Hacker News: arscan

New comment by arscan in "Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)"

arscan — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:15:18 +0000

Hey, I worked there in high school as an intern! But just on the intranet, which for its time (‘96?) was really quite good.

New comment by arscan in "Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students"

arscan — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:15:03 +0000

I would think this type of behavior (ugh, or dare I say default mindset) by consumer-facing LLMs will always be desirable for ‘hard’ problems (things previously unsolved) because it’s a bit like having saftey mechanisms in place to prevent hallucinations for users incapable of verifying correctness of the output. You’ve got to do a little work to prove you understand that it’s hard but it’s still something the LLM might be able to accomplish.

New comment by arscan in "How Much Has Trump Made from Crypto? ($1.4B from 2025 Federal Disclosure)"

arscan — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:20:44 +0000

I think fundamentally there is a difference in the definition of “America” at play here too.

New comment by arscan in "Slack Code"

arscan — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:09:58 +0000

> This isn't just a new feature — it’s a new way to build software

I imagine they smushed 2 of the most well-known AI-isms together on purpose here to troll the AI-weary. Might as well I guess, if this type of language annoys you then the whole feature probably will too.

New comment by arscan in "Finger: the 1971 social network that never died"

arscan — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:56:16 +0000

I was very into PC gaming during this era, and ran a decently sized gaming news website, and Carmacks use of .plan as a one-to-many microblog was really a decade or two ahead of what became mainstream twitter’s primary use case. None of the games I ‘covered’ had enough .plan activity by the developers to warrant an automated script, but I remember being really impressed by the sites that did it (usually id-centric ones like blues news or stomped I think?)

Such good memories. I think my whole career has been built around chasing the feeling I had when making that gaming site.

New comment by arscan in "Show HN: Git-knife – Edit commit messages, authors, and dates like a spreadsheet"

arscan — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:33:23 +0000

Well, yeah, it does.

Effective and clear communication is really important and often really hard for engineers. It is said that one goal of stackoverflow was to help programmers learn how to write through practice, as it’s both very hard and very critical to their effectiveness:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/how-to-write-without-writing/

But programmers are also lazy*, so why put in the effort to improve when you can just get llms to do the work for you?

* not necessarily in a bad way

New comment by arscan in "Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"

arscan — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:38:58 +0000

Not a substantive comment on content but hopefully constructive feedback on presentation:

Holy moly, on mobile I was trying to read the example console screenshots/snippets and then it would just unexpectedly change. Took me a little while to figure out it’s some kind of carousel for the examples, and not more screenshots/snippets loading and pushing down content (or me going crazy). Please don’t do this on mobile sites, just let me scroll through the examples!

New comment by arscan in "Defending my own brain against enshittification"

arscan — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:26:23 +0000

There’s the chance that you notice patterns emerging that become quite grating after listening to it for awhile, in the same way that LLMs tend to have subtle but eventually noticeable patterns in writing. Some people care, some don’t.

Will that be the case for the music that you are listening to that’s generated by AI, maybe? Maybe not?

By highlighting that the music predates generative AI, at least that’s something that you won’t have to think about.

At least, that’s how I read it. It’s like a ‘no artificial sweeteners’ label on a drink.

New comment by arscan in "I love LLMs, I hate hype"

arscan — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:42:51 +0000

Who is going to end up capturing all this value being generated is going to be very interesting. Back in 1980, who’d have thought MS would capture the majority of the value from PCs over the next 3 decades, and not IBM?

New comment by arscan in "Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool"

arscan — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:35:11 +0000

Linus Tech Talk (LTT) did a whole series on doing this on the pool at the channel hosts’ house. Extravagant home upgrades are a frequent topic on that YouTube channel… business expense write off yada yada. My general takeaway was, yikes, all that piping and infrastructure would be a nightmare to maintain and will likely just be closed off whenever an issue comes up (or he sells). I’m no expert, but I am a home owner, and have come to form a deep appreciation for maintaining simplicity when it comes to the operation of your house.

New comment by arscan in "Notes on Software Quality"

arscan — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:53:51 +0000

Perhaps this is a controversial take, but I believe security runs in opposition to many other quality attributes (i.e., usability, interoperability). Not to say that there aren’t designs that could exist that are optimal for security and these other quality attributes simultaneously, but security massively reduces the potential design space to the point where there is no rule that at least one of these optimal designs must exist.

Quality is an opinionated measure of a design, which involves tradeoffs based on your goals, values, etc. Valuing security very high, even at the expense of every other aspect of quality if necessary, is completely understandable. But that’s a value that isn’t universally held.

If your point is that security should at least be considered when measuring quality these days (like, it’s a top 10 ‘ility’ at least): fair enough.

New comment by arscan in "Notes on Software Quality"

arscan — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:24:24 +0000

Quality is an opinion based on your perspective. The author articulates quality from their perspective, which has value, but isn’t universal.

New comment by arscan in "Matt's Script Archive: The Scripts That Reshaped the Web"

arscan — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 02:14:16 +0000

I remember Matt’s Scripts Archive as an absolute gold mine for learning how to make web applications through example in the pre-PHP days, which was pretty challenging when all you had to work with is CGI and maybe SSI if your hosting provider was particularly advanced. It’s what got me started as a web application developer 30+ years ago. I guess I probably learned about security the hard way by following his examples. But it got me headed broadly in the right direction I think.

I remember being very proud of how I extended his forum software to support threaded messaging and pagination.

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.