Hacker News: Igrom

New comment by Igrom in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

Igrom — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:18:16 +0000

I believe you might be replying to a bot account.

New comment by Igrom in "Reverse engineering Android malware from popular Chinese projectors"

Igrom — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:02:47 +0000

In case you are interested in hearing a reader's opinion: the AI writing was noticeable and detracting. The most significant cues for me were the sensational tone and the prolific "clever" one-liners. I think that while it is difficult to make the judgment with any degree of accuracy based on a single suspicious sentence, but given the length of the article, all the individual cues eventually add up to a near certainty.

I think that the sorry thing about the article is that, even though I've read through an article of yours, I have learned nothing about what kind of person you are. I think that there's more to blogging than just showing the work. It's also a stage for you. The displays of character in the article ("I had a feeling", "I sat with that for a minute") written in first person are not actually yours, and are instead, in a way, a performance of the LLM that you used. So in my opinion (and you're free to disagree) you've robbed yourself of the attention you deserved.

However, I assume that the contents of the investigation were true, and if so, they are quite damning (in fact, my SO has just surprised me with a cheap Chinese projector. Nice timing!). It was also great that you've shared the prompts and results at each stage.

New comment by Igrom in "Roman Letters"

Igrom — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:01:39 +0000

serious_angel is not contending with you that the design is bad, or that it is bad because it is unoriginal. In fact, they are not even specifically calling out the design.

They have noticed the design, recognized it as the output of an LLM, then proceeded to discover that an LLM was involved in much of the creation of the project. This is an academic project. Whatever the pedigree of the researcher is, this implies to the grandparent that the final result of the work may be amateurish or worse, to an extent generated. Therefore, he's concerned that it puts the legitimacy of the research outcomes (e.g. completeness, contents of letters, classification, maybe even hallucinations in the thesis proper).

Preemptive arguments:

1. "The author's a researcher, not a programmer; therefore it's fine to use an LLM. It is preposterous to ask each researcher to learn web development to publish their research." You are right, but given the amount of vibe-coded websites we see, and them all having the default (Astro?) style, the grandparent all the same has the right to associate that style with untrustworthy crap. I'm not saying that this academic website is necessarily crap. However, I think it's useful for the grandparent to share their sentiment, because the researcher might not know.

2. "A lot of pages have links to sources; you could verify the legitimacy yourself". perhaps, but doubting the veracity of research is a bad first impression, isn't it?

It's a bit sad, because the website is non-trivial, and would have taken quite a bit of effort without an LLM. But it is difficult to separate webdev enablement with the rest of the LLM baggage.

New comment by Igrom in "SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud"

Igrom — Sat, 16 May 2026 10:26:55 +0000

I was checking the submission on the phone and only peeked at the comments section. While it's not always easy to judge if something is AI-generated or edited, here it was obvious at first glance from the quotes. Assuming that all of the comments were done in good faith, I think that the low AI literacy even here is really concerning.

New comment by Igrom in "The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization"

Igrom — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:24:51 +0000

Flagged for AI content: I hope this submission dies and the user is penalized (look at their submission and comment history!), because IMO the article does not belong on the front page. Quick polemic:

>The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

If you ask me, one could name different criteria for winning, and commercialization would not be the first thing to come to my mind:

https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202604/15/content_WS69df29e6...

https://fortune.com/2026/05/03/chinese-court-layoffs-workers...

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-moves-regulate-dig...

> It also owns platforms that generate and organize the data of the AI age. YouTube is a video corpus. Google Drive and Microsoft 365 sit inside daily office work. GitHub sits inside software development.

Yeah, okay. China does not have any platforms nor data.

New comment by Igrom in "European Lisp Symposium 2026"

Igrom — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:49:48 +0000

The first talk begins in 10 minutes, at 10:00AM UTC+2.

European Lisp Symposium 2026

Igrom — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:49:48 +0000

Article URL: https://european-lisp-symposium.org/2026/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48092188

Points: 29

# Comments: 1

New comment by Igrom in "Knitting bullshit"

Igrom — Wed, 06 May 2026 08:53:47 +0000

Not taking away the right to your opinion, but I couldn't disagree more; I found it an excellent sociological article. One, it takes the formal concept of "bullshit" and applies it to knitting in a very methodical and strict manner. I found it novel and convincing, and the examples were great; not contrived or forced at all. IMO it was much better than many academic books or articles; an immediate share.

Two, the turns of logic are clearly laid out, in a conversational way, which would make it easy to stick a wrench in and form a polemic if you found any of her arguments or logical implications specious. That said, that does make the article quite long. But then, it is anything other than "elliptical", which I think you used as "runs in circles and repeats itself often", while it actually means "omits parts and thus is difficult to understand" (like the ellipsis sign: …).

Also: what the heck is wrong with that podcast farm founder. I hope they have a bad year.

New comment by Igrom in "Six (and a half) intuitions for KL divergence"

Igrom — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:15:58 +0000

Which chapters have you found the most enlightening or useful?

(off-topic: here's my own "recommend everywhere" book, "Attacking Faulty Reasoning" by T. Edward Damer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacking_Faulty_Reasoning).

New comment by Igrom in "Emacs-libgterm: Terminal emulator for Emacs using libghostty-vt"

Igrom — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:12:40 +0000

What do you know, wishes sometimes come true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45351060.

New comment by Igrom in "Typing and Keyboards"

Igrom — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:10:51 +0000

I could never see the need to rebind Ctrl to Caps Lock (and I do use Emacs). Whenever it's time to press Ctrl, I curl my pinky and press that key with my pinky's distal joint. I did, however, swap Fn and the Global key on my Mac.

New comment by Igrom in "So where are all the AI apps?"

Igrom — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:55:05 +0000

You can't mention Hyperbole and not say how you use it. I did not get past the "include the occasional action button in org-mode" phase.

New comment by Igrom in "Jared Kushner Solicits Funds for His Firm While Working as Mideast Envoy"

Igrom — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 22:38:20 +0000

I once won a power bank in an anonymous raffle at a marketing event of a company that could be imagined as our distant competitor. I voluntarily gave it away to another attendee, because God forbid there's a suspicion of a conflict of interest. But I am clearly a bear of very little brain.

New comment by Igrom in "Darkrealms BBS"

Igrom — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:49:16 +0000

Just an occasional visiting scholar.

New comment by Igrom in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)"

Igrom — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:05:31 +0000

Location: Zürich, Switzerland, Europe/EU

Remote: Nice to see. Worldwide okay, depending on arrangement.

Willing to relocate: Poland/Switzerland, optionally China, but depends on the offer.

Technologies: Strong with distributed systems, networking (SD-WAN, VPN, ZTNA), authorization systems, web/network security and more. Backend: Rust, Typescript, Python, C#, Go and a variety of other interpreted and compiled languages. Frontend: React, Angular, Tailwind and so on. Relational and document databases. Data analytics. AWS and Azure. China specialist and interpreter, can speak German.

Résumé/CV: https://sowinski.blue/files/cv.pdf

Email: igor at sowinski.blue

I have 9+ years of experience as a software engineer and technology-oriented China specialist. Based in Switzerland. I have designed and implemented a large part of internal production systems at a well-known international printing company, and currently develop zero-trust solutions at a Swiss networking company.

I've been engaged with China since 2015. In 2020, I've started a degree in Chinese Studies at the University of Zürich. In 2024, I have finished a scholarship at the BFSU, the best language university in China. I have interpreted between Polish, English and Mandarin Chinese for the Polish Trade & Investment Agency at the Polish-Chinese Economic Forum in Shanghai (see pics on LinkedIn). I also keep tabs on technology and Chinese cybersecurity laws through Chinese sources and keep in touch with open source enthusiasts based in Mainland China and in Taiwan.

Sneak Peek at the Redesigned Stack Overflow

Igrom — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 15:47:41 +0000

Article URL: https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/02/25/your-sneak-peek-at-the-redesigned-stack-overflow/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181879

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by Igrom in "Things Unix can do atomically (2010)"

Igrom — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 09:44:08 +0000

>fcntl(fd, F_GETLK, &lock), fcntl(fd, F_SETLK, &lock), and fcntl(fd, F_SETLKW, &lock)

There's also `flock`, the CLI utility in util-linux, that allows using flocks in shell scripts.

New comment by Igrom in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)"

Igrom — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:02:54 +0000

Location: Zürich, Switzerland, Europe/EU

Remote: Nice to see. Worldwide okay, depending on arrangement.

Willing to relocate: Poland/Switzerland, optionally China, but depends on the offer.

Résumé/CV: https://sowinski.blue/files/cv.pdf

Email: igor at sowinski.blue

Hi, I'm Igor. I have 9+ years of experience as a software engineer and technology-oriented China specialist. Based in Switzerland. I have designed and implemented a large part of internal production systems at a well-known international printing company, and currently develop innovative at a Swiss networking company.

New comment by Igrom in "Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?"

Igrom — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 10:07:00 +0000

Can you expand upon the Roman architecture books?

New comment by Igrom in "Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert"

Igrom — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 15:43:59 +0000

谢谢你的文章，太有意思了。这么神秘的故事容易吸引人，万一里面犯了少许语法上的错误，还会有人介意吗？人工智能用起来却可能正事与愿违，让大家质疑你对故事加以过夸张或编造。我建议，第二部不用机器翻译，手动翻译翻译吧。回复人消息，自己写也更好。

Thank you very much for the article, it was super interesting. The mystery in the story draws people in, and people surely won't mind a couple of grammatical mistakes. But you have to watch out: the use of AI makes it easy for people to suspect that the story might've been embellished. For the second part, it might be better to try translating it manually; the same goes for writing replies.