Hacker News: abraxas

New comment by abraxas in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

abraxas — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:28:52 +0000

Your advice beautifully reinforces OP's case. We now have to use auxiliary apps with more predictable behaviour because designers made such a mess of things.

New comment by abraxas in "The 200k Ghost: Instruction Degradation in Long-Context LLM Sessions"

abraxas — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:53:20 +0000

This fascinates me because I tend to use Claude Code in _very_ long sessions, driving it until its context window is exhausted at which point I grab most of the session history from the terminal window and paste it right back into the context. This usually fills the context window right back up to 80-100K tokens. Seems a lot more successful especially with keeping track of recent developments than built in compaction does.

For some reason I get the best results this way. I know it's unorthodox but with my approach the agent seems to learn about the ongoing concerns as it stays 'in the loop' and I prefer it to use its minion agents to do grunt work like grepping sources or log files. That way the main context is free of monotonous blobs. I like having it act as a coding/troubleshooting companion rather than a minion to delegate short bursts of work to. I believe it's because I rarely feed it a big block of data to parse in a single prompt or let it grep incessantly in the main context that I don't get hit by the dreaded 'context rot'.

This little study seems to line up with my experiences.

New comment by abraxas in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess"

abraxas — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:27:35 +0000

However, when fed source material into the context they will lie less, right? So at this point is it not just a battle of the nines until it's called "good enough"?

I also wonder if I leave my secretary with a ream of papers and ask him for a summary how many will he actually read and understand vs skim and then bullshit? It seems like the capacity for frailty exists in both "species".

New comment by abraxas in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess"

abraxas — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:20:55 +0000

Not to mention that it would then make some hedge fund with a better backtesting harness or more AI scrutiny more successful thus keeping the financial market work as designed.

New comment by abraxas in "Trump is 'calling for a nuclear strike,' former White House comms director says"

abraxas — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:53:32 +0000

Americans, you elected someone with the mentality of a child to the highest office in your country. You should be ashamed.

Face it, this is not some recent attack of dementia as some of you claim (perhaps trying to defend your extraordinarily poor judgment). The first time I heard that man talk was in 2016 when I saw fragments of his debate with Hillary Clinton. He was as childish and incoherent then as he is now. Later, seeing some clips of his behaviour during your election campaigns it was evident that he has the language and mannerisms of a child. I suspect he stopped his mental advance around the age of early adolescence or even earlier. This is not how an adult talks or behaves.

You gave nuclear codes to a 79 year old child. I can't condemn your recklessness enough.

New comment by abraxas in "You can't cancel a JavaScript promise (except sometimes you can)"

abraxas — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:25:17 +0000

and so the thirty year old hackathon continues...

New comment by abraxas in "Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others"

abraxas — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:23:03 +0000

I can think of a couple of presidential careers where that worked out for the deceivers.

New comment by abraxas in "1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History"

abraxas — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:37:34 +0000

Most people who have significant savings in the stock market don't have the lifespan to ride out a 25 year recovery cycle. And those young enough to have the time usually don't have much in savings yet.

New comment by abraxas in "ARC-AGI-3"

abraxas — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:25:13 +0000

Even if tomorrow's models get good enough to complete these games we won't be able to proclaim AGI. In the realm of silly computer games alone I'm going on record saying that there are plenty of 8 bit games that AIs will trip on even when this benchmark is crushed. 2D platformers like Manic Miner or Mario need skills that none of these games appear to capture.

New comment by abraxas in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

abraxas — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:09:59 +0000

Nonsense. Of course Democrats are also on Israel's side. The US will always take Israel's side in any Middle East dispute. But it's only this infantile man and his clown cart that is stupid enough to go along with any and every hare brained idea that Israel puts forth.

New comment by abraxas in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

abraxas — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:29:42 +0000

Perhaps they are not as intelligent as you think they are.

New comment by abraxas in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

abraxas — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:07:13 +0000

You elect clowns, you get a circus.

The US has turned into a Wall-e society just getting off on entertainment and bored with civilized, thoughtful politicians. This is the end result of TOO MUCH prosperity for the average American.

They haven't experienced true hardship in generations and we (the rest of the world) is paying the price of their hubris.

New comment by abraxas in "Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued"

abraxas — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:57:24 +0000

I also worry that the whole idea will die before it had a chance to truly blossom. It's really amazing as is and with higher resolution and better field of view it could be on another level altogether. I hope that Valve will keep the tocrch and I plan to get their VR glasses to support the industry.

New comment by abraxas in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

abraxas — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:32:31 +0000

Because xAI = Jian-Yang x N.

I'm kidding... I think.

New comment by abraxas in "Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once"

abraxas — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:24:53 +0000

One more tool targeting OSX only. That platform is overserved with desktop agents already while others are underserved, especially Linux.

New comment by abraxas in "Reliable Software in the LLM Era"

abraxas — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:05:58 +0000

You won the internet today sir. At least for this geezer you did.

New comment by abraxas in "I built a programming language using Claude Code"

abraxas — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:11:58 +0000

I agree with the sentiment but want to point out that the biggest drive behind UML was the enrichment of Rational Software and its founders. I doubt anyone ever succeeded in implementing anything useful with Rational Rose. But the Rational guys did have a phenomenal exit and that's probably the biggest success story of UML.

I'm being slightly facetious of course, I still use sequence diagrams and find them useful. The rest of its legacy though, not so much.

New comment by abraxas in "Throwing away 18 months of code and starting over"

abraxas — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:55:16 +0000

Which in turn were only invented because millennials would not be caught dead writing Java and JSP. We had all this shit figured out by the late nineties and 90% of what is accomplished on the web today was entirely possible and well integrated in Java app servers.

This whole business is a fashion industry.

I'm for one grateful for LLMs because for the first time in around 30 years there is actually genuine novelty to explore in software engineering. Ruby and nodejs weren't it.

New comment by abraxas in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

abraxas — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:08:23 +0000

You're welcome, thanks for making it! The noise is intermittent and may simply be CPU/GPU overload and the resulting sound distortions. But it could be something else. It is quite reproducible on my phone.

New comment by abraxas in "Show HN: AI agent that runs real browser workflows"

abraxas — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:05:16 +0000

I was looking for a similar produc/project the other day. Alas my need is a Linux native version. You may want to consider it as Mac seems to be overserved by the agent harness supply while Linux is the opposite