Hacker News: 4star3star

New comment by 4star3star in "The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Worse Than You Thought"

4star3star — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:36:12 +0000

It's hard to grapple with the degree of the offense. It is offensive. Imagine a small village a couple hundred years ago with a central square and something like a bulletin board. Someone paints an explicit painting using a village youth's face an puts it on the bulletin board. That's going to create quite a stir, and maybe a lynch mob. I don't want to trivialize the offense.

That said, there's the question of where the line is drawn. If I clip from a biology textbook an image of a nude woman, and I clip the Gerber baby's head and paste it onto the nude woman's head, what is that? If I generate the face of a young boy, then draw a stick figure under it and give the stick figure a stick erection, what is that? I don't know. I mean these things are weird and offensive, but to what degree?

New comment by 4star3star in "XML Is a Cheap DSL"

4star3star — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:59:44 +0000

In case it helps anyone tinkering with XML and C#, Visual Studio has a feature in the menu to "paste xml as classes". That can be quite handy if you're going to be deserializing it.

New comment by 4star3star in "How do you capture WHY engineering decisions were made, not just what?"

4star3star — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:47:43 +0000

As a counter point, it may be quite subtle and hard to notice what goes wrong when you remove something to see what happens. Imagine you see a large sql query that has a bit of logic that doesn't make sense to you. If you go change it without knowing why it was that way, and users keep on using report output from that query, who is going to notice when they get 982 records in their report instead of 983 one day? It's easy to spot when erroneous data APPEARS, but it's a lot harder to notice when valid data DISAPPEARS. Oh, they really did have a good reason to use outer apply instead of cross apply, there. Oops.

New comment by 4star3star in "How do you capture WHY engineering decisions were made, not just what?"

4star3star — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:42:20 +0000

This seems reasonable to me. Devs and BAs flesh out business processes and ultimately document decisions in our Jira issue comments. When you have an issue id handy, it's not that hard to go read what the rationale was for a feature.

I have been ignoring Jira's AI summary, but I suppose that could be useful if the comments were very long.

New comment by 4star3star in "AI and the Ship of Theseus"

4star3star — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:28:52 +0000

I agree. If we look to music, how can a musician unhear what they've heard? We celebrate musicians when they cite their influences. In the case of a software library, it is a tool, not a work of art. Its beauty is in accomplishing a specific, useful task. If we can accept musicians drawing inspiration from all the music they've ever listened to, we should be able to do the same for software, especially when its internal code is unrecognizable from a similar tool.

New comment by 4star3star in "Why I don't think AGI is imminent"

4star3star — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 16:16:37 +0000

We are currently at a point where the master furniture craftsmen are doing quality assurance at the new automated furniture factory. Eventually, everyone working at the factory will have never made any furniture by hand and will have grown up sitting on janky chairs, and they will be the ones supervising.

New comment by 4star3star in "Bunny Database"

4star3star — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:10:09 +0000

Why choose this over Cloudflare D1?

New comment by 4star3star in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

4star3star — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:53:30 +0000

The soap opera effect drives me nuts. I just about can't watch something when it's on. It makes a multimillion dollar movie look like it was slapped together in an afternoon.

New comment by 4star3star in "How to build silos and decrease collaboration on purpose"

4star3star — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 21:50:31 +0000

Why don't you invest in some 3D scanning equipment/software. Build the physical object or close to it, then scan it and tweak it in software, doing the whole process backwards.

New comment by 4star3star in "Go ahead, write the “stupid” code"

4star3star — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 18:49:37 +0000

The analogy is strained. Software is closer to a food recipe than a building. Trying to make a 3-layer strawberry banana cake with pineapple frosting? You are going to have to bake something and taste it to see if your recipe is any good. Then make some adjustments and bake some more.

New comment by 4star3star in "13 reasons SQL has got to go"

4star3star — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 21:12:12 +0000

The author is like, "OMG, so many tables everywhere, jeez!" Uh, yeah bud, you new here?

New comment by 4star3star in "I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file"

4star3star — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:59:37 +0000

I've got loads of Notepad++ tabs open for various things. No concerns about having to save them as they auto save, and they persist if the system reboots for whatever reason. Other than that, I just use indentation to organize related items.

New comment by 4star3star in "Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting"

4star3star — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:14:05 +0000

The writing felt like it was deliberately long-winded as though being so would complement the point it was trying to make. IMO, the author did not make a compelling case that their wordiness was worth the time spent reading it.

New comment by 4star3star in "LLM Inevitabilism"

4star3star — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 14:10:24 +0000

At the heart of it all is language. Logic gates to assembly to high level programming languages are a progression of turning human language into computed processes. LLMs need to be tuned to recognize ambiguity of intention in human language instructions, following up with clarifying questions. Perhaps quantum computing will facilitate the process, the AI holding many fuzzy possibilities simultaneously, seeking to "collapse" them into discrete pathways by asking for more input from a human.

New comment by 4star3star in "High tariffs become 'real' with our first $36K bill"

4star3star — Thu, 08 May 2025 17:10:21 +0000

It would make a lot more sense to boil the frog over a long period of time with steady, scheduled increases in tariffs instead of pouring scalding water on everyone's heads all at once. Even with plenty of capital and willpower and know how, it takes plenty of time for industry to be built out. Under ideal conditions, even, these tariffs are harmful (and we don't have ideal conditions).

New comment by 4star3star in "In Defense of Y'All"

4star3star — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 18:10:07 +0000

I knew I explained that poorly. What I mean is that, in comparing "y'all" to "all y'all", a simple "y'all" is "you guys (and maybe me)" while "all y'all" is "you guys and not me".

Grammatical constructs can have a lot of variation between languages, and there are certainly nuances that can't be expressed in English the same way that it can be in other languages. One thing we lack is a nuanced sense of past, while other languages have baked in ways to express recent past or distant past (e.g. Bantu languages).

My proposed interpretation regarding "all y'all" is not academic, just a native feel, and I'm sure other native speakers could disagree.

New comment by 4star3star in "In Defense of Y'All"

4star3star — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 21:09:24 +0000

"y'all'dn't've"

New comment by 4star3star in "In Defense of Y'All"

4star3star — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 21:08:24 +0000

Having never given much thought to it, your analysis rings true to my native Texan ears.

There's another usage that comes to mind, though. One might argue that "y'all" borders on a second person plural inclusive of the speaker whereas "all y'all" marks a distinction between the speaker and the others. For instance, a peeved person would be more likely to say, "All y'all can kiss my ass," as opposed to, "Y'all can kiss my ass." "Y'all" by itself is more friendly and self-inclusive than "all y'all", which carries an inherent otherness to it.

New comment by 4star3star in "We Built a Self-Healing System to Survive a Concurrency Bug at Netflix"

4star3star — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 16:03:38 +0000

I think they just needed a quick and dirty solution that was good enough for a few days. They figured that for 1% failure per hour, they needed to kill x processes every y minutes to keep ahead of the failures. I'm sure it would be much more efficient but also more complicated to try to target the specific failures, and the "good enough" solution was acceptable.

New comment by 4star3star in "We built a self-healing system to survive a concurrency bug at Netflix"

4star3star — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 15:49:53 +0000

Your take is much different than mine. The issue was a practical one of sparing people from working too much over one weekend since the bug would have to wait until Monday, and the author willingly described the solution as the worst.