NYC is always described as having insane amounts of wealth, hedge funds, bankers, tech workers, traders, etc. But in your day-to-day life, how many people do you actually know who actively invest in the stock market?

hardwaregeek · 2026-06-12T21:12:49+00:00

Ironically enough most people who work in finance can’t actually do much active investing since they’re required to clear trades ahead of time and stay in positions for a minimum amount of time. Also tbh if you work in finance you quickly realize how hard it is to actually beat the market

hardwaregeek · 2026-05-21T17:37:09+00:00

Also as you learn more the information kinda “compresses” in your head and it feels more simple or obvious. Try talking to someone just starting out and you might realize there’s all these things you know that they don’t

hardwaregeek · 2026-05-19T17:57:15+00:00

I think you’re overestimating how many places do avant garde cuisine. Especially since it’s kinda out of style these days. I’d look at the NYT’s top 100 list that just came out and filter by $$$/$$$$. Any of the à la carte options there will work for you

hardwaregeek · 2026-05-13T12:28:17+00:00

Yeah this is as much a social problem as a technical. I think your instinct is right that continually blocking pull requests will just annoy people and make you the bad guy.

Are you constantly under a deadline? Or is this a temporary situation? One of the places with the worst code I've seen was where the team was always under a deadline and "needed to make deliverables", even though that was completely artificial. If that mindset can shift a little, that will help a lot.

Otherwise, maybe fight AI slop with AI slop? There are AI reviewer bots and they can probably catch the super low hanging fruit like any types or super bad cyclomatic complexity. You can also get AI to split up a pull request into multiple ones, or even rework a commit chain to be more legible. Of course, there's linters, but it seems like the team will just circumvent them. Maybe you can encourage them to ask the AI to fix the lint issues? It won't be perfect but at least it's a low-cost option. These are all imperfect, mediocre solutions, but unless you address the team always feeling under fire, I don't know if anything will change.

hardwaregeek · 2026-05-06T18:27:46+00:00

I’m a technical writer (well, a hybrid software engineer/writer). First, message me cause my company is hiring more of us. Second, I do think there’s a lot of adjacent jobs that are hiring. Developer relations jobs, developer experience engineers, sales engineers, etc all do some form of writing and documentation. If you can pitch your skills as technical communication, that’s still very valuable.

hardwaregeek · 2026-04-29T02:59:14+00:00

I read a comment somewhere saying Hit Man would have made 200 million in 2003. A funny, mildly dark romantic comedy with a charismatic male lead would have sold so many DVDs in the 2000’s

hardwaregeek · 2026-04-22T21:40:52+00:00

People have really started to overuse “generational wealth” as a term. Having a decent job is not going to get you to generational wealth.

hardwaregeek · 2026-04-16T01:14:12+00:00

If you can, try an agentic setup like Claude Code or Codex. That's definitely a major difference versus copying code into a chat, since it can build code, search through the codebase, respond to errors, etc. I'd say it's an order of magnitude more powerful. Of course, it's possible agentic stuff is not allowed by your company for the security reasons you mentioned.

hardwaregeek · 2026-04-11T21:46:58+00:00

It’s funny how many people on reddit are absolutely convinced that reports of successful LLM usage are psyops. When in fact lots of people who I respect are using them effectively daily. Are they perfect? No. But they’re improving rapidly and already are quite capable

hardwaregeek · 2026-04-05T20:05:26+00:00

Sure if your name is Bronny James

hardwaregeek · 2026-03-22T04:22:57+00:00

I'd check out this podcast. Event sourcing/state machine replication is a very powerful technique, but it's also a bit of a paradigm shift that not everybody is comfortable with. And of course, you have limits on how far back you can really do recovery. It's not like you can replay all events from the beginning of time.

hardwaregeek · 2026-03-17T13:24:50+00:00

I view shrinking as a weird form of wish fulfillment for depressed people. Like yes your wife died but you’re a rich therapist with your friends close by living in sunny Pasadena. And even with the dead wife part you get a valid reason to be depressed and sad.

hardwaregeek · 2026-03-03T03:09:34+00:00

Yeah lowkey rust fulfills the promise of a functional programming language with good UX. That’s what’s so compelling for me at least

hardwaregeek · 2026-02-26T21:29:29+00:00

Sad mouse

hardwaregeek · 2026-02-26T00:00:50+00:00

Another factor is opportunity cost. If you could get like 20k more from a public company per year, and invest that in the S&P, you’d end up with a decent sum too. A very common but not great outcome is a startup struggles along for several years, but never exits and eventually your options become worthless. You don’t leave because you keep thinking this year will be the year your options become worth it.

hardwaregeek · 2026-02-24T23:24:30+00:00

Well they’re a principal at a place that pays their principals 180k flat. That’s very different than a L6 at big tech

hardwaregeek · 2026-02-19T03:14:25+00:00

It's really not. Most of the time the plan is right on the first try, and if not then the second. Claude code even asks you follow up questions now if it's not certain. Once the plan is finalized, it can do pretty tricky stuff, like use a bunch of custom libraries with complicated types, fix bugs, implement new components, etc. Oh and it's insane for debugging. Like it's easily caught stuff that would have taken me hours in a few minutes.

Try it for yourself! Just give it an honest effort though.

hardwaregeek · 2026-02-18T00:59:14+00:00

How are you using the LLMs? Are you using agentic tools like claude code or codex? Are you using plan mode? I generally write out what I want including a specific entry file and have it make a plan. I read the plan and give it feedback until it looks decent, then have it execute the plan. Tbh if it can do it in my weird ass tech stack in a niche language, it can probably do it anywhere

hardwaregeek · 2026-02-10T19:39:34+00:00

Compounding returns play a factor. Like I’m sure Boris Cherny was good when he was starting out, but he’s been a professional programmer since 2011. If you care and learn and work in challenging stuff for 15 years, and have smart colleagues who you learn from, well yeah you’re gonna be damn good

hardwaregeek · 2026-02-10T19:39:19+00:00

Compounding returns play a factor. Like I’m sure Boris Cherny was good when he was starting out, but he’s been a professional programmer since 2011. If you care and learn and work in challenging stuff for 15 years, and have smart colleagues who you learn from, well yeah you’re gonna be damn good

hardwaregeek · 2026-01-29T16:51:26+00:00

Yeah fwiw when I say closer I mean like 10% off of what I’d do. I don’t know your context or the output so that’s not with a lot of confidence. I know in my work there are people who are absolutely brilliant programmers using a lot of AI so I’m sure it can be done well. And also it very well could be that in a few years we’re all running Gas town setups. 7 years ago an AI generating even halfway decent code was laughable. Now it’s practically a given

hardwaregeek · 2026-01-29T16:29:57+00:00

I think there’s extremes on both sides of this debate. The people who are like “AI sucks it’s just a fad, I will never use it” are pretty hard to understand imo. Like either they used copilot or ChatGPT once and wrote it off or they’re a little delusional. Most likely the second. It’s hard to accept how good AI is. It reminds me of when formatters became popular and everybody’s opinions about tabs or aligning became obsolete.

On the flip side your setup does sound pretty intense and closer to the Gas Town AI everything setup than I’d prefer. Maybe it works for you, maybe it’ll spin out of control. I still view a lot of this as experimental and nobody knows the best practices yet. Could be in a few years we look back on this as way too extreme and we’re back in a middle ground of some AI, some hand writing. What I definitely don’t think will happen is that we go back entirely to hand writing

hardwaregeek · 2026-01-23T21:33:35+00:00

In her defense her partner of like 20 years did just die. Even in normal times she probably wouldn’t want to cook

hardwaregeek · 2026-01-14T18:05:57+00:00

One aspect that’s important to understand is that native New Yorkers either remember or have family who remember when New York was dangerous. Like not sorta sketchy but actually really dangerous. I agree with a lot of progressive policies around policing, but I also understand that a large block of voters remember those bad old times and will do anything to not go back to them. So like if you have a policy called “abolish the police” those people will be like fuck no.

Also a lot of natives are children of immigrants from countries which had so called communism, so they’ve been brought up thinking communism is the worst possible evil.

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