Hacker News: awkward

New comment by awkward in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

awkward — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:56:01 +0000

Code quality is a tactical concern and products live or die on strategy.

I wouldn't recommend neglecting tactics if your strategy doesn't put you on the good side of a generational bubble though.

New comment by awkward in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

awkward — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:57:33 +0000

There's a reason we had a few years of heavy anti police protest across the US.

New comment by awkward in "The Unmaking of the American University"

awkward — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:00:28 +0000

Safety and freedom is incompatible with direct political control. Respect for truth is a false value if what truth is is to be put to a vote or changed to match the whims of whoever is in power.

New comment by awkward in "Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)"

awkward — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:25:46 +0000

The decline of technic sets is such a shame. There's so little support for anything but representative models of specific cars, despite the platform being able to support a ton of mechanical creativity.

New comment by awkward in "Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance"

awkward — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:50:36 +0000

To be fair that's more than a little bit present in most superhero media.

New comment by awkward in "Kernighan on Programming"

awkward — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 16:28:16 +0000

Kernighan's Lever - https://linusakesson.net/programming/kernighans-lever/index....

This article is perennially posted here and is probably the best breakdown of this quote.

New comment by awkward in "Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores"

awkward — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:07:28 +0000

You aren't renting walking distance to a butcher baker and candlestick maker for less than $3K for a studio. That's an aspirational lifestyle for a few neighborhoods.

New comment by awkward in "GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source"

awkward — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:50:58 +0000

Deeply hate this. Just add a small fee. It's just a couple bucks. What are you, cheap?

Open Source Software underwrites everything. It makes the largest human endeavors work. It makes silly ephemeral games little notes apps and digital art run. Turning maintainers into a kind of digital landlord that charges a fee is both insultingly low bore and enough to squeeze the life out of computing as a hobby.

New comment by awkward in "Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them"

awkward — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:08:22 +0000

Folding drying racks come in several shapes and are very affordable.

New comment by awkward in "So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?"

awkward — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:03:54 +0000

The article does go into this and gives lip service to the idea that a secure third party could expose age without exposing identity. Ultimately, there's still the problem that even if point of verification can be done in a zero trust way, you are still entrusting very sensitive information to a third party which is subject to data breach.

New comment by awkward in "Poison Fountain"

awkward — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 19:43:43 +0000

There are several humans who need to make decisions between bad training data and life or death decisions coming from an LLM.

New comment by awkward in "How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders"

awkward — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:22:42 +0000

Games are a zero marginal cost industry driven by hits. The cap is pretty high. The floor is what you should be worried about.

New comment by awkward in "Break up bad companies; replace bad union bosses"

awkward — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:10:22 +0000

Unions are useful because they are a counterparty to negotiations with management. They have leverage because they are able to represent labor as a single entity. If they are only able to represent labor on one axis, but not on issues that represent quality of workplace, they lose leverage in negotiation that allows them to win larger salaries.

New comment by awkward in "Programming peaked"

awkward — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 14:30:00 +0000

Having a relational database in a gui was great. The problem with access was that it tried to support network applications as a backend but supported a punishingly low number of connections. Having an application that crashed with 10-50 connections put it in an awkward space. Businesses without a strong technical team would build on it, release with N=1 load testing, and get surprised when it crashed out at scale. MS wasn't going to improve it, because they wanted more sophisticated customers to buy SQL server.

New comment by awkward in "The Penicillin Myth"

awkward — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 20:04:37 +0000

It's a myth in the most literal way. Fleming published and promoted his results despite a lack of reproducibility. By the time he won the Nobel Prize, he had backformed or misremembered a folksy story about an open window. That's textbook mythmaking.

It can both be fine to have a glib story to tell schoolkids and important to recognize that the actual intellectual process is messier and more complex.

New comment by awkward in "The Penicillin Myth"

awkward — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 18:43:51 +0000

So many other good details that get to how impossibly multivariate biology research is, like the need to have several days at the exact temperature.

It's not uncommon for results in biology to have this kind of snag in reproducibility even now. Sometimes it's due to attributing variations to something like "steady hands at the bench", but other times it can even be a deliberate attempt to prevent rivals from duplicating a process before it can be patented and privatized.

New comment by awkward in "New study finds users are marrying and having virtual children with AI chatbots"

awkward — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 14:39:10 +0000

Chatbots enable self destructive manipulation of others at scale.

New comment by awkward in "Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture"

awkward — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 13:55:09 +0000

I like your angle, but most applications is a big difference from most companies. Serverless comes after deciding whether or not to break up the monolith, and after breaking up engineering into separate teams. It's a good way to manage apps with high variance in traffic while keeping cloud spend down.

New comment by awkward in "I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform"

awkward — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 18:38:50 +0000

It sounds like it's a B2B SaaS product that's gone through multiple pivots with very weak guidance on product on every step.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you, but it's a very common way for things to go wrong.

New comment by awkward in "Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org"

awkward — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 14:32:54 +0000

Tiles aren't just about data selection, they're also about caching. By turning a continuous domain (any part of the world at any scale) into a series of discrete requests (a grid of tiles at several fixed scales), maps become a series of cacheable requests.