Hacker News: arscan

New comment by arscan in "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?"

arscan — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:15:31 +0000

Applications like Photoshop will one day be regarded as the castles of this era. Technically impressive, but economically/politically irrelevant. While they could be reproduced at a fraction of the cost there just isn’t any point to it because there are much better ways to allocate capital.

New comment by arscan in "Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server"

arscan — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:24:44 +0000

I had a similar experience. Back then gamers were an outsized part of the online community, so if you wanted to build a site that got some actual use and engagement, building to that audience was a good strategy. And of course, it helps when you are part of that audience.

New comment by arscan in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

arscan — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:32:11 +0000

I learned about this technique from Owen Wilson’s character in the otherwise exceptionally forgettable movie “The Haunting (1999).” Paradoxically, you are the one doing them a favor by effectively giving them permission to ask for help in the future.

New comment by arscan in "Artemis II fault tolerance"

arscan — Sat, 02 May 2026 02:17:47 +0000

I interned at a company called Stratus which did hardware fault tolerant computers in the 80s/90s. I think they called it a “Pair and spare” approach, where every component had 3 copies running and comparing state every cycle. If one component’s state stopped matching the other 2, the failing component would be taken offline and the system would call home for a replacement to be fedexed overnight. I think just about every component was hotswappable too. Pretty cool, but expensive, and other architectures for improving availability, or mitigating impact from loss of availability, won out (except for a handful of exotic use cases).

New comment by arscan in "To Protect and Swerve: NYPD Cop Has 547 Speeding Tickets"

arscan — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:59:55 +0000

It does, but according to the article it doesn’t apply to tickets issued by camera.

New comment by arscan in "How do Wake-On-LAN works"

arscan — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:06:00 +0000

To perhaps give a little insight into why this is on the front page by someone who upvoted it: I didn't realize it was so open and easy. Now I do. The Golang code simply serves as proof in how open and easy it is.

> Even at the time, the task didn't seem like "enough" for a show-the-world blog post.

Its an old (de facto industry) standard, but maybe more relevant than ever. I'm interested in moving more of my compute usage off-cloud these days, which is why this is of interest to me right now. I suspect many others feel the same way.

Might be a good time to post other tidbits of knowledge you have like this, targeted at software engineers that are starting to get more into infrastructure management. Standards that are ubiquitous and just work are awesome.

New comment by arscan in "Code is run more than read (2023)"

arscan — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:49:43 +0000

It is completely possible that the path that got them to this point was the optimal path given their goals and knowledge at the time. And wildly enough, maybe it was even the optimal path with perfect knowledge of the future as well.

New comment by arscan in "Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]"

arscan — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:06:00 +0000

I don’t think people are spending their time on more pressing issues. I think they are just are hooked on an endless stream of content that is built for addiction and is always within arms reach.

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

arscan — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:14:39 +0000

I think the idea is that if they cannot perform any cognitive task that is trivial for humans then we can state they haven’t reached ‘AGI’.

It used to be easy to build these tests. I suspect it’s getting harder and harder.

But if we run out of ideas for tests that are easy for humans but impossible for models, it doesn’t mean none exist. Perhaps that’s when we turn to models to design candidate tests, and have humans be the subjects to try them out ad nauseam until no more are ever uncovered? That sounds like a lovely future…

New comment by arscan in "Kagi Small Web"

arscan — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:16:07 +0000

I do love the concept, but a little part of me died each time I came across an article with a very strong AI voice. That just feels antithetical to the ‘small web’ ethos because it obscures the ‘neighbor’ behind it.

New comment by arscan in "When AI writes the software, who verifies it?"

arscan — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:15:38 +0000

Sure but industry cares about value (= benefit - price), not just price. Price could be astronomical, but that doesn’t matter if benefit is larger.

New comment by arscan in "Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension"

arscan — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:20:42 +0000

I’ve been thinking about it like this for some time: If the computer is a bicycle of the mind, then the LLM is its credit card.

New comment by arscan in "Show HN: Badge that shows how well your codebase fits in an LLM's context window"

arscan — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:16:04 +0000

I’m not so sure an increasingly large context window will be seen as a critical enabler (as it was viewed 6 months ago), after watching how amazingly effective subagents and tool calls are at tackling parts of the problem and surfacing the just the relevant bits for the task at hand. And if increasing the context window isn’t the current bottleneck, effort will be put elsewhere.

New comment by arscan in "Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play"

arscan — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:23:20 +0000

Reminds me of the “Google AI Challenge” in 2011 called Ants [1], except the ‘AI’ is implemented using ‘AI’ now instead of human programmers.

I was proud for getting the highest-ranked JavaScript-based implementation, but got absolutely crushed by the eventual winner.

1. https://github.com/aichallenge/aichallenge

New comment by arscan in "AI makes you boring"

arscan — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:33:31 +0000

> There's a middle ground of "written by human and LLM together".

Absolutely, but I’d categorize that ‘bit’ as the innovation from the human. I guess it’s usually just ongoing validation that the software is headed down a path of usefulness which is hard to specify up-front and by definition something only the user (or a very good proxy) can do (and even they are usually bad at it).

New comment by arscan in "AI makes you boring"

arscan — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:05:03 +0000

> But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these things increasingly do).

It works, sure, but is it worth your time to use? I think a common blind spot for software engineers is understanding how hard it is to get people to use software they aren’t effectively forced to use (through work or in order to gain access to something or ‘network effects’ or whatever).

Most people’s time and attention is precious, their habits are ingrained, and they are fundamentally pretty lazy.

And people that don’t fall into the ‘most people’ I just described, probably won’t want to use software you had an LLM write up when they could have just done it themselves to meet their exact need. UNLESS it’s something very novel that came from a bit of innovation that LLMs are incapable of. But that bit isn’t what we are talking about here, I don’t think.

New comment by arscan in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

arscan — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:46:57 +0000

I got the sense that Kidders side was approximately equal to my father’s side, as my father said he provided a lot of information to the author through interviews and was happy with the account that ended up in the book. I’ll see what I can find though.

I ended up working for the lead of the competing team within DG (whose product lost to the book’s protagonist) for many years right after college at a different company he founded. I suspect he has a slightly different perspective on the whole thing, but I never asked.

Sadly my father and many of his contemporaries are no longer with us. But I’m really happy that this book exists as a durable & accurate snapshot of the period. The computer history museum also has a wonderful collection of interviews worth checking out, which includes several of the staff from DG [1]

1. https://computerhistory.org/oral-histories/

New comment by arscan in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

arscan — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 03:58:34 +0000

My father was an unnamed DG marketing executive in the book, who joked that his greatest career regret was asking Kidder to be unnamed in case the book wasn’t any good (it won Kidder the Pulitzer). I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.

New comment by arscan in "ai;dr"

arscan — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:28:02 +0000

This absolutely has been the case for me for the last few months. But what’s disheartening is that this signal will just be mimicked through simple prompting if too many people start tuning in to it. Or maybe that’s already happened?

New comment by arscan in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

arscan — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:28:40 +0000

  Don't worry about the future
  Or worry, but know that worrying
  Is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing Bubble gum
  The real troubles in your life
  Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind
  The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday

    - Everybody's free (to wear sunscreen)
         Baz Luhrmann
         (or maybe Mary Schmich)