Viewing profile — birken

I'd really like to see a regular poll on HN that keeps track of which AI coding agents are the most popular among this community, like the TIOBE Index for programming languages. Ha…

What kind of headcount do you estimate $1MM/year can reliably support? That's like ~2 engineers at FAANG.

This launched at the beginning of the MLB season and can handle anything from simple queries like "Which team has the best record this year?" to complicated queries like "When was …

It is difficult to say this is what consumers want, when right now consumers are getting the best of both worlds: The ease of AI agents without the long-term negative consequences …

While yes, I am attempting to collect ad revenue from users, and yes, I don't want somebody competing with me and cutting me out the loop, a large part of it is controlling my cont…

The AI isn't "reading the web" though, they are reading the top hits on the search results, and are free-riding on the access that Google/Bing gets in order to provide actual user …

A datacenter could consume a lot of water with evaporative cooling. I don't know how prevalent it is, but given how cheap and efficient evaporative cooling is, I'd guess datacenter…

Coincidentally I just had a professionally done garage door spring replacement today, and I asked the repairman this question, and here is what he said: 1. The springs lift the doo…

The people who come up with 409a prices have every incentive to make it as low as possible provided it is somewhat defensible to the IRS. I assure you they can get more creative th…

And then they'd have sold at the higher value, because the sale price is almost certainly higher than whatever the 409a price was.

It might not be a 90% discount but it still will be a >50% discount

And how did that go?

Self driving electric cars are much better than car shares as they'll have significantly higher usage rates and eliminate much of the need for parking spots in dense downtown areas…

I'd just like to note the irony of saying how bad Google is while at the same time saying that Google's general purpose search engine is still better than any of the specific searc…

Generally speaking the people who live in SF aren't comparing SF to Boise, they are comparing SF to other elite cities like NYC, LA, Boston, Austin, etc. And the COL is not 2-3x hi…

You always need somewhere to live, so you can only "sell high" if that means you can "buy low" somewhere else. If all bay area houses go up 10%, then you haven't actually gained an…

I've logged a lot of miles of Comma in a 2023 Hyundai Ioniq and 2022 Toyota Prius Prime, and the built in driving assist of both cars is nowhere near Comma, both in terms of steeri…

As a very happy user of Comma, I think it is reasonable to say the company is going to fail, but that ignores that the product they created is still awesome. Comma is light years b…

Well I guess we'll both agree to disagree about the nuances of the early years of Reddit, something neither of us know anything about. Oh well.

There is a very big difference between giving no credit and giving a fair amount of credit, which might be small. If you listened to the podcast they talked about Aaron in a non-di…

If I had to guess as to why his contributions are marginalized, it would be that his contributions were ~16 years ago to a version of the website that is vastly different in scope …