Hacker News: MarkSweep

New comment by MarkSweep in "Leave Me Behind"

MarkSweep — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:18:38 +0000

I suspect you are right that LLM-generated software will likely negatively impact people's lives. The flip side of this is there is going to be a lot of software generated that would have never been possible before. And for some use cases, some crappy software is better than no software. I think it's hard to predict whether on net this will be a good or bad thing.

New comment by MarkSweep in "A History of IDEs at Google"

MarkSweep — Wed, 13 May 2026 23:27:49 +0000

To make this more concrete, the Chromium source code browser has a subset of the functionality of the internal Code Search tool. For example, you can left click on symbols to go to reference and right click to find all references:

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ipc...

New comment by MarkSweep in "Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did"

MarkSweep — Sun, 10 May 2026 22:41:08 +0000

To put a name to it, “biphasic sleep” used to be more common:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieva...

New comment by MarkSweep in "Just Use Go"

MarkSweep — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:25:23 +0000

Eh, at least for people consuming .NET apps compiled with NativeAOT, the experience is similar. Applications can be compiled as a single file with no dependancies. A hello world in .NET is half the size of one in Go:

https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/sizegame

New comment by MarkSweep in "Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one"

MarkSweep — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:59:52 +0000

I understand the stated reasons and disagree with their conclusions. It seems like a lot of extra work on the part of the Zig developers to have to reverse engineer undocumented interfaces. There is potentially extra work for the Windows developers if they want to change their private implementation details that Zig programs are now relying on. And in the case where the lower level APIs are missing features implemented higher level APIs, Zig has to either reimplment the functionality themselves or not have the same level of support for Windows features that normal Win32 apps have. A concrete example is looks like Zig programs can't open serial devices:

https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/src/commit/6193470ceea89a98...

All this to save a little memory CPU and memory usage? The juice does not seem worth the squeeze.

New comment by MarkSweep in "Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one"

MarkSweep — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:41:43 +0000

The best statement of whether or not calling functions in ntdll is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/k...

> documentation for the WDK and Windows SDK recommends that application developers avoid calling undocumented Nt entry points

So it's safe to call documented ntdll functions. But calling undocumented functions is more risky.

New comment by MarkSweep in "Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one"

MarkSweep — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 22:36:53 +0000

> I wonder how much of this problem was caused by lack of adequate documentation describing how an installer should behave, and how much was developers not reading that documentation and being content when it works on their machine.

There is a third option: the developers knew the rules and chose to ignore them for some reason. A modern example of this is the Zig language’s decision to reverse engineer and use undocumented APIs in Windows in preference of using documented APIs.

https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/31131

New comment by MarkSweep in "Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?"

MarkSweep — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 23:47:14 +0000

In addition to reason in the article, one thing I’ve noticed among some executives and product managers is their experience using LLM coding tools causes them to lose respect for human software engineers. I’ve seen managers lose all respect for engineering excellence and assume anything they want can be shat out by an LLM on a short deadline. Or assume because they were able to vibe code something trivial like a blog they don’t need to involve engineers in the design of anything, rather they should just be code monkeys that follow whatever design the product managers vibed up. It is really demoralizing to be talked to as if the speaker is promoting an LLM.

New comment by MarkSweep in "XML is a cheap DSL"

MarkSweep — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:49:52 +0000

There is a middle ground between using XML and imperative code for representing tax forms. Robert Sesek’s ustaxlib [0] uses JavaScript to encode the forms in a way that is reasonably statically analyzable. See the visualizer [1]. My approach uses XML to represent the forms with an embedded DSL to represent most expressions tersely. See for example Form 8960 in ustaxlib [2] and my TaxStuff program [3]. The main thing that the XML format from the article has going for it is that it is easy to write a parser for. But it is a bit verbose for my taste.

[0]: https://github.com/rsesek/ustaxlib

[1]: https://github.com/rsesek/ustaxviewer

[2]: https://github.com/rsesek/ustaxlib/blob/master/src/fed2019/F...

[3]: https://github.com/AustinWise/TaxStuff/blob/master/TaxStuff/...

New comment by MarkSweep in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

MarkSweep — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:30:11 +0000

Rejecting a PR for being overly complicated or difficult to understand is valid. Breaking a large change into understandable pieces is an important skill both for making changes reviewable as well as helping the author understand the problem.

New comment by MarkSweep in "I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project"

MarkSweep — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:07:36 +0000

The link on GitHub to the real site is marked with rel="nofollow". I wonder if it would make sense for GitHub to remove nofollow in some circumstances. Perhaps based on some sort of reputation system or if the site links back to the repo with a in the header? Presumably that would help the real site rank higher when the repo ranks highly.

New comment by MarkSweep in "[dead]"

MarkSweep — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:35:09 +0000

By their self reporting, people are already dying in ICE custody. Looking a few reports, it a common occurrence is someone starts having a heart attack and EMS does not arrive until hours later:

https://www.ice.gov/detain/detainee-death-reporting

It looks like ICE is not trying very hard to keep people alive.

New comment by MarkSweep in "Don't trust AI agents"

MarkSweep — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:56:14 +0000

Yeah, the article's claim of having a low number of lines of code are disingenuous. Rather than writing some sort of plugin interface, it has "skills" that are a combination of pre-written typescript and English language instructions for how to modify the codebase to include the feature. I don't see how self-modifying code that uses a RNG to generate changes is going to be better for security than a proper plugin system. And everyone who uses Nanoclaw will have a customized version of it, so any bugs reported on Nanoclaw probably have a high chance of being closed as "can't reproduce". Why would you live this way?

New comment by MarkSweep in "Allocating on the Stack"

MarkSweep — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:10:09 +0000

.NET bothers with it, to support RuntimeHelpers.EnsureSufficientExecutionStack [1] and other things. See the pthreads calls used to here [2].

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.runtime....

[2]: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/b6a3e784f0bb418fd2fa7...

New comment by MarkSweep in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

MarkSweep — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 01:14:41 +0000

I think some form of ads made it into the release channel. I recently did a clean install of Windows 11 25H2 and I could not figure out how to get App Store ads out of the search results in the start menu. That and a game working better on Linux than Windows was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me and I installed Ubuntu.

Show HN: MCP server for SOAP web services

MarkSweep — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 20:55:41 +0000

Did you just wake up from a 20 year coma? Did you build a bunch of buzzword compliant web services back in the early 2000s and want all your SOAP and WSDL to be relevant again? Now you can put the smooth sheen of AI on your pile of angle brackets by exposing your SOAP-based web service as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46569849

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by MarkSweep in "Welcome to Gas Town"

MarkSweep — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 06:33:14 +0000

Agreed. If the author did not bother to write, much less read, their work, why should we spend time reading it?

In the past a large codebase indicated that maybe you might take the project serious, as some human effort was expended in its creation. There were still some outliers like Urbit and it's 144 KLOC of Hoon code, perverse loobeans and all.

Now if I get so much as a whiff of AI scent of a project, I lot all interest. It indicates that the author did not a modicum of their own time in the project, so therefore I should waste my own time on it.

(I use LLM-based coding tools in some of my projects, but I have the self-respect to review the generated code before publishing init.)

New comment by MarkSweep in "Lessons from 14 years at Google"

MarkSweep — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:54:33 +0000

This and the other top story on HN right now ( I charged $18k for a Static HTML Page) [0] make it clear the the most important thing as a software developer is jumping through hoops and being agreeable. It does not matter if it makes sense to you. I’ve come to accept that I can’t always predict what is actually valuable for the business and should just go with the flow and take their money. The leetcode-style interview selects for this by presenting as an arbitrary hoop you have to jump through.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46469877

New comment by MarkSweep in "2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop"

MarkSweep — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 01:04:39 +0000

I made the switch as well. For many years I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows, hanging on to my familiarity with Windows and love for Visual Studio. Finally October 2025 some update made games laggy on Windows while they still worked fine on Ubuntu. I attempted to fix this by reinstalling Windows 11 and found I could not figure out how to remove advertisements from the start menu. So I finally transferred all my files from ReFS to ZFS and committed to 100% Linux.

Something has gone wrong in Microsoft in the product management organization where they are more concerned with chasing advertising dollars and upselling OneDruge than building a good product. It is depressing because all the Microsoft engineers I’ve interacted with in open source work have been excellent.

New comment by MarkSweep in "Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)"

MarkSweep — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:03:39 +0000

The derivatives following jerk are snap, crackle, and pop:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv...