Hacker News: bigfishrunning

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Five memorable books about programming (2008)"

bigfishrunning — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 22:02:51 +0000

After reading the little schemer, I bought two more copies just to lend out to people. It's that good.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "From Linux to Wikipedia: How Volunteers Build the Internet"

bigfishrunning — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 15:22:10 +0000

"I wish the corporations did censorship instead of the government" isn't the anti-censorship take you think it is. I agree there's a ton of vile shit that people don't want to see, but client-side filtering is the way to handle that, not "please, zuck, don't show me stuff you don't think i'll like, and I completely trust you to decide what that is"

New comment by bigfishrunning in "The Lisp curse, now coming to your ecosystem"

bigfishrunning — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 23:46:13 +0000

I prefer the schemes.... Chicken scheme for standalone programs, s7 for embedding into larger systems. They're simple and easy to mold to whatever shape you want in my experience

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?"

bigfishrunning — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 16:22:45 +0000

> Next time I would splurge a bit more and buy a machine with more RAM.

Sam Altman would prefer you didn't

New comment by bigfishrunning in "AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt"

bigfishrunning — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 14:05:20 +0000

I don't think they're suggesting that, rather that the "more eyeballs" quote is a bit flawed (in that not every project gets enough eyeballs). A thing can still be better then another thing and not be perfect.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt"

bigfishrunning — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 14:00:06 +0000

> PHP is junk literslly(sic) written over nights by some volunteers!

And yet everyone knows this, and millions of people still continue to use it and develop new software with it, to avoid learning from our mistakes. The software industry is just not interested in fixing these problems; I've heard people upset that AI is pointing out flaws, instead of being upset that flaws exist. Deeply unserious.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)"

bigfishrunning — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 21:34:59 +0000

sounds like your uniforms were not uniform enough

New comment by bigfishrunning in "LLM Voice"

bigfishrunning — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 19:45:50 +0000

Not necessarily -- I am extremely anti-AI; I think the danger is not that it's good, it's that it's convincing. Turns out most people don't care about the quality of art or prose or code that they interact with, and it's very depressing.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI"

bigfishrunning — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 12:51:59 +0000

I assume the standards you're referring to are things like The MISRA guidelines, or the IEC standards (specifically 62304). In my experience, these are applied in very "check-the-box" ways that often undermine their intent; Very very few organizations take software safety seriously.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI"

bigfishrunning — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 12:47:50 +0000

We shouldn't have to "push reboot" on systems we rely on. The fact that that's acceptable is a big part of the problem.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI"

bigfishrunning — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:47:45 +0000

So those goals and timelines should be reconsidered; If a civil engineering firm slapped up a bridge as quickly and cheaply as possible with no concern for quality, they would cease to exist. We have no standards for software quality, and therefore anything that accelerated the perceived output is enthusiastically adopted without consideration for any future consequences.

Weinberg’s Law -- If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI"

bigfishrunning — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:41:09 +0000

> For a programming job you could be exempted from using AI tools to do the work, but you would still have to do the work at a reasonable standard.

Plenty of programmers don't work at a reasonable standard; See, for example, every security incident ever, proliferation of slow electron apps, commercial software that flat-out doesn't work properly.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible"

bigfishrunning — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 17:26:11 +0000

I consume Debian on a regular basis...

New comment by bigfishrunning in "I will no longer upload to NEW"

bigfishrunning — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 12:04:39 +0000

Why not? Linux distributions contain tons of packages that are not the Linux kernel, and just because AI patches have been accepted in one place doesn't mean they'll be accepted elsewhere.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Roblox downloaded 145GB models from us (including adult content) without asking"

bigfishrunning — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:36:46 +0000

> This is a website about starting businesses.

It's really not, unless the only qualifier for that is "hosted by a VC incubator". Most of the people here are here to argue about AI or Crypto or whatever, or read announcements from Nvidia and Google. I would bet less then 1% are starting businesses.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you"

bigfishrunning — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:08:47 +0000

Having an encyclopedia entirely sourced in an LLM that is easily manipulated and prone to "hallucination" doesn't seem like a great idea, that's why not.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you"

bigfishrunning — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:06:55 +0000

the only way to fight back is to put up (and use!) small web pages, and foster small communities.

New comment by bigfishrunning in "Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany"

bigfishrunning — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 23:48:37 +0000

I would expect that, just like other cryptocurrency, "cloud wallets" will manage the tokens themselves for most people, who will gladly give up decentralization for the tiniest bit of convenience

New comment by bigfishrunning in "A complete bypass of eMudhra’s 1FA OTP login system"

bigfishrunning — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:39:04 +0000

did not know it was a mastodon thing

New comment by bigfishrunning in "eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business"

bigfishrunning — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 19:08:40 +0000

5 has two ones in it!