the argument? It is not true. 10y yields have been down / flat since beginning of 2025 (i.e., price up). also tsy auctions remain well-subscribed / within historical range

I would not debase myself by causing the starvation of children.

Just got it at work today and it’s a dramatic step change beyond Cursor despite using the same foundation models. Very surprising! There was a task a month ago where AI assistance was a big net negative. Did the same thing today w/ Claude Code in 20ish minutes. And for <$10 in API usage!

Much less context babysitting too. Claude code is really good at finding the things it needs and adding them to its context. I find Cursor’s agent mode ceases to be useful at a task time horizon of 3-5 minutes but Claude Code can chug away for 10+ minutes and make meaningful progress without getting stuck in loops.

Again, all very surprising given that I use sonnet 4 w/ cursor + sometimes Gemini 2.5 pro. Claude Code is just so good with tools and not getting stuck.

Amrstrong’s heart rate spiked to >150bpm during the moon landing, more than double his resting heart rate

Thank you, Dan! I really appreciate all the work you do making HN what it is

“Redfin data shows millennials are more or less on track with previous generations”

“more or less” is doing some heavy lifting. The chart referenced shows a pretty dramatic discontinuity between Millennials and Gen X / Boomers from age 25 to 35 w.r.t homeownership rate.

Click the links for “Available” and “Employment” at the bottom — they link to what I assume are the roles he’s looking for

Ha! I was thinking of Google specifically. I imagine it varies significantly then. Maybe 40+ L5 is not an OOM more common than 7, but L5 + L6 I think safely is. Agreed on L7 pay, very doable.

I think you’re right, I see that his resume links to Distinguished Engineer roles at Google / Amazon. Which … I don’t know. At my FAANG-adjacent company, there have only ever been _low_ single-digit number of ICs at that level. We’re talking 0.1-0.3% of all engineers. And they had insane track records.

And FWIW I think that there’s at least an order of magnitude more “happy L5s” older than 40 at FAANGs than senior staff+

I found all the napkin math in this befuddling.

I’m not sure where these “per day” benchmarks are coming from -— is this supposed to be executive pay or mid-level/senior engineer pay? Because $5k - $10k / day works out to $1m - $3m / yr (depending on if you use 200 working days / yr or just 365). Which, yes, happens (esp with good year of stock appreciation) but is not as common as the prose makes it seem.

Also these numbers come from companies like this? “These companies aren’t Google or Apple, but rather some tractor company or heavy manufacturing company just churning out results for year.” Seems unlikely! The post says they fly under the radar, but are there any examples? In general, non-tech companies pay software engineers significantly worse bc you’re a cost center

And this footnote: “if you do the math using practical inflation and cost of living going up 7% to 13% per year” — if you’re going to claim extraordinary inflation over the last decade like that, please share how you arrived at the number!

5 years ago I did a similar analysis of price per part because I remember there being a big controversy around the price of the new Star Destroyer set. I analyzed price per piece but also price per gram, estimated in a few different ways. I was surprised to see that price per gram was stable through the 2010s on an inflation-adjusted basis and that it went down fairly significantly over the 1990s.

I did this before I learned how to finish projects, so it's been sitting in a private repo the whole time :)

I just made the repo public. Perhaps the author or someone else can make use of it: https://github.com/iechevarria/lego-price-analysis/

The plots and code are in this file: https://github.com/iechevarria/lego-price-analysis/blob/mast...

If your goal is become a better programmer, your time is better spent working on challenging programming problems.

If you enjoy math, go do some math. It might help you see problems differently. If you don't enjoy math, don't grind through it.

In general, the best advice for the question "I want to get better at $skill, should I study $subject?" is "just do $skill"

I’ve had a very positive experience with instagram — it’s my favorite social media thing. My feed is friends, paintings, photos, bikes, and furniture.

I also used the shopping tab (never bought anything there though) because its recommendations were great for finding specific things with the aesthetic I was looking for. I wish it was still in the app.

Congratulations on 2022 revenue, and thank you for sharing! Your blog posts are genuinely inspirational because of how honest you’ve been about your mistakes.

I remember reading your first post about bootstrapping and thinking that you were spending a lot of time on weird products and making rash decisions with money. I did not think you’d last long. Very happy to be wrong.

Those early years pre-TinyPilot are what make this success inspiring: they’re proof that you don’t need to immediately start out as a product or business genius to build a real company. It’s an antidote to the “oh I should learn more before starting” attitude that stops me.

I really hope this doesn’t come off like a backhanded “if this idiot could do it, anyone can” comment, because that’s not how I feel. Just trying to express real admiration for your transparency, perseverance, and now success.

I have a copy of the Pure Software Engineering Handbook which was created for internal use only. It's amazingly comprehensive and well-organized. I've never seen any kind of onboarding that comes close.

Just made these changes and the improvement is insaaaane. The most important one IMO is turning off “Predictive” typing. Leaves more room for keys and screen and I never tapped those suggestions anyway. This feels so much better. Thank you.

I get that it seems implausible that there's just money sitting around waiting to be picked up, but it was there. Used autos is a hugely fragmented industry that is only slowly consolidating. Bids + bid strategy are likely still extremely far from optimal. Probably more easy wins out there.

I don't know what the theory says but giving your bidders this rule of thumb works better in practice. Or at least it did some years ago

This can be directly applied to wholesale auto auctions

+1 to Trading at the Speed of Light. A great read, particularly for any engineer curious about clinging to the limits of physics. An example: microwave towers are used to beam data from Chicago to New York because it's faster than fiber optic cables. Even crazier: these microwave towers have their repeater hardware at the top of the tower (microwave towers usually have it at the bottom) so that they don't lose time in wires going from the top to the bottom.

"Take-home technical assignment (~4h)"

Last time I was interviewing, I had ~5 take-home assessments sent to me. I didn't finish any of them. Much easier to prioritize a live interview. Less risk of having my time wasted.