Hacker News: 9dev

New comment by 9dev in "How employment is changing at Anthropic"

9dev — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:47:28 +0000

Wow, that sounds like an AI hellscape! Constant pressure to use AI agents to be more productive. That pressure requires an amount of attention that wears you out so quickly just to stay competitive that you need to build bespoke tools to orchestrate your agentic workflows. But the amount of output from that is too much too, so you need to build meta-orchestrators to orchestrate your orchestrators.

And all of this is then somehow classified as responsible development of AI, by people who claim AI could eradicate humanity, and that RSI will be our downfall. How exactly is outsourcing your work on agents to agents not RSI at this point? Why are these people still allowed to operate again?

New comment by 9dev in "A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes (2024)"

9dev — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:38:52 +0000

There's a difference between NPM package updates and backwards-incompatible API changes, which shouldn't really occur often. Even in the NPM ecosystem, major version updates are not a regular event. So I'll take that over templated YAML in a heartbeat.

New comment by 9dev in "Parser Combinators"

9dev — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:35:51 +0000

It's a cool guide, but you kind of missed the opportunity to parse the packet metadata as arbitrary key-value pairs, i.e. for:

  64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=52 time=47.1 ms

everything after the colon is key-value data, and throwing in a generic parser for `pKeyVal()` would make an even better point of how elegant the approach is.

New comment by 9dev in "A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes (2024)"

9dev — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 10:54:29 +0000

I’ll never understand why people don’t use JSON for generated Kubernetes definitions, which its API understands just fine. YAML is good when you need humans to read and modify it themselves, for config files and such. But why on earth would you use string manipulation tools to compose YAML templates? That takes a special kind of twisted cruelty.

New comment by 9dev in "A skeptic's first contact with Kubernetes (2024)"

9dev — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 10:48:45 +0000

> Yes, but it might throw errors because the client library you're using is too old and attempts to define fields that no longer exist in your newer infrastructure API.

Well. Don’t use a client library that is too old then? Like you do in any other kind of software deployment, where you update your client libraries together with the upstream API you talk to?

New comment by 9dev in "Pele – Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG"

9dev — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 09:46:39 +0000

Amazing. I just migrated the diagrams on the docs site of a project of mine, and they just look great[0]. Before, I had a combination of mermaid, panzoom, and some minor workarounds to get integrated styling and dark theme work right. Pele not only takes care of all of that, but also manages a nicer layout!

[0] https://cetacean.mazetti.me/authentication#oidc

New comment by 9dev in "How the Claude Code team does code review"

9dev — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:12:46 +0000

I hate to say this, but you're now living in a world where the value of artisanal code is rapidly approaching zero. If you still cling to beautifully written code as your core qualification, you're having a rough future ahead of you.

And I say this with the bitterness of someone having lost a big part of what made me enjoy this line of work.

New comment by 9dev in "Tesla Roadster"

9dev — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 10:42:23 +0000

I'd still restrict this to an ability to pursue ideas that others find too risky with relentless persistence and a laser focus. He is able to get something off the ground and make others believe in it, but not good at actually running a stable business. And that's fine, mind you, I absolutely respect what has built. But the person who is responsible for turning SpaceX from an incredibly risky bet into a profit machine is Gwynne Shotwell, not Elon Musk.

New comment by 9dev in "Tesla Roadster"

9dev — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 07:33:45 +0000

If anything his companies are doing well despite of him, not because of him. There's level-headed and competent leadership in them resisting his bullshit.

New comment by 9dev in "Do dentists know what they're doing?"

9dev — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:06:48 +0000

My point was that for the specific critique raised here, the European (or the be exact, the German) healthcare system doesn’t really offer much of an improvement, but suffers from similar problems. The fact that you don’t pay yourself doesn’t change the incentives medical professionals have in terms of getting paid for their work.

New comment by 9dev in "Fire at Starlink site in Bulgaria after suspected sabotage in Poland"

9dev — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 09:23:06 +0000

Lavrov says all kinds of things. Whatever he utters serves a purpose and has no logical relation to truth.

Don’t underestimate the capability of the EU to gridlock itself with decision paralysis. If we were decisive actors, we would have long stopped tolerating the hybrid attacks Russia is deploying against us today. Europe is anything but united now! We’re still purchasing oil from Russia. We can’t even agree on acting against the shadow fleet, or sanctioning all oligarchs, or applying second order sanctions.

A drone loaded with explosives targeting a German airport? We were merely lucky that it had a technical defect, or it may have been a disaster of epic proportions. Do you recall what the reaction to that was? I thought so.

Until we manage to gain some kind of unified agency, you better hope Russia cannot handle the logistics yet.

New comment by 9dev in "Do dentists know what they're doing?"

9dev — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 09:03:57 +0000

Individual doctors working for a clinic are paid a flat salary, true - but the clinics themselves, or the small doctors running their own office are absolutely dependent on accurate billing to the insurances. They have an incentive to optimise their margins, even if patients are not paying directly, and that means both trying to spend as little on care as possible while getting back as much as possible from the insurance providers.

New comment by 9dev in "Do dentists know what they're doing?"

9dev — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 06:07:22 +0000

As a European, I can assure you we have the same problem. Healthcare providers still get payed by the insurance for the work they do, so there’s both an incentive to bill them for as much as possible and also to upsell special premium services the insurance won’t cover for, like better filling materials, invisible aligners, these kinds of things. As a layman, of course you never know if what they are offering you is really the right way, and asking different doctors for their opinion can also lead to wildly different diagnoses.

Perversely though, there is another incentive for doctors to spend as little time as possible with each patient, because they need to justify all time spent and procedures done to the insurance, which is naturally suspicious of the provider to overbill. Thus, they require tons of documentation the provider has to fill out, and neither that nor just talking to a patient for longer than usual are line items they get paid for, leading to appointments being as short as they can manage - usually rushing in, working through the list a medical assistant prepared, annoyedly answering a question if you can manage to slot it in, and rushing out to the next person.

Having a general sense of ease that a malade won’t ruin me or be a death sentence is a good thing, really, and I cannot imagine living another way. But we haven’t really figured it out yet fully either.

New comment by 9dev in "Fire at Starlink site in Bulgaria after suspected sabotage in Poland"

9dev — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:50:53 +0000

> Attacking a NATO country would mean total war for Russia.

Is that so? I wouldn't trust the USA to commit to its NATO responsibilities anymore. The rest of NATO, torn as it is, could just as well find all kinds of reasons why this particular attack isn't a "real" attack, just to avoid the confrontation.

I wouldn't bet on that scenario happening, but as Russia, I wouldn't dismiss it outright either.

New comment by 9dev in "Akhetonics Photonic Computing: 1,000x Faster CPUs"

9dev — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 21:36:32 +0000

We're all adults here, you can spell out BrainFuck just fine.

New comment by 9dev in "IRCv3"

9dev — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 19:30:48 +0000

If you make IRC centralised like this, you’re taking everything away that makes it IRC. You could build the same thing with XMPP, Matrix, or Signal.

New comment by 9dev in "IRCv3"

9dev — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 10:41:01 +0000

That’s just nostalgia. You wouldn’t miss bouncers, worrying about presence, multiple devices, file sharing, and more.

New comment by 9dev in "Apple/macOS silently removed from official Unix registry"

9dev — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 16:50:17 +0000

The point I was making was that knowing what GNU means in the first place probably requires some cultural background that many people lack, especially younger ones.

New comment by 9dev in "Apple/macOS silently removed from official Unix registry"

9dev — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 14:26:31 +0000

It’s a computer. I can make a computer go beep if I want, that is not the issue.

The fact that someone who didn’t grow up at the time when open source was an idealistic concept instead of free support to corporations needs to learn about the gnutils and how to install them with homebrew is what makes me sad.

Why do we seriously not have a command-line package manager on macOS yet? Windows has one by now. It’s just sad to me that you need a manual checklist of post-setup steps to turn a Mac into a useful machine for software development.

New comment by 9dev in "Clinical trial of a prion disease drug candidate begins enrolling participants"

9dev — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:53:53 +0000

Not just technically. Proteins, and the molecular machinery producing them, are just that. Look at the flagellar motor. It's a marvel of (natural) engineering.