Hacker News: 0x445442

New comment by 0x445442 in "Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop"

0x445442 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 12:21:45 +0000

Yeah the social media giants cribbed Lifestreams sort of with the timeline but without the search capabilities that were a cornerstone of the paper. You can see glimpses of this metaphor elsewhere with email, rss and news readers but it would be interesting to make that the centralized metaphor of an entire system for all the system's data.

New comment by 0x445442 in "Jev in 25 Lines of Python"

0x445442 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:17:23 +0000

If something is task-specific (well understood) wouldn't this be a good candidate for a computer program?

New comment by 0x445442 in "MCP was always a bad idea?"

0x445442 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:25:18 +0000

Just tell the clanker to read the api documentation that should already exist. You dont need an MCP server for that.

New comment by 0x445442 in "MCP was always a bad idea?"

0x445442 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:41:07 +0000

What interactions with internal tools? If you can answer that question then the clankers can help you write a deterministic program for that same interaction and you only spend the tokens once.

New comment by 0x445442 in "MCP was always a bad idea?"

0x445442 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:36:29 +0000

MCPs are a bad idea because they encourage token burn at runtime when a deterministic program that uses the API should be used.

Of course Mario, Sammy, Jensen et al. would be for this.

New comment by 0x445442 in "Why MCP Was Always a Bad Idea?"

0x445442 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:26:45 +0000

I'm old enough to remember the OpenAPI spec.

New comment by 0x445442 in "Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'"

0x445442 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 18:42:34 +0000

I don't know if it's even OK for a cop to just randomly watch a random street corner without a specific reason to do so. If a cop was following a given person around all day every day without probable cause would this not be considered harassment? If we view the Flock Camera network as a single system is this not harassment?

New comment by 0x445442 in "OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework"

0x445442 — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:43:31 +0000

This is what I've been mulling over for months. Surely there's a better, more rigorous specification format than Markdown prose that already exists in the industry and is useful to the agents. Formal Use Cases perhaps? Probably not Gherkin but maybe some other spec DSL.

New comment by 0x445442 in "Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs"

0x445442 — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:54:49 +0000

I agree with this but what I've been trying to answer the last few months is if there was an optimal language for the spec. As with you, I don't think it's English Markdown, but I don't think it's Java either. I also don't think it's Gherkin, Lisp perhaps? I'm still searching.

New comment by 0x445442 in "I have a theory that software drives people insane"

0x445442 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:32:23 +0000

Upper management material right there.

New comment by 0x445442 in "Codes – typed application outcomes for Kotlin and Java"

0x445442 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:48:25 +0000

Result { String resultCode; T data; List errors; }

New comment by 0x445442 in "Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence"

0x445442 — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:04:48 +0000

The Architects you're describing aren't reviewing the code and making suggestions for changes so your comparing apples and oranges. What I'm describing is more of a team lead to team members relationship.

New comment by 0x445442 in "Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence"

0x445442 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:41:16 +0000

I realized recently the LLMs are calling bullshit on the moniker of engineer or programmer that I've bestowed on myself over the course of my career. The current LLMs are making it quite easy to seperate software design from implementation. I used to be firmly in the camp that one really needed to roll up their sleves, sit down with an editor and start banging away until the software evolved and coalesced around a solution.

I convinced myself that functional specs and detailed design documents were not needed because they wouldn't be kept in sync with the code. But the LLMs are essentially turning the synthesis of the code from those documents to a compilation step of sorts.

Now I must ponder the question, what portions of the acts of coding, designing and delivering a working product were the portions that bring me joy. I've been attempting to answer this question by making a concerted effort to delegate the coding to the LLMs and reviewing if the code conforms to the designs I've written down. This process is much closer to the historical engineering disciplines but I have to say, its not been easy.

My advice to the the more junior reading this. Experiment with different functional and design spec formats that best serve the LLMs and develop the skill of writing these and then managing the LLMs.

TLDR, the LLMs are giving the term Software Engineering actual meaning.

New comment by 0x445442 in "Why Wikipedia cannot claim the Earth is not flat"

0x445442 — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 13:09:27 +0000

The creator of Wikipedia disagrees with you.

https://larrysanger.org/2025/08/on-the-cybersecurity-subcomm...

New comment by 0x445442 in "Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot"

0x445442 — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:15:36 +0000

And Peter Thiel is anagram for The Reptile.

New comment by 0x445442 in "Baseball durations after the pitch clock"

0x445442 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 13:30:26 +0000

My guess is higher run totals.

New comment by 0x445442 in "People Who Hunt Down Old TVs"

0x445442 — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 12:22:32 +0000

I find this dubious since the effect she was describing is caused by resonance frequency. Since, in the example provided, the source is an amplified speaker pushing air in both cases the outcome should be the same. The more famous test of this principle is the breaking of a glass and I would be surprised if this hadn't been done with digital signal inputs.

New comment by 0x445442 in "Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android"

0x445442 — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 12:38:43 +0000

We used to have a very nice option called Blackberry. Oh how I miss those phones.

New comment by 0x445442 in "Why was Apache Kafka created?"

0x445442 — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 12:42:42 +0000

Dozens of microservices, oh one should be so lucky. Try hundreds where the complexity of the whole system rises non-linerarly as a function of each microservice.

New comment by 0x445442 in "Twitter (X) Why is it so toxic?"

0x445442 — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 12:31:18 +0000

There is good content on the site. But it's nearly impossible to get in a convenient way with the UI options. I've glanced at their APIs and it looks possible to build some clients that presented only what you wanted in a chronological order, filterable by accounts but it would take work.