Hacker News: apalmer

New comment by apalmer in "Agents need control flow, not more prompts"

apalmer — Thu, 07 May 2026 17:14:24 +0000

Generally agree with this stance case in point: the breakthrough in ai coding was not that AI intelligence increased as much as that a lot of the core process execution moved out of the LLM prompt and into the harness.

New comment by apalmer in "We were right about Havana syndrome"

apalmer — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:10:52 +0000

Didn't the US use some weapon that essential causes the same thing as Havana Syndrome?

New comment by apalmer in "Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?"

apalmer — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 13:50:42 +0000

This again? In general, Software Engineering is not engineering.

It's not a technical issue, it's a 'software doesn't really kill people so government doesn't intervene in it'. In the case where the software is life and death it's generally developed in ways similar to 'real' engineering

Fundamentally folks built building/structures without engineering, just so consistently caused death and destruction that govt stepped in and started requiring licensed trained folks, approval trails etc. without this real world intervention regular physical 'engineering' the same crap shoot as software engineering.

New comment by apalmer in "Abstraction, not syntax"

apalmer — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 21:28:47 +0000

I don't think the title and the article really communicates it's case well. Did not understand the goal until 90% through the article when they showed the source code of RCL with the loops.

This isn't syntax vs abstraction. This is how much programming language power do you want to enable in your configuration language. This is a big difference and I think we miss the interesting part of that discussion because we dip into this 'abstraction angle.

New comment by apalmer in "What if we treated Postgres like SQLite?"

apalmer — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 18:02:11 +0000

I upvoted this, because while it was critical it didn't feel meanspirited and it was factually correct.

After fully reading the article I came to understand it really was not referring to anything sqllite specific, was really 'what if you ran postgres as an application on a server', there really is nothing more to be gained from reading the article beyond this, and this is kind of the most basic deployment model for postgres for like the last 40 years.

New comment by apalmer in "How to stop functional programming (2016)"

apalmer — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 17:27:58 +0000

Ultimately the important thing is that the development team align on the style of programming that they will use at least per project. And the larger the codebase and more developers working on it the more important the consistency in implementing the style guide is.

Imperative programming style has many advantages over functional for some problems. Functional programming style has many advantages over imperative for some problems.

The only clearly 'wrong' approach is codebases where you can look at the code and determine a specific developer on the team wrote feature x because it fundamentally looks completely different from the other sections.

New comment by apalmer in "The gentrification of videogame history"

apalmer — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 19:10:45 +0000

I don't think 'gentrification' is the right word for this. However the comments here do illustrate an underlying 'real' phenomenon what ever you call it.

Just for clarity: - Non-Japan Asia is new to gaming, and that's okay, it's going to take some time before they find their own voice.

This is not factually true, video games have one of the most popular forms of entertainment in non Japan Asia for 25 years. Nearly a quarter of humanity lives in non-japan asia. There were good non japanese games, bad non japanese games, and more than anything tons of 'mid' non japanese games. They aren't new too it, and they do have their own voices and styles.

What gets talked about as history of video gaming tends to reflect American video gaming history and the unavoidable influence of America's number one vassal state, Japan. Really this is the history of games marketed in North America and that's fine, it just isn't the whole history.

New comment by apalmer in "Memorizing the first 100 perfect squares (2022)"

apalmer — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 17:39:49 +0000

I am not knocking the article but seems like if you are going to dedicate the effort of learning quick mental math it's probably more efficient to 'just' know how to multiple 2 digits quickly than specifically focusing on 2 digit squares...

New comment by apalmer in "Handling complexity without abstraction: Algebraic Bricklaying C"

apalmer — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 20:22:37 +0000

The ABC approach written about her seems good to me, but I still think of this as abstraction. I get that this is a 'zero' or 'low cost' abstraction but it's still an abstraction. Don't want to be overly nit picky so going to leave it there.

New comment by apalmer in "OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO"

apalmer — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 23:15:25 +0000

This is valid thought process BUT Altman is not going to come back without the other faction being neutered. It just would not make any sense.

New comment by apalmer in "Students made Oxford murder capital of late medieval England, research suggests"

apalmer — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 02:57:49 +0000

numerous things, for one much much greater likely hood of getting caught.

New comment by apalmer in "Baldurs Gate 3 comes out on Mac tomorrow. I will not play it"

apalmer — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 23:16:29 +0000

Good for you? Different people have different challenges, I salute you for standing up to yours. I don't think you should change your mind on this, the feeling of sticking to you 'will' is better than any game.

New comment by apalmer in "Jsonformer: Generate structured output from LLMs"

apalmer — Tue, 02 May 2023 20:11:43 +0000

Trying to understand why this is necessary? LLMs cannot reliably generate valid Jason?

New comment by apalmer in "Cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform may be the wrong choice"

apalmer — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 12:33:37 +0000

Article doesn’t really present an argument. Pretty much starts with ‘you don’t want the cost and complexity’ and then goes on from that point as a given.

A more useful article would actually walk through the cost/complexity trade

New comment by apalmer in "First make the change easy, then make the easy change (2021)"

apalmer — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 23:08:01 +0000

I think there is a minimum floor that should be allocated to this kind of work.

It doesn’t make sense to clean everything to a perfect condition but there should be some amount of ‘keep your room clean’ level of hygiene that’s maintained

New comment by apalmer in "Nobody optimizes happiness"

apalmer — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 01:19:17 +0000

But you are not actually retired. Seems more in line with what the article is saying.

New comment by apalmer in "DoorDash and pizza arbitrage (2020)"

apalmer — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 19:23:52 +0000

This to me is what killed delivery as a service. It doesn’t work even when they are charging what works out to be double the salary the restaurant pays its own delivery people. And it works out for no one, restaurant, driver, even the delivery as a service providers since they are all hemorrhaging money.

It’s a fake industry held up by VC money.

New comment by apalmer in "A mystery of the ketogenic diet: benevolent pseudo-diabetes in mice (2019)"

apalmer — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 18:41:55 +0000

Well the thing is studies are not really for media or lay people, or even researchers/scientists out of a given field.

New comment by apalmer in "Ask HN: What helped you get good at programming?"

apalmer — Tue, 03 May 2022 22:54:21 +0000

I think outside of the formal logic space the concept of invariants still are core to programming. Many different strategies such as pure functions, unit tests, type systems, isolation of global state, all key really key around the concept that their are logical truths that always hold for a given program. This is a key way to build large complex programs. it’s impossible to hold every detail of what the code does, so having certain things be known truths goes a long way to enabling one to reason about code.

New comment by apalmer in "The Superhero Industry Hates Children (2019)"

apalmer — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 17:10:06 +0000

Comics just are too expensive to target a young child audience, and as such their story lines reflect that… basically only comic hero with big money behind them aimed at kids is spider man…

On the other hand I don’t know anyone under 20 into American comics, but almost all the kids I know read tons of manga and watch a bazillion anime joints. And most of them got into it off shonen dragon ball and Naruto style cartoons that most have childish themes of friendship and hard work