Hacker News: bandrami

New comment by bandrami in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

bandrami — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:32:04 +0000

The only job application process I've ever walked out on in the middle of was 25 years ago, when I was taking a proctored computer skills test and it dinged me for pressing the Windows key rather than moving the cursor to the Start button and clicking it.

So this is a new presentation of an old problem, I guess is the takeaway there.

New comment by bandrami in "Grok Bot"

bandrami — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:15:24 +0000

IDK, it's the same problem I had with OpenClaw: I can't think of anything I need done that I want it to do for me.

New comment by bandrami in "OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining"

bandrami — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:30:54 +0000

A year ago everybody in San Francisco was saying the entire world was about to be blindsided by the fundamental changes that would happen in the next 8-12 months and, well, that just hasn't happened.

New comment by bandrami in "OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining"

bandrami — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:28:36 +0000

Hard disagree, as someone whose main job is telling developers "no". If it's everybody's responsibility it is in fact nobody's responsibility.

New comment by bandrami in "Chicken Scheme 6.0"

bandrami — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:35:59 +0000

It has eval but it lacks reader macros (or at least it did thirty years ago) which is what makes eval useful on lisp2 systems.

New comment by bandrami in "The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI"

bandrami — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:44:28 +0000

Somebody's got to actually operate those robots, after all

New comment by bandrami in "Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)"

bandrami — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:40:44 +0000

Particularly since one of their flagship products is a CMS that solves that problem and lets you move documents around without breaking links

New comment by bandrami in "New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health"

bandrami — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 06:02:12 +0000

Meta (née Facebook) hired addiction medicine specialists to work on their platform engagement. It wasn't to make teens use their platforms less.

New comment by bandrami in "OpenAI's ring-shaped smart speaker will reportedly cost between $300 and $400"

bandrami — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:01:56 +0000

Smart speakers are a mature market and seem to have topped out at about 1/3rd of US households at a lower price point than this. This is going to be a very hard sell.

New comment by bandrami in "Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage"

bandrami — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 06:31:33 +0000

I still think this question is a future minefield, as well as the question of what happens if an LLM outputs a patented algorithm

New comment by bandrami in "The Entropy of a Markov Chain"

bandrami — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 06:26:47 +0000

Anything with a probability mass or distribution function has entropy; the state space of Markov chains just tends to get combinatorially big as the chain's memory increases.

New comment by bandrami in "Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years"

bandrami — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 06:05:53 +0000

There was for a brief period a Middle Path, called libiberty (now mostly subsumed into gnulib). It generated GNU-compatible shim functions for whatever system you happened to be on that translated those calls into the native calls. So you wrote one clean GNU-esque codebase and gnulib patched together essentially a translation layer for it when you built.

New comment by bandrami in "Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code"

bandrami — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:39:23 +0000

As an aside, back in the days of Stack Exchange I would always type out manually whatever answer I found to make sure I understood WTF I was adding to the system.

New comment by bandrami in "How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)"

bandrami — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:15:14 +0000

They moved the functionality from Firefox to Thunderbird IIRC, which seemed like a desperate attempt to get anyone to use Thunderbird.

New comment by bandrami in "How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)"

bandrami — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:13:36 +0000

Buzz was weird because its main impact was killing another Google product, Orkut

New comment by bandrami in "How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)"

bandrami — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:10:08 +0000

In the early aughts the web was largely anonymous (MySpace and Friendster were just starting out and Facebook was still a Ivy league only thing). We thought we wanted to be able to find and be found by specific people, but in retrospect I definitely regret that change. It was better when I was just a randomish string of characters.

New comment by bandrami in "How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)"

bandrami — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:07:17 +0000

IDK, I ran an RSS feed that had ads 20 years ago (it was a niche hobby blog and every fifth post was an ad for supplies for that hobby). It made enough to pay for the hosting.

New comment by bandrami in "A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands"

bandrami — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 08:11:29 +0000

I mean, go to an IBEW hall in a busy area and talk to the shop steward; he can probably start you tomorrow

New comment by bandrami in "AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough"

bandrami — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:55:06 +0000

The xAI Anthropic deal was pretty widely covered, but the press release is here: https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership

The absurdly large discount was why Anthropic could claim a revenue-positive quarter for the first time. But that discount window ends IIRC in September. The problem remains that xAI announced the discounted revenue as "revenue before discounts".

New comment by bandrami in "AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough"

bandrami — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:19:45 +0000

That's $25B before discounts, and their discounts to Anthropic in the current quarter alone are $12B of that.