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chis commented on Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation   a16z.com/building-a16zs-p... · Posted by u/ProofHouse
chis · 19 hours ago
A16Z is consistently the most embarrassing VC firm at any given point in time. I guess optimistically they might be doing “outrage marketing” but it feels more like one of those places where the CEO is just an idiot and tells his employees to jump on every trend.

The funny part is that they still make money. It seems like once you’ve got the connections, being a VC is a very easy job these days.

chis commented on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels   scrollguard.app/... · Posted by u/adrianhacar
ric2z · 6 days ago
chis · 6 days ago
Can confirm this one works great. Tons of nitty little options to customize what experience you get and the dev is clearly active.
chis commented on Claudia – Desktop companion for Claude code   claudiacode.com/... · Posted by u/zerealshadowban
chis · 7 days ago
Really good idea, I’ll have to try it out. The thing I really want is to have the ability to give a recipe for a new Claude code instance - spin up a docker image with code, data, and a running server and then let Claude work against that.
chis commented on Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update   antirez.com/news/154... · Posted by u/antirez
quantumHazer · a month ago
I'm going a little offtopic here, but I disagree with the OPs use of the term "PhD-level knowledge", although I have a huge amount of respect for antirez (beside that we are born in the same island).

This phrasing can be misleading and points to a broader misunderstanding about the nature of doctoral studies, which it has been influenced by the marketing and hype discourse surrounding AI labs.

The assertion that there is a defined "PhD-level knowledge" is pretty useless. The primary purpose of a PhD is not simply to acquire a vast amount of pre-existing knowledge, but rather to learn how to conduct research.

chis · a month ago
If you understand that a PhD is about much more than just knowledge, it's still the case that having easy access to that knowledge is super valuable. My last job we often had questions that would just traditionally require a PhD-level person to answer, even if it wasn't at the limit of their research abilities. "What will happen to the interface of two materials if voltage is applied in one direction" type stuff, turns out to be really hard to answer but LLMs do a decent job.
chis commented on My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures   sankalp.bearblog.dev/my-c... · Posted by u/dejavucoder
ianberdin · a month ago
Reading all these glowing reviews of Claude Code, I still get the feeling that either everyone’s been paid off or it’s just the die-hard fans of terminal windows and editors like Emacs and Vim. Using the terminal is right up their alley—it’s in their DNA.

Every time I read comments saying Claude Code is far better than Cursor, I fire it up, pay for a subscription, and run it on a large, complex TypeScript codebase. First, the whole process takes a hell of a lot of time. Second, the learning curve is steep: you have to work through the terminal and type commands.

And the outcome is exactly the same as with the Claude that’s built into Cursor—only slower, less clear, and the generated code is harder to review afterward. I don’t know… At this point my only impression is that all those influencers in the comments are either sponsored, or they’ve already shelled out their $200 and are now defending their choice. Or they simply haven’t used Cursor enough to figure out how to get the most out of it.

I still can’t see any real advantage to Claude Code, other than supposedly higher limits. I don’t get it. I’ve already paid for Claude Code, and I’m also paying for Cursor Pro, which is another $200, but I’m more productive with Cursor so far.

I’ve been programming for 18 years, write a ton of code every single day, and I can say Cursor gives me more. I switch between Gemini 2.5 Pro—when I need to handle tasks with a big, long context—and Claude 4.0 for routine stuff.

So no one has convinced me yet, and I haven’t seen any other benefit. Maybe later… I don’t know.

chis · a month ago
So far my feeling is that cursor is a bit better for working on existing large codebases, whereas claude does a good job planning and building greenfield projects that require a lot of code.

That does net out to meaning that Cursor gets used way more often, atm.

chis commented on Tell HN: uBlock Origin on Chrome is finally gone    · Posted by u/ipsum2
chis · a month ago
Has anyone made the switch to firefox? I’d be sad to lose my nice google profile integration to chrome and the password manager. And whenever I try Firefox it feels a little bit jankier and slower, but that might just be in my head
chis commented on Async Queue – One of my favorite programming interview questions   davidgomes.com/async-queu... · Posted by u/davidgomes
brettgriffin · 2 months ago
I'm not going to dive into the specifics of my thoughts on this question. I think a lot of comments here address this.

But does anyone else get embarrassed of their career choice when you read things like this?

I've loved software since I was a kid, but as I get older, and my friends' careers develop in private equity, medicine, law, {basically anything else}, I can tell a distinct difference between their field and mine. Like, there's no way a grown adult in another field evaluates another grown adult in the equivalent mechanism of what we see here. I know this as a fact.

I just saw a comment last week of a guy who proudly serves millions of webpages off a CSV-powered database, citing only reasons that were also covered by literally any other database.

It just doesn't feel like this is right.

chis · 2 months ago
I think a lot of fields of engineering have analogous questions actually. EEs ask to explain a circuit or draw a new one. Mech Es ask to design some piece of simple hardware with a clever catch. Interviewing is just hard, it’s impossible to cover breadth of knowledge in 45 mins so we end up with little brain teasers.

This particular question is a bit ill formed and confusing I will say. But that might serve as a nice signal to the candidate that they should work elsewhere, so not all is lost.

chis commented on Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent   allenpike.com/2025/coding... · Posted by u/GavinAnderegg
nickjj · 2 months ago
Serious question, how do you justify paying for any of this without feeling like it's a waste?

I occasionally use ChatGPT (free version without logging in) and the amount of times it's really wrong is very high. Often times it takes a lot of prompting and feeding it information from third party sources for it to realize it has incorrect information and then it corrects itself.

All of these prompts would be using money on a paid plan right?

I also used Cursor (free trial on their paid plan) for a bit and I didn't find much of a difference. I would say whatever back-end it was using was possibly worse. The code it wrote was busted and over engineered.

I want to like AI and in some cases it helps gain insight on something but I feel like literally 90% of my time is it prodiving me information that straight up doesn't work and eventually it might work but to get there is a lot of time and effort.

chis · 2 months ago
I can't believe people are still writing comments like this lol how can it be
chis commented on Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent   allenpike.com/2025/coding... · Posted by u/GavinAnderegg
chis · 2 months ago
Has anyone else done this and felt the same? Every now and then I try to reevaluate all the models. So far it still feels like Claude is in the lead just because it will predictably do what I want when given a mid-sized problem. Meanwhile o3 will sometimes one-shot a masterpiece, sometimes go down the complete wrong path.

This might also just be a feature of the change in problem size - perhaps the larger problems that necessitate o3 are also too open-ended and would require much more planning up front. But at that point it's actually more natural to just iterate with sonnet and stay in the driver's seat a bit. Plus sonnet runs 5x faster.

chis commented on Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent   allenpike.com/2025/coding... · Posted by u/GavinAnderegg
quonn · 2 months ago
Charging $200/month is economically only possible if there is not a true market for LLMs or some sort of monopoly power. Currently there is no evidence that this will be the case. There are already multiple competitors and the barrier to entry is relatively low (compared to e.g. the car industry or other manufacturing industries), there are no network effects (like for social networks) and no need to get the product 100% right (like compatibility to Photoshop or Office) and the prices for training will drop further. Furthermore $200 is not free (like Google).

Can anyone name one single widely-used digital product that does _not_ have to be precisely correct/compatible/identical to The Original and that everyone _does_ pay $200/month for?

Therefore, should prices that users pay get anywhere even close to that number, there will naturally be opportunities for competitors to bring prices down to a reasonable level.

chis · 2 months ago
I think you forgot to consider the cost of providing the inference.

u/chis

KarmaCake day893November 13, 2016View Original