strken (u/strken) - Readit News

strken commented on Vouch github.com/mitchellh/vouc... · Posted by u/chwtutha

Bayko · 16 hours ago

Indian here. You are correct. Expecting any employed Indian software developer to not be able to spare 1$ is stupid. Like how exactly poor do you think we are?!

strken · 15 hours ago

I think the point was that if an aspirational minimum wage worker on a borrowed computer wants to put up a PR then it would cost them less than ten minutes of wages to afford $1USD in the US, while the same worker in India would need to put up about half a day's wages.

This is very noble in theory, but in practice you're not going to get many high-quality PRs from someone who's never been paid to write software and has no financial support.

strken commented on Vouch github.com/mitchellh/vouc... · Posted by u/chwtutha

Fnoord · 20 hours ago

It is a privileged solution. And a stupid one, too. Because $1 is worth a lot more for someone in India, than someone in USA. If you want to implement this more fairly, you'd be looking at something like GDP or BBP plus geolock. Streaming services perfected this mechanism already.

strken · 17 hours ago

This might be by design. Almost anyone writing software professionally at a level beyond junior is getting paid enough that $1 isn't a significant expense, whether in India or elsewhere. Some projects will be willing to throw collaboration and inclusivity out the window if it means cutting their PR spam by 90% and only reducing their pool of available professional contributors by 5%.

strken commented on We mourn our craft nolanlawson.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/ColinWright

Nextgrid · 2 days ago

LLMs are only a threat if you see your job as a code monkey. In that case you're likely already obsoleted by outsourced staff who can do your job much cheaper.

If you see your job as a "thinking about what code to write (or not)" monkey, then you're safe. I expect most seniors and above to be in this position, and LLMs are absolutely not replacing you here - they can augment you in certain situations.

The perks of a senior is also knowing when not to use an LLM and how they can fail; at this point I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what is safe to outsource to an LLM and what to keep for a human. Offloading the LLM-safe stuff frees up your time to focus on the LLM-unsafe stuff (or just chill and enjoy the free time).

strken · a day ago

LLMs are a threat to the quality of code in a similar - but much more dramatic - way to high level languages and Electron. I am slightly worried about keeping a job if there's a downturn, but I'm much more worried about my job shifting into being the project manager for a farm of slop machines with no taste and a complete inability to learn.

strken commented on The F Word muratbuffalo.blogspot.com... · Posted by u/zdw

Veserv · 2 days ago

Of course it is a personal benefit, you are literally benefitting by not spending your own post-tax dollars for something that goes into your stomach. However, there are legal rules that allow categorizing certain such expenses and amounts as a cost of doing business even though the manifest benefit is purely “personal”.

These rules have tightened up since the days of company cars and company houses “expensing” employee cars and houses as a tax advantaged form of compensation. If you try to do that now, that all shows up as “compensation” which is taxed. If you look at say Mark Zuckerberg’s yearly “salary” you will see that it is almost entirely non-monetary compensation for bodyguard services and “paying” for Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, using the plane of Mark Zuckerberg, the person, and paying personal income taxes on that “compensation” even though Mark Zuckerberg was not paid any dollars (for that compensation).

The allocations you are provided and the manner in which you are allowed to spend them are generally considered “safe” from a accounting perspective. There is usually wiggle room above them if you are willing to more thoroughly document or finagle them, but that is extra accounting department cost to do things beyond the safe, well-trod legal path even if it is actually okay at the end of the day.

strken · 2 days ago

None of which is relevant for a $5 box of fibre bars, which fall below the de minimis threshold.

strken commented on The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7

112233 · 2 days ago

"If X is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity" - matches a lot of different X. Maintaining persons health increases productivity. Good education increases productivity. What is playing out now is completely different - it is both irresistible lust for omniscient power provided by this technology ("mirror mirror on the wall, who has recently thought bad things about me?"), and the dread of someone else wielding it.

Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things

strken · 2 days ago

The difference is that we've more or less hit a stable Pareto front in education and healthcare. Gains are small and incremental; if you pour more money into one place and less into another, you generally don't end up much better off, although you can make small but meaningful improvements in select areas. You can push the front forward slightly with new research and innovation, but not very fast or far.

The current generation of AI is an opportunity for quick gains that go beyond just a few months longer lifespan or a 2% higher average grade. It is an unrealised and maybe unrealistic opportunity, but it's not just greed and lust for power that pushes people to invest, it's hope that this time the next big thing will make a real difference. It's not the same as investing more in schools because it's far less certain but also has a far higher alleged upside.

strken commented on NIMBYs aren't just shutting down housing inpractice.yimbyaction.or... · Posted by u/toomuchtodo

margalabargala · 3 days ago

Why do you doubt it? Sounds like the owner didn't care. If it was a house, what would be different?

strken · 3 days ago

Spending 7am to 7pm next to a homeless encampment isn't the same as sleeping next to it, or letting your wife and kids sleep next to it.

Although in this instance I think NIMBYism is less useful than having functioning local government, police, and homeless services.

strken commented on It's 2026, Just Use Postgres tigerdata.com/blog/its-20... · Posted by u/turtles3

saisrirampur · 4 days ago

Agree to disagree here. I see a world where developers need to think about (reasonable) scale from day one, or at least very early. We’ve been seeing this play out at ClickHouse - the need for purpose-built OLAP is reducing from years to months. Also integration with ClickHouse is few weeks of effort for potentially significantly faster performance for analytics.

strken · 4 days ago

I see a world where developers need to think about REASONABLE scale from day one, with all caps and no parentheses.

I've sat in on meetings about adding auth rate limiting, using Redis, to an on-premise electron client/Node.js server where the largest installation had 20 concurrent users and the largest foreseeable installation had a few thousand, in which every existing installation had an average server CPU utilisation of less than a percent.

Redis should not even be a possibility under those circumstances. It's a ridiculous suggestion based purely on rote whiteboard interview cramming. Stick a token_bucket table in Postgres.

I'm also not convinced that thinking about reasonable scale would lead to a different implementation for most other greenfield projects. The nice thing about shoving everything into Postgres is that you nearly always have a clear upgrade path, whereas using Redis right from the start might actually make the system less future-proof by complicating any eventual migration.

strken commented on The Codex app illustrates the shift left of IDEs and coding GUIs benshoemaker.us/writing/c... · Posted by u/straydusk

GalaxyNova · 5 days ago

> I don’t read code anymore

Never thought this would be something people actually take seriously. It really makes me wonder if in 2 - 3 years there will be so much technical debt that we'll have to throw away entire pieces of software.

strken · 5 days ago

I'm torn between running away to be an electrician or just waiting three years until everyone realises they need engineers who can still read.

Sometimes it feels like pre-AI education is going to be like low-background steel for skilled employees.

strken commented on Why poor countries stopped catching up davidoks.blog/p/why-poor-... · Posted by u/j-bos

topaz0 · 6 days ago

Life expectancy vs GDP per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-pe...

I don't have an R^2, but clear to me that it's far from one.

Likewise for infant mortality rate: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-gdp-per-c...

Edit to add: point being that a weak correlation, even if it is indisputably real, leaves a lot of room for other factors to be operative when it comes to particular differences.

strken · 6 days ago

I notice that the two most obvious outliers for low GDP high life expectancy countries are North Korea and Syria, and the low GDP low life expectancy outliers are three African petrostates.

My interpretation is that this confirms both points. Yes, petrostates with concentrated wealth, states with dubious truthfulness, and those ravaged by war are all cases where GDP doesn't tell the full story. I'm not sure that tells us GDP is useless when applied to where most HN users live, though.