Hacker News: JoelMcCracken

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "Show HN submissions tripled and now mostly have the same vibe-coded look"

JoelMcCracken — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:25:57 +0000

Why I like using AI right now is that I get to try out far more of my own ideas quickly (and find issues with them!)

Before, it was like:

"Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... (loses interest before idea validated)

Now: "Oh, X idea is really cool, let me try it!" ... with AI, I get to actually validate that it works (ideally), or reformulate the idea if it doesn't.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "Apple Business"

JoelMcCracken — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:15:14 +0000

To me the primary answer was a fully functional web browser. the mobile web was extremely limited; I know, I used to use it on a windows pda device.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer"

JoelMcCracken — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:05:55 +0000

This is true/valid in many ways, but the signs of significant AI gen are pretty obvious. And now I wonder how much of the overblown narrative is here.

This reminds me of the slop bug reports plaguing the curl project.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "Apple Business"

JoelMcCracken — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:48:39 +0000

The iPhone was revolutionary. There really was nothing like it at the time. The closest thing (the PDA) was _nothing_ like it.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

JoelMcCracken — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:26:44 +0000

This. While I was in college, I worked for Circuit City doing tech support (the "IQ Crew", heh, later called "firedog". Memories). People would call/come in and I would try to gather information about their setup.

It was extremely common to get Q/A like:

Me: Who is your internet serviced provider?

Them: I just click the 'e'.

Translation: They were telling me they use internet explorer.

Me: OK, bring in your computer and I can look at it.

Them: (arrives some time later, plops their CRT monitor on the table).

It was always like that. It took me a while to figure out how to ask the right questions to get the information I needed from them. TBH, this was most of the job.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "Just Put It on a Map"

JoelMcCracken — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:43:38 +0000

This is generally a big problem in Pittsburgh where huge areas of the most valuable land is owned by “nonprofits”

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "Just Put It on a Map"

JoelMcCracken — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:37:36 +0000

IIUC the maintenance costs of suburbs is higher. Not sure if you meant that.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn"

JoelMcCracken — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:01:15 +0000

I mean I don’t know anything absolutely about someone else’s internal mental state. But I’ve just observed enough to come to certain conclusions, though not necessarily about any particular person.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn"

JoelMcCracken — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:42:31 +0000

I do think there are absolutely instances of people virtue signaling.

But, after observing society over the last few years, I've come to think that people who _whine_ about virtue signaling are so full of vice that they cannot possibly believe someone _else_ isn't also as base as they are.

Its all such a shame. It seems like society has no ability to have reasonable, sensible conversation. I really wonder how the enlightenment even _happened_.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "To understand our fascination with crystals, researchers gave some to chimps"

JoelMcCracken — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 15:19:37 +0000

Don’t get me wrong, this is very interesting, but there is something very funny about the idea that “give a chimpanzee stuff and see if they like it” is academic research.

This could absolutely be a headline on The Onion.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

JoelMcCracken — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:11:38 +0000

I’m not in favor of these tariffs. At all. However, it seems that they haven’t had such an impact yet on the economy, at least regarding consumer prices. You’d expect much larger inflation given the tariffs IIUC.

My current understanding of the general consensus is that many companies have been eating the tariffs with the hope SCOTUS will strike them. If they are upheld, prices will likely rise significantly

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner"

JoelMcCracken — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:43:21 +0000

I'm less worried about the "vibe coded" than "vibe-language-learning"

Though I do think there is vast potential for such things, it needs to be approached judiciously.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs"

JoelMcCracken — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:50:33 +0000

I remember using one of these tools and it falsely identified some other account as being mine. Of course, I only have just this account.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "Code is cheap. Show me the talk"

JoelMcCracken — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:00:42 +0000

Oh wow this is a great reference/image/metaphor for "software engineers" who misuse these tools - "the great pakledification" of software

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "Benchmarking a Baseline Fully-in-Place Functional Language Compiler [pdf]"

JoelMcCracken — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 15:29:28 +0000

IIUC koka can apply these optimizations dynamically when it determines data is unique via reference counting. However the paper has more details.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "The Toxic Modernity Narrative"

JoelMcCracken — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 21:47:47 +0000

Ditto. The entire issue with microplastics is that at certain scale they might have all sorts of bio-active aspects, like BPA and _other_ chemicals used in plastic.

I wish we did more to honor "Unknown unknowns" and make changes more gradually, especially when the difference is barely consequential. Plastic is essential for many things, but not for shopping bags, drink bottles, etc. We over-use it like crazy, and at this point if we find out that omnipresent plastic pollution causes issues, we better hope we find a solution quickly because we won't be able to get rid of the plastic.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

JoelMcCracken — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:36:40 +0000

Yeah I figured that, but the combinations I was dealing with really weren’t that many.

The problem was https://xmonader.github.io/prolog/2018/12/21/solving-murder-... and trying to solve it with list monad. Someday I hope to get back to it.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"

JoelMcCracken — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:25:08 +0000

Na each key press goes to a separate lambda invocation that gets submitted to a Kafka queue, and what happens after that is a mystery to all involved.

We can make crazy latency ourselves just fine, no space transmission necessary

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

JoelMcCracken — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:33:51 +0000

Yea I’ve wanted to try using logict to do some larger logic programming stuff. I’ve done it with list monad but found a lot of speed issues, never quite figured out why it was so slow.

New comment by JoelMcCracken in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

JoelMcCracken — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:57:32 +0000

The only languages I know that can do prolog-like-constructs as-a-library are lisps, or at least langs that have reasonable symbol constructs. Usability is way way worse if you can’t talk about variables as first class objects.

I was talking to Bob Harper about this specific issue (context was why macro systems are important to me) and his answer was “you can just write a separate programming language”. Which I get.

But all of this is just to say that doing relational-programming-as-a-library has a ton of issues unless your language supports certain things.