Hacker News: asdfman123

New comment by asdfman123 in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

asdfman123 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:36:53 +0000

The article correctly identifies the upsides of Markdown, then identifies a bunch of issues that I, as a casual user of it, don't care about.

Then, in the solution section, doesn't identify a solution.

No thank you, I'll stick with Markdown.

New comment by asdfman123 in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

asdfman123 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:03:51 +0000

People are still trying to figure out how to use AI. Right now the meme is it's used by juniors to churn out slop, but I think people will start to recognize it's far more powerful in the hands of competent senior devs.

It actually surprised me that you can use AI to write even better code: tell it to write a test to catch the suspected bug, then tell it to fix the bug, then have it write documentation. Maybe also split out related functionality into a new file while you're at it.

I might have skipped all that pre-AI, but now all that takes 15 minutes. And the bonus creating more understandable code allows AI to fix even more bugs. So it could actually become a virtuous cycle of using AI to clean up debt to understand more code.

In fact, right now, we're selling technical debt cleanup projects that I've been begging for for years as "we have to do this so the codebase will be more understandable by AI."

New comment by asdfman123 in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

asdfman123 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:57:16 +0000

One of the major things code review does is prevent that one guy on your team who is sloppy or incompetent from messing up the codebase without singling him out.

If you told someone "I don't trust you, run all code by me first" it wouldn't go well. If you tell them "everyone's code gets reviewed" they're ok with it.

New comment by asdfman123 in "I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services"

asdfman123 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:52:56 +0000

It's really not the same magnitude at all. It's much harder to run into those problems now.

New comment by asdfman123 in "I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services"

asdfman123 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:20:40 +0000

The late 90s internet was filled with predators, skeeziness, and viruses that would break your computer and require a reformatting.

That stuff is still there if you look for it, but it's not on your social media feeds or in any of the apps provided through app stores.

New comment by asdfman123 in "Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer"

asdfman123 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:49:15 +0000

You could argue that it's one of the most versatile instruments, sure. "Greatest" is completely subjective.

But is it one of the most versatile instruments? You can do signal transforms with any kind of audio input, although it's done more with the electric guitar than any other instruments.

I would say it in practice, it has the most versatile sonic profile.

New comment by asdfman123 in "OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine"

asdfman123 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:12:27 +0000

Pursuing growth at all costs is inevitable though. If you don't continue to grow, you get superseded by entities that do. Goes for both countries and companies.

Communist countries like the Soviet Union and China have even had the explicit goal of outgrowing the US.

New comment by asdfman123 in "OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine"

asdfman123 — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:17:13 +0000

Every accusation is a confession

New comment by asdfman123 in "OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine"

asdfman123 — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:14:50 +0000

I would be careful with this kind of reasoning, because it suggests corruption within a corporate model is inevitable, giving it implicit permission to continue existing. It's not inevitable.

New comment by asdfman123 in "OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine"

asdfman123 — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:11:12 +0000

It's already crumbling. That's why we have AI-powered fascism in the first place. Society destabilizes and a significant fraction of the population says "perhaps authoritarianism is a good thing." It's never worth it, though.

New comment by asdfman123 in "Looks like it is happening"

asdfman123 — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:54:55 +0000

Maybe we need to find a new metric to judge academics by beyond quantity of papers

New comment by asdfman123 in "uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts"

asdfman123 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 01:16:15 +0000

We have such powerful AI tools these days. Every media recommendation service should have a slider you can set to indicate how much you want to be "challenged."

High challenge = CS papers explained

Medium challenge = bridge engineering videos

Low challenge = some guy playing video games for you on YouTube

New comment by asdfman123 in "The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling"

asdfman123 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:10:04 +0000

> My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent

These laws are harsh... but, as much as I hate to say it, the impact social media has had on the world has been worse.

New comment by asdfman123 in "OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission"

asdfman123 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:30:06 +0000

Yet they still keep the word "open" in their name

New comment by asdfman123 in "Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation"

asdfman123 — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:48:48 +0000

Google is good at buying existing products and scaling them, which is exactly what they did with DeepMind.

New comment by asdfman123 in "What's the difference between a "disc" and a "disk"? (2023)"

asdfman123 — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:47:09 +0000

As a quick and dirty heuristic: the C in disc is for CD (or other optical media).

New comment by asdfman123 in "Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist Credit Card Number"

asdfman123 — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:07:49 +0000

It's a privacy problem because permitting things like this can lead to abuses.

New comment by asdfman123 in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

asdfman123 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:02:47 +0000

"It's really not hard to create your own coal power. Our engineers have built a small coal power generator and simply get coal from our mines (which I'll describe in a future blog post)."

New comment by asdfman123 in "FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE"

asdfman123 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:34:32 +0000

Have any of you tried talking to a police officer in real life? If you're just polite to them they treat you like they're your private protection force.

Moreso in blue cities, I have no idea what point you're making there other than crime you've seen on TV is scary.

New comment by asdfman123 in "FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE"

asdfman123 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:03:01 +0000

If they throw out things like due process and reasonable doubt they can do a whole lot with the data they've collected.

That may sound hyperbolic but I hope it's obvious to most people by now that it's not.