Hacker News: adtac

New comment by adtac in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

adtac — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:18:31 +0000

LOC is the worst metric for engineering output, except for all the others - Churchill

New comment by adtac in "AI is killing B2B SaaS"

adtac — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:05:46 +0000

> camcorders have been around for ages but you don't have millions of directors around just because you make a tool more accessible

tiktok alone has 1.5 million directors! it's just that we call them creators now.

the meaning of the word director has changed, that's all. but professional roles shift in meaning all the time. a computer used to be a literal human doing arithmetic. an engineer was someone who designed war machinery. being a doctor used to mean teaching at an university.

human beings are natural tool makers. we always have been. the frontier material to manipulate where the most advanced engineering happens constantly changes: stone -> bronze -> iron -> ink (descartes) -> steel -> silicon -> javascript (YOU ARE HERE).

notice how each step is an improvement/abstraction on top of the steps that came before it. some say english is next in that chain. i honestly have no idea. all i know is there will always be The Next Thing and it'll be much nicer to work with.

New comment by adtac in "Exe.dev"

adtac — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 06:48:42 +0000

i got to try exe a while back and i have to say, the "Login with exe" [1] is probably the most magic thing i've seen since tailscale :)

[1] https://exe.dev/docs/login-with-exe

New comment by adtac in "Some Epstein file redactions are being undone"

adtac — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:33:29 +0000

ed is the standard Unix text editor.

New comment by adtac in "Musk Foundation"

adtac — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:12:38 +0000

December 2018 was the last version to not have "Development of safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity"

https://web.archive.org/web/20181223120124/http://www.muskfo...

New comment by adtac in "Show HN: Strange Attractors"

adtac — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:20:02 +0000

too many of these vaguely look like what galaxies look like from earth

e.g. https://i.imgur.com/ZjiBF8f.png

just a coincidence?

New comment by adtac in "The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel"

adtac — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 01:01:02 +0000

weekend hackernews best hackernews

New comment by adtac in "Deterministic multithreading is hard (2024)"

adtac — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 22:13:29 +0000

if you haven't read the factorio devblog before, please do!

after HN, it's one of my favourite places on the internet because i constantly learn new, random, insane things almost every time. imho it teaches you how to think + shows you what great engineering taste looks like. sorry if i'm overly effusive but each post is so deeply technical and well-written that i can't believe it's free.

you don't need to know anything about factorio or gamedev btw (i don't), just pick a random number between 1 to 438 and start reading :)

Deterministic multithreading is hard (2024)

adtac — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 09:20:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-415

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632976

Points: 115

# Comments: 13

New comment by adtac in "A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size"

adtac — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 05:06:53 +0000

> or endeavor to

you picked the worst example company to complain about how they're are not trying lol. just in 2025 from anthropic:

Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/met...

On the Biology of a Large Language Model https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...

Progress on Attention https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attention-update/index...

A Toy Model of Interference Weights https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/interference-weights/i...

Open-sourcing circuit tracing tools https://www.anthropic.com/research/open-source-circuit-traci...

New comment by adtac in "A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size"

adtac — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 04:52:20 +0000

>Note that there isn’t the slightest attempt to explain the planet trajectories (specifically, why the planets keep ending up where they do regardless of how many epicycles you bolt on) from a theoretical perspective. My impression is that they have absolutely no idea why the heavens behave the way they do; all they can do is stare at the night sky, record, and see what happens. That is not reassuring to me at least.

- AstronomerNews user, circa 1650 (probably)

New comment by adtac in "Adaptive LLM routing under budget constraints"

adtac — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 20:27:49 +0000

Why not something dumb like this: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b60199-b6ac-8009-b50d-3e7cfff1d7... (gpt-4o)

New comment by adtac in "Eternal Struggle"

adtac — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:23:58 +0000

wow not even yin-yang can escape entropy or the heat death of the universe

Firefox bug that's 24 years old

adtac — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 04:50:05 +0000

Article URL: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125390

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44969121

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by adtac in "Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers"

adtac — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:57:41 +0000

>That's basically your documents lossily encoded.

Vector embeddings are lossy encodings of documents roughly in the same way a SHA256 hash is a lossy encoding. It's virtually impossible to reverse the embedding vector to recover the original document.

Note: when vectors are combined with other components for search and retrieval, it's trivial to end up with a horribly insecure system, but just vector embeddings are useful by themselves and you said "all useful AI retrieval systems are insecure by design", so I felt it necessary to disagree with that part.

New comment by adtac in "Claude Code weekly rate limits"

adtac — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 19:51:49 +0000

if you feel cheated now, I promise you'll feel more cheated if they did this after you rely on it for several months. the least worst option is to change pricing as early as possible.

New comment by adtac in "ZUSE: IRC terminal client"

adtac — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 19:25:43 +0000

this is just XMPP and it has been around for years before Slack was even a thing

Slack won anyway for the same reasons most centralised, commercial, closed sourced products often win: less fragmentation, more marketing, stronger network effects, simpler onboarding for normies, richer integrations, and most importantly, an enterprise sales team that actually showers

RFC 1392: Internet Users' Glossary

adtac — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 21:09:42 +0000

Article URL: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1392.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44653039

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by adtac in "Git experts should try Jujutsu"

adtac — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 12:58:56 +0000

clicked hoping for an out of distribution argument for why a specific type of Japanese martial arts is perfect for git users :(

good article nonetheless!

New comment by adtac in "Building Linux kernel on macOS natively"

adtac — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 12:33:09 +0000

1. modern computers are insanely fast

2. they compiled a version of the kernel with as many configurable options disabled as possible

3. modern computers are insanely fast