<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: apical_dendrite</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=apical_dendrite</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 09:07:27 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=apical_dendrite" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I had someone submit a PR that was 3000 lines of shell scripts. Totally useless crap. I tried repeatedly asking him why he made particular choices and it was so painfully obvious that he had absolutely no idea and was just inventing bullshit answers. I would rather he have just said "I don't know, Claude added that", then tell obvious lies to my face.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:09:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48499817</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48499817</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48499817</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A better way to put it is that these things do have value to the customer, the customer just doesn't have a way to understand how the work you're doing provides value because it's the part of the product you don't see. If you clean up technical debt, improve test coverage, improve your deployment systems, etc, it doesn't change the immediate customer experience in a meaningful way, but it does allow you to deliver the changes that customers do see faster and with fewer risks.<p>This quote makes it seem like the work is self-indulgent, and I have seen that happen sometimes, but it's not half of what we do.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:42:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491920</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491920</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491920</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I worked for a lean startup that built a very expensive hardware product. The company kept the team as small as possible and took a ship fast and iterate approach. They shipped hardware that had numerous design and manufacturing defects and failure rates were very high, over 50% required replacement after 2.5 years. For a while the company was relatively generous with out-of-warranty replacements, which helped mitigate the issue, but that became too expensive. So customers spent thousands of dollars on a hardware product that was likely to fail in the year after the warranty expired. The company was also very reluctant to spend on customer service and QA, but spent very generously on marketing.<p>I'm curious how you would think about this situation from the lean startup perspective. With hardware products, if you don't do lots of initial testing, the scale of problems might not become apparent for years. You can't just fix a problem with a software patch.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:44:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48481602</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48481602</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48481602</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's true now. But in the world of this article, it's also the senior engineers that get nailed. In the world of this article, all code is like what machine code or bytecode is now - it's designed to be used by the machine, not the human, because the expectation is that humans will rarely, if ever, touch it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 05:37:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432146</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432146</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432146</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is the case now - I can explain to the AI that I want to re-factor a component to support different implementations using a strategy pattern, and I can get a similar outcome to what I would have written, just implemented a bit faster. My expertise brings value.<p>But that's not what this specific article is describing. The world this article is describing is one where you describe the business requirements, and you don't think about how it's implemented. You don't write the code, you don't review the code, you don't test the code. You give the AI business requirements and you give it access to sources of context (slack, meeting notes, etc). Every place where the human would act as a gate reduces throughput, so it should be eliminated through building harnesses and providing context.<p>What they're doing here is the equivalent of taking a factory where you have 2 process engineers and 100 operators, and replacing all the operators with robots. They want to automate the whole process of making the software and just leave the part that figures out how to make the automation work effectively.<p>In this world, the average software company doesn't need people who know how to write good software, because writing, reviewing, maintaining, and testing the software will be entirely automated. There will be a small number of people at companies like OpenAI that need to know how to write good software in order to supervise training the models, and there will be a small number of people at the software companies who have expertise in setting up the automation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 05:29:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432101</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432101</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48432101</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wonder why we as engineers aren't protesting AI in the same way that artists and people in film and television are. This post should instill the same terror that visual artists feel.<p>If you're a more senior person in tech, this post is effectively saying that a large portion of your skillset is about to become completely worthless. This goes beyond the skills involved in writing the code. Everything that you've learned over years about how to determine whether code is good or bad, and what practices make an engineering team effective is not just obsolete, it's fundamentally counter-productive because it assumes a slow, human-centric process that requires you to actually review and understand the code. Even your ability to mentor junior engineers is now obsolete, because all that experience you've built up is now worthless to them.<p>If this is the approach the industry takes, particularly when combined with a lack of interest in quality from the business (and let's face it, consumers have shown us that they're happy to pay for cheap crap), it's hard to see much of a future for software engineers. You don't need thousands of people with deep technical expertise, you need a handful of manager-types, who will focus on defining product and business requirements and configuring how the AI gets enough context to implement the requirements.<p>Maybe, if we're extremely lucky, there's so much demand for software that total employment doesn't fall off a cliff, but the nature of the work will change so much that many older, more expensive engineers will become unemployable. Those who remain will have to accept that the skills they spend decades developing are now worthless, that younger engineers no longer respect or listen to them, that the business no longer sees them as experts worthy of respect, but old fogies who grew up in a different world.<p>Joe Biden liked to say that a job is more than just a paycheck, it's part of your identity and your sense of self-worth. We're all very used to a certain level of respect (and commensurate remuneration). If you don't think that's true, compare how a software engineer is treated to how a warehouse worker is treated. What happens when we lose that?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:06:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431049</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431049</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431049</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You probably mean USAGM (US Agency for Global Media) and its affiliated programs (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, etc) rather than USAID.<p>USAID was a humanitarian aid agency that focused on programs like famine relief, disaster response, and medical aid in some of the poorest countries on Earth.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:22:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48430537</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48430537</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48430537</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are a number of significant differences. For one thing, physical libraries have to purchase the books that they own.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 13:14:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235436</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235436</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235436</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The content you're describing is a minuscule fraction of what's available on Anna's Archive.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 12:45:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235103</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235103</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235103</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is pretty rich since none of the data belongs to them in the first place.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 12:19:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234862</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234862</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234862</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was inspired by technology when I was young, but not anymore. When I was young it felt like the tech industry was about empowering human beings - Steve Jobs liked to say that a computer was like a bicycle for the mind. Today it feels like the tech industry is about wonton destruction ("move fast and break things") for the purposes of making a tiny number of people fantastically wealthy.<p>I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cannot imagine him complaining about how he had to miss some great parties so he could spend the weekend taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest children (as Elon Musk did during his DOGE phase). The ethos was just completely different.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 12:15:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234811</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234811</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234811</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "Tesla's lithium refinery discharges 231,000 gallons of polluted wastewater a day"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This Inside Climate News article is a little clearer.<p>> TCEQ began its investigation after workers for Nueces County Drainage District No. 2, which presides over the ditch area, found an unfamiliar pipe stretched across the district’s easement, expelling black liquid into the ditch<p>> The permit didn’t allow Tesla to use private or public property to transport the wastewater. Under the permit, it was Tesla’s responsibility to acquire whatever property rights were required to use the discharge route, the TCEQ permit states.<p>So one issue is that while they may have had a permit to dump wastewater, they didn't have a right to build a pipe on land controlled by the drainage district. Tesla, not TCEQ, needed to notify the drainage district because Tesla was the one building on land controlled by that district.<p><a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19032026/tesla-lithium-refinery-wastewater-discharge/" rel="nofollow">https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19032026/tesla-lithium-re...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 23:53:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201247</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201247</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201247</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "GPT-5.5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't find it exciting at all. I just feel anxiety about my career and my place in the world. I have a set of skills that I've developed over many years. I care about what I create. I consider it a craft. When I use my skills to solve a hard problem, I feel good about myself. When the AI does the work for me, I don't get that sense of accomplishment. I am seeing my value evaporate before my eyes.<p>I hate this stuff and I wish it had never been invented.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2026 02:23:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884754</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884754</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884754</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "GPT-5.5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just a year ago, Elon Musk was gleefully destroying the US government agency that provides food and medicine for many of the poorest, most desperate people on earth. He was literally tweeting about missing out on great parties to put USAID into the "wood chipper".<p>The tech overlords don't even want to spend a minuscule percentage of the federal budget helping starving people, even when it benefits the US. They are not going to give us a post-scarcity society.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2026 02:04:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884645</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884645</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47884645</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "Michael Rabin has died"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The Wikipedia edit that this thread is discussing was as follows. I think it's worth printing it here to make the point that the commenter above you is completely right about the prevalence of anti-semitism in online discourse today:<p>> Michael Oser Rabin (Hebrew: מִיכָאֵל עוזר רַבִּין; September 1, 1931 – April 14, 2026) was a Jew (a.k.a. kike) rat computer scientist who was co-recipient, with Dana Scott, of the 1976 ACM Turing Award for their military research on efficiently culling goycattle in "Greater Israel".<p>Nothing about this edit is legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. It is pure anti-semitism. Rabin spent most of his career in the United States and worked in abstract mathematics.<p>I generally agree that legitimate criticism of Israel is often unfairly criticized as anti-semitic. I would like you to also acknowledge that many people on the left summarily dismiss blatant and rank anti-semitism, as you did here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:45:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816328</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816328</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816328</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I get a message from a co-worker that seems to have been written by an LLM, I am incredibly turned off and instantly think less of the person. It can be easy to spot: key words bolded, acknowledging that I'm right, longer and with a different tone than their typical messages, with neat bullet points.<p>It feels a little disrespectful. It feels a little pointless (why am I bothering talking to you if I can get the same result from the AI). I have no idea whether you've given the problem any actual thought, or if you're just copy-pasting an answer. I have no idea if you actually believe what you're telling me (or if you've even read it or understand it).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:50:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758966</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758966</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758966</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "OpenAI says its new model GPT-2 is too dangerous to release (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have a lot of trouble understanding the mindset of a person who thinks that what they're building is so dangerous that it must be locked away or it will cause untold harm, but also that they must build it as fast as possible.<p>I can understand it in the context of the Manhattan project, where you're fighting a war for survival. I cannot understand how you can do it as a commercial enterprise.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:31:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684783</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684783</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684783</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're missing some key distinctions. The issues are: 1) putting classified information into a non-classified system; 2) putting information that needs to be preserved under laws like the presidential records act into systems where it's set to be auto-deleted. Both are illegal. Simply saying that the Biden administration pre-installed Signal is irrelevant. There are legitimate uses.<p>Your own article makes this exact point:
> Matthew Shoemaker, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who left the agency in 2021, said that while Signal was used during his time in government, “it was almost exclusively restricted to scheduling purposes,” such as letting their boss know that they’ll be late to work because of personal circumstances.
“That’s why Signalgate is all the more staggering — because these senior leaders were doing the exact opposite of what even my most junior intelligence officers knew not to do,” he said.<p>You're doing bullshit partisan whataboutism. "well the democrats did it first".<p>This has nothing to do with adding the wrong contacts. It has to do with putting highly-sensitive material into Signal to circumvent the law around records preservation and as a result creating a situation where it's possible to accidentally add the wrong contact and therefore exposing that information to a journalist.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:57:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47546075</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47546075</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47546075</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You'd be surprised how many doctors still rely on a physical fax machine.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:51:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545979</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545979</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545979</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by apical_dendrite in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We still deal with doctors who handwrite their progress notes. Fax will be around for a very, very long time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:47:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545926</link><dc:creator>apical_dendrite</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545926</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545926</guid></item></channel></rss>