Hacker News: 2sk21

New comment by 2sk21 in "AWS Bedrock to require sharing data with Anthropic for Mythos and future models"

2sk21 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:46:52 +0000

This seems more like a marketing move though following the old dictum that all publicity is good publicity.

New comment by 2sk21 in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

2sk21 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:35:40 +0000

You can turn off the "smart" features in the settings page for gmail. I did this and find it to be much more usable!

New comment by 2sk21 in "Mirage Reasoning: The Illusion of Visual Understanding"

2sk21 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:53:35 +0000

This is just insane! Why hasn't this bubbled up to the top?

New comment by 2sk21 in "How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills"

2sk21 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:11:00 +0000

You can, most certainly, drive a car without understanding how it works. A pilot of an aircraft on the other hand needs a fairly detailed understanding of the subsystems in order to effectively fly it.

I think being a programmer is closer to being an aircraft pilot than a car driver.

New comment by 2sk21 in "Prism"

2sk21 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 23:18:21 +0000

Indeed - there is a lot of fake "productivity" going on with these swarms of agents

New comment by 2sk21 in "I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?"

2sk21 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:08:49 +0000

I was reminded of this classic short story by Isaac Asimov, The feeling of Power: https://archive.org/details/1958-02_IF/page/4/mode/2up

New comment by 2sk21 in "I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?"

2sk21 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:06:59 +0000

I feel grateful that I retired a few years ago and no longer have to make a living being a developer.

New comment by 2sk21 in "Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI""

2sk21 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:23:33 +0000

This reminds me of the early 1980s, when home PCs were still very new, the main use cases that vendors used to promote were managing household accounts and recipes. These use cases were extremely unimpressive for most ordinary people. It took a long time for PCs to become ubiquitous in homes - until gaming and the web became common.

New comment by 2sk21 in "Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”"

2sk21 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:20:04 +0000

IDEs used to be extremely expensive back in the 1990s. IDEs such as Microsoft Visual Studio and IBM's Visual age for Java were quite expensive subscription as I recall. subsequently, open source IDEs like Eclipse and VisualStudio seem to have become the norm.

New comment by 2sk21 in "I Ran an AI Misinformation Experiment. Every Marketer Should See the Results"

2sk21 — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:57:38 +0000

The next generation of SEO - this article is both hilarious and disturbing

New comment by 2sk21 in "Weird Generalization and Inductive Backdoors: New Ways to Corrupt LLMs"

2sk21 — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 22:34:40 +0000

This is absolutely mind boggling. Why hasn't this bubbled up to the top of HN?

New comment by 2sk21 in "The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review"

2sk21 — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 11:59:44 +0000

Reviewing someone else's large pull request is like having a second task in parallel with what you are working on yourself!

New comment by 2sk21 in "OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems"

2sk21 — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 22:36:06 +0000

Telecom vendors were doing exactly this before the dotcom crash of 2000

New comment by 2sk21 in "My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures"

2sk21 — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 22:12:45 +0000

I'm curious: Do you scrutinize every line of code that's generated?

New comment by 2sk21 in "I use Cursor daily - here's how I avoid the garbage parts"

2sk21 — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 11:14:01 +0000

I read this point in the article with bafflement:

"Learn when a problem is best solved manually."

Sure, but how? This is like the vacuous advice for investors: buy low and sell high

New comment by 2sk21 in "The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise"

2sk21 — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 15:49:14 +0000

Indeed, there have been so many new activation functions that I have stopped following the literature after I retired. I am glad to see that people are trying out new things.

New comment by 2sk21 in "The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise"

2sk21 — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:00:33 +0000

I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention that one of the key factors that enabled deep learning was the use of RELU as the activation function in the early 2010s. RELU behaves a lot better than the logistic sigmoid that we used until then.

New comment by 2sk21 in "ChatGPT Search"

2sk21 — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 13:07:04 +0000

I would be happy if it could search through my enormous reading list on Safari

New comment by 2sk21 in "Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]"

2sk21 — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 18:48:03 +0000

I worked summers in a lab in the 1980s that had Silicon Graphics, Apollo and Sun workstations. The Sun was the easiest to program by far so it got the most use.

New comment by 2sk21 in "Microsoft forgot to renew their Office CDN certificate"

2sk21 — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 15:49:21 +0000

Yeah - it was pretty chaotic when I was there too. We had to use the internal purchase order system to buy certificates from a CA. It was cumbersome as it required several levels of approval. I have long since quit IBM thankfully and had forgotten all about it until I saw this post today :-)