Hacker News: amoe_

New comment by amoe_ in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

amoe_ — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:39:34 +0000

But for a large proportion of people, "what they build" is meaningless (in social terms). Doing as you suggest would eliminate the majority of work.

New comment by amoe_ in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

amoe_ — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 09:31:37 +0000

As you say, many entered the field beacause of a natural interest in tech, rather than pay. But that doesn't imply that they uncritically accept every new technology just because it's new. It seems like you're arguing for "tech for the sake of tech", which you're entitled to do. But now tech has a transformative impact on the world, and most did not consent democratically to said transformation. It makes sense for an adult to consider the effect that their role has on the world at large.

New comment by amoe_ in "I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy"

amoe_ — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:24:36 +0000

I'd like to think that actually-existing-telepathy would be a more transformative technology than something that simply allows people to do their existing work more conveniently.

New comment by amoe_ in "The other half of AI safety"

amoe_ — Thu, 14 May 2026 06:54:15 +0000

The difference is that these rhetorical techniques need to be used with taste. LLMs just sprinkle them everywhere to try to make their copy sound good, even when it's completely inappropriate tone-wise. They don't make higher level judgements about when to employ specific features.

New comment by amoe_ in "Tell HN: I'm sick of AI everything"

amoe_ — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:46:31 +0000

> - Philosophy, really good and useful

I have had the opposite experience, philosophy questions tending to show the various chatbots at their most irrational and confabulatory.

New comment by amoe_ in "Hegel, a universal property-based testing protocol and family of PBT libraries"

amoe_ — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:49:01 +0000

Completely agree. It's absolutely awful having software projects squatting on the names of great philosophers and artists. I appreciate that perhaps the author wanted to show their appreciation, but there are plenty of other equally communicative options.

New comment by amoe_ in "I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services"

amoe_ — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:55:11 +0000

The problem for me is not services where the content is online, you can just avoid those, but cases where access to scarce real resources is controlled through online verification. E.g. renting recording studios, background checks for job applications, things like this. Often there is no route that does not go through a third-party verification service.

New comment by amoe_ in "We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole"

amoe_ — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:07:56 +0000

Which particular LLM was that?

New comment by amoe_ in "Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade"

amoe_ — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 12:47:20 +0000

If I'm already using Poetry and not facing any issues with it, is there any advantage to using uv?

New comment by amoe_ in "Rights groups urge UK PM Starmer to abandon plans for mandatory digital ID"

amoe_ — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 14:52:53 +0000

I actually like this and don't want them to be joined up.

New comment by amoe_ in "Evaluating GPT5's reasoning ability using the Only Connect game show"

amoe_ — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 13:57:20 +0000

> Wall: Players group 16 elements into four categories (similar to the NYT Connections game)

I have to be the designated pedant here and point out that Only Connect was first.

New comment by amoe_ in "Online Safety Act: What went wrong?"

amoe_ — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:39:19 +0000

The knife crime analogy is a bit off, as we already have age restrictions for buying knives in the UK.

New comment by amoe_ in "Systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success"

amoe_ — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:41:14 +0000

I was pro-systemd at the time of the controversial discussions. I still think it's a net positive relative to what was there before. But personally speaking, it's only the core of the software (service management) that improved things for me. The other things (timers, journald) I either ignore or don't like, but perhaps they're useful for distributions.

New comment by amoe_ in "UK's Online Safety Act comes into force"

amoe_ — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 09:59:54 +0000

This legislation was created by the Conservative party, but wasn't opposed by any major political party in the UK.

New comment by amoe_ in "Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?"

amoe_ — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 11:29:18 +0000

> You're going to pay for that one later if you do the simple thing and add an "email" column

You'll only pay if the project survives long enough for that new requirement to actually surface, which often it won't.

New comment by amoe_ in "The XY Problem (2014)"

amoe_ — Fri, 26 May 2023 10:23:11 +0000

I'm going to echo what everyone else is saying in this thread -- the inverse problem (YX) is by far the bigger issue with tech questions on the internet in general (mainly SO and IRC). It's common enough that it puts me off asking anything that's not entirely trivial. And yes, ChatGPT mitigates this to a large degree.

However there is definitely a place for pointing out XY problems in a work context, especially if you have to directly deal with the resulting code. You need a lot of shared context to have confidence that you've identified an actual XY problem.

New comment by amoe_ in "JEP draft: No longer require super() and this() to appear first in a constructor"

amoe_ — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 11:13:02 +0000

Yep. Pre-generics, Java was considered a good teaching language because of its simplicity and the ability to hold the entire language in your head. I think it's much more difficult to make that argument now. The same for Python. Moreover, while Python 3's unicode/byte string separation was a crucial step, IMV other features from Python 3 haven't made a big impact on how useful the language is.

New comment by amoe_ in "Programs are dead, and JavaScript has killed them"

amoe_ — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 10:35:33 +0000

You have low expectations; I have Racket programs that have worked for over 10 years essentially untouched. More or less the same with Perl. We should be aspiring to Plato's cave (while accepting that we won't reach that).

New comment by amoe_ in "Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill"

amoe_ — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 18:24:45 +0000

The OSB has become a big bucket which UK politicians can point to and say "see, we're doing something". When faced with a question about the internet, the stock response of Tory MPs is to say "wait for the Online Safety Bill". In that way, it's quite similar to the situation before Brexit, where representatives would evade responsibility for policy by claiming that their hands were tied by Brussels.

New comment by amoe_ in "Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?"

amoe_ — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 15:23:40 +0000

> If what you want is... automated, predictable deployments... then Docker Compose and Terraform is all you need.

Can you elaborate on the deployment story here a bit?