Hacker News: 4lx87

New comment by 4lx87 in "Roblox parental controls are a dystopian security disaster"

4lx87 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 15:48:58 +0000

Take them to small claims for all the money you ever spent in Roblox.

New comment by 4lx87 in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

4lx87 — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 14:23:27 +0000

Hard to imagine it would be worse than Republicans, who don’t have any policy except for the whims of a man child.

New comment by 4lx87 in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

4lx87 — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:42:21 +0000

We don’t have to guess. Democrats had a pragmatic policy under Biden — which was rescinded by Trump when he took office.

https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...

New comment by 4lx87 in "Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?"

4lx87 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:03:37 +0000

I think it’s becoming more and more performative. We’ve never been less focused on the actual product — the software — than we are now. The focus is increasingly on how someone generates code, despite that not having much to do with the product.

The software is not getting better. Generating code faster does not result in better software. Software continues to be slow, unreliable, complex, and counter-intuitive. AI has not improved on the metrics that matter.

AI, as amazing as it is, has not actually changed the process of software development and as a consequence, the resulting software has not changed. The job hasn’t either, except insofar as you’re judged for tokenmaxxing.

New comment by 4lx87 in "Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to launch its own prediction market"

4lx87 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:52:25 +0000

The fact that someone has billions of dollars and still chooses to spend 40-60 hours/week going to the office to work on Facebook seems psychotic. He can do practically anything he wants, and he chooses to work on Facebook. It’s mind bending.

New comment by 4lx87 in "The brain was not designed for this much bad news"

4lx87 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:36:30 +0000

Are they? I think it could be the opposite, ironically. Trump is in many ways the result of news media directed at voters, which was mostly misinformation and propaganda.

New comment by 4lx87 in "There are no instances in ATProto"

4lx87 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:55:55 +0000

From a user’s perspective: To use Bluesky I need to create an account, and to create an account I need to choose the server where that account is hosted. Once I have an account I can follow any account even if hosted w/ someone else. That’s the same UX as Mastadon (leaving aside that moving PDS might be easier in ATProto than ActivityPub).

New comment by 4lx87 in "There are no instances in ATProto"

4lx87 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:59:33 +0000

If it quacks like a duck... An account has a single Personal Data Server (PDS), right? The DID links to a PDS which is the canonical data feed for a user, and where a user's writes go. Data can be replicated but the PDS is treated as canonical. That's much closer to client/server architecture than distributed architecture. There's no P2P database. There's no writes into a DHT or peers. You write to your PDS, then those writes are optionally mirrored. Also discovery happens via DNS, so you don't even ask peers for data. You connect to a relay not as a peer but as a client asking a server for a copy of data that's canonically hosted by the PDS. I don't think it's a stretch to call the PDS an instance and the relay a mirror.

New comment by 4lx87 in "AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less"

4lx87 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 03:53:43 +0000

Right, and do you spend so much of your time doing that your net LoC is negative? If that's the case it implies people are writing code only for other programmers to clean it up. Programmers solving a problem created by programmers. That's dysfunctional. Effective engineering as I see it would be putting the processes in place to prevent having to constantly rewrite code.

New comment by 4lx87 in "AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less"

4lx87 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:12:58 +0000

> Because they were added doesn't mean they were needed and even if the same person added and then removed them, it doesn't mean they are digging ditches to fill them.

Huh? If LoC weren't needed then adding them was unnecessary and a waste of time. Someone who is known at an organization for removing unnecessary code screams inefficiency to me. It's paying one person to create a mess then another to clean it up.

New comment by 4lx87 in "AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less"

4lx87 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:08:46 +0000

It’s not a failure that resources were spent writing code that was not needed?

New comment by 4lx87 in "AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less"

4lx87 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:46:12 +0000

The most effective contributors at your job remove more code than they add? That doesn't sound effective that sounds like digging ditches to fill them. Every line of code removed is a line that was previously added.

New comment by 4lx87 in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

4lx87 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:56:57 +0000

No, those are the shareholders who don’t produce anything.

New comment by 4lx87 in "Apple WWDC 2026"

4lx87 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:18:49 +0000

No parents on HN? The new parental controls are everything I could ask for.

The Bluesky firehose if everyone was messaging you

4lx87 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:02:47 +0000

Article URL: https://hah.spencer.place/messages

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48379409

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by 4lx87 in "Three Ways to Get Paid (2018)"

4lx87 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:54:30 +0000

Nobody wants to hear "no". The way you say "no" without saying it is by turning "no" into an option, and attaching costs to options.

"no, I won't be able to make it in time" would be "I can confidently deliver in time if I have X, and we save Y and Z for later."

New comment by 4lx87 in "Ask HN: What Is an "AI Engineer"?"

4lx87 — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:45:03 +0000

“AI Engineer” is already out-of-date. You need to be an “AI GTM engineer”.

New comment by 4lx87 in "OpenAI Is Preparing to File for an IPO Soon"

4lx87 — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:20:39 +0000

OpenAI reported ~$20 billion annualized revenue for 2025, up from $6 billion the year before.

New comment by 4lx87 in "Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]"

4lx87 — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:06:20 +0000

It is insane, but my past experience with GCP is they suspended all service only days after a failed payment, after years of paying on time. It's a major factor in why I don't use them anymore. I'm not waking up to angry customers again because the CC is expired and I missed an email.

I'd be curious to know why Railway's account was suspended. Was it a similar payment issue or something else?

New comment by 4lx87 in "Magical Realism: “Northern Exposure” 25 Years Later (2015)"

4lx87 — Sun, 17 May 2026 22:07:19 +0000

Find the German or UK international DVD release for original music. Region 1 DVDs have replacement music for licensing reasons, and it changes the show for the worse.

One of my favorite shows.