Hacker News: Xenoamorphous

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward"

Xenoamorphous — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 19:33:36 +0000

Need one for hair loss ASAP.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "How is the Bun Rewrite in Rust going?"

Xenoamorphous — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:14:06 +0000

Some thoughts:

- just because it doesn’t help 99.9% of the companies today it doesn’t mean it won’t help them tomorrow

- 0.01% of the companies employ a much bigger percentage of people

- 99.9% of companies won’t need to do a project of this magnitude

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?"

Xenoamorphous — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:09:12 +0000

> we’re approaching $800k in money spent on this rewrite.

That’s peanuts, if not the shells of the peanuts, for a project and company of this magnitude

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "SQLite Is All You Need"

Xenoamorphous — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:41:39 +0000

> I guess I am one of those "architects" that imagines they need an actual date/time storage class instead of some stringly-typed text column that I hope will contain a parsable ISO8601 datetime string when I try to read it back.

To be honest if you're using JSON at any point in your stack you have the same issue.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "I also filed the corners off my MacBook"

Xenoamorphous — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:18:05 +0000

I’ve literally calluses on my wrists from those edges.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Sam Neill has died"

Xenoamorphous — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 06:53:20 +0000

So sad. Jurassic Park had a tremendous impact on me as a dino obsessed teenager ( was 13 when it came out). RIP.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026"

Xenoamorphous — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:24:38 +0000

A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo and we lose a leap second.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "A better way to tie your gym shorts. (Or any drawstring) [video]"

Xenoamorphous — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:31:31 +0000

A few years back I got a couple of Adidas running shorts. Instead of the typical drawstring they had some continuous string. To this day I've no idea how it was supposed to be used, I just cut it off and voila, a regular drawstring.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Spain Orders Blacklist of Palantir from Public and Private Companies"

Xenoamorphous — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:28:55 +0000

The current government has little chance to get re-elected, and the next one will revert most of these decisions.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To"

Xenoamorphous — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:54:53 +0000

To me the build step is a good thing. It's a simple script in npm, and it means I only keep what I need (the JSON Schema, which I don't need at dev time) in runtime and whatever package generates those schemas out of TS types can remain as a dev dependency.

zod can't be a dev only dependency, and you have to deal with breaking changes and maybe switching to a completely different library in a few years (joi, with a syntax very similar to zod's, was very popular a while ago too).

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To"

Xenoamorphous — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 14:44:02 +0000

Obviously it's not ideal, but IMO it's the better option. Much better than `z.number().integer().min(0)` or whatever zod equivalent there is and then have to deal with the inferred types which among other things tend to suck for IntelliSense etc. Those annotations map directly to JSON Schema attributes.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Parse, Don't Validate – In a Language That Doesn't Want You To"

Xenoamorphous — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:48:06 +0000

I don't like zod. I want to define my types, not write schemas. And I don't like that then I have to use the types derived from those schemas rather than types I've defined myself directly.

So I just define my types and then use typescript-json-schema or similar to build a JSON Schema at build time (i.e. from an npm script) which then I use to validate input using ajv.

The only thing I do on top of that is to use annotations like "@minimum 0" (or, in the email example, "@format email") where the base types are not enough, but those simply go inside comments.

So the compiled package only has ajv as runtime dependency (which you're likely to have anyway, as it's everywhere), you're just defining regular types with some annotations on top and use a dev dependency to build you the JSON Schema. And as popular as zod is, I think JSON Schema is more of a standard and likely to stay with us longer.

I also reference those generated JSON Schemas from my OpenAPI definition, as a bonus.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model"

Xenoamorphous — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 09:13:09 +0000

Another strong possibility is that you might be working on something that’s not very prevanlent in the training set.

Even the choice of programming language matters, e.g. Java or Javascript vs some niche one.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model"

Xenoamorphous — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:13:32 +0000

Indeed. Most people have more arms than average, which must be 1.9 something.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Accenture to acquire Ookla"

Xenoamorphous — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:19:13 +0000

It does.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Magnifica Humanitas"

Xenoamorphous — Mon, 25 May 2026 12:08:10 +0000

> Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.

From Crichton's book Jurassic Park, which like most of his books is about the perils of technological advancements.

They used the quote in the movie, slightly tweaked.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "The Eternal Sloptember"

Xenoamorphous — Mon, 25 May 2026 06:54:40 +0000

Even if agents failed at that I'd wager that's a very small percentage of software projects anyway.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend"

Xenoamorphous — Sun, 24 May 2026 19:48:29 +0000

Yeah, just read the first couple of paragraphs and then stopped because that’s not my experience at all with Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7.

If you ask it with a prompt that leaves room for criticism it’ll definitely go for it when warranted.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Gemini 3.5 Flash"

Xenoamorphous — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:25:47 +0000

Pelican in a white Testarossa.

New comment by Xenoamorphous in "Idempotency Is Easy Until the Second Request Is Different"

Xenoamorphous — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:26:41 +0000

If it’s a retry of the same request it should have the same key. If it’s not a retry, a different one. I don’t see the issue.

If the client sends the same key but a different payload that’s a 400 or 409 in my eyes.