Hacker News: blanched

New comment by blanched in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

blanched — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:17:47 +0000

I feel like this could be said about most human traits, on both ends of those traits’ axis. I’m not sure if that makes it insightful or obvious :).

New comment by blanched in "How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown"

blanched — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:08:42 +0000

I think it depends on your job/role. Unless you're spending literally all day in Jira, I don't think the performance (or even more broadly, the enjoyment) of one's task tracker affects productivity that much.

New comment by blanched in "Kiki – a tiny homepage construction kit with a small footprint"

blanched — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:53:36 +0000

I’m sorry you’re going through this. She’s very cute.

Dedicating a project to her sounds like a great idea.

If you use Reddit, I can also highly recommend the r/petloss subreddit for a bit of “group therapy”. It was very helpful for me a couple years ago.

New comment by blanched in "If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?"

blanched — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:05:58 +0000

Thanks for the reply and links, I’ll give it a read today.

New comment by blanched in "If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?"

blanched — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:58:52 +0000

Why are they bunk science? I’m not an environmental expert, but the research papers and policies I’ve read don’t seem to be egregiously wrong.

I’m asking genuinely, I’m open to changing my mind here.

New comment by blanched in "When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident"

blanched — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:57:19 +0000

That feels like deciding to go after Jetbrains because someone used IntelliJ to write a harmful program.

Is there a distinction I’m missing?

New comment by blanched in "Go: Support for Generic Methods"

blanched — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:19:58 +0000

I'm not familiar with D, but Zig and Rust are well-known for continuously evolving.

Zig has the (in)famous "Writergate": https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24329

And besides Rust's high count of RFCs, there are things like async (I'm not complaining about it, but its an obvious large-scale "change"), module system changes, etc.

(To be clear, I like both languages a lot. But I wouldn't call them slow moving or right from the start.)

New comment by blanched in "I manage teams without a single call"

blanched — Mon, 25 May 2026 16:50:38 +0000

This is why I dislike most wartime analogies. Most day jobs just aren't that urgent or important.

New comment by blanched in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

blanched — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:30:34 +0000

Because Microsoft pushes C#/dotnet as the preferred way to write UI on Windows.

New comment by blanched in "PHP's Oddities"

blanched — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:21:08 +0000

I'm not familiar with PHP, can you elaborate on what you mean here? What is it compiling? Or are you referring to type safety?

New comment by blanched in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

blanched — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:43:54 +0000

That’s the law, yes, but in practice it’s murkier: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/08/super-pacs-raise-mi...

> In fact, not a single coordination investigation has ever resulted in a PAC being fined.

New comment by blanched in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

blanched — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:13:32 +0000

Politicians, by definition, have power. How do you easily remove or withhold it?

New comment by blanched in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

blanched — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:08:06 +0000

What did he pay in previous years? To borrow a phrase, I’ll wait while you google it.

New comment by blanched in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

blanched — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:00:13 +0000

In what reality does a business owner get to claim their customers’ taxes as their own contribution?

New comment by blanched in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

blanched — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:57:17 +0000

Right, as presented, these people are closer to Lex Luthor than Superman.

And I would still want to tax Superman.

New comment by blanched in "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence"

blanched — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:01:31 +0000

I've only been to the low tens of graduations, but in my experience this is pretty common for a speaker. A couple highlights and otherwise a little boring :)

Now of course, there are exemplary speakers who keep you engaged the whole time, but they're rare.

New comment by blanched in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

blanched — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:15:49 +0000

“anti-intellectual” judgment aside, I believe it’s just a meme (in the original definition of the word).

New comment by blanched in "Flipper One – we need your help"

blanched — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:03:26 +0000

Why is it entitled for other people to complain about certain types content, but fine for you to do it here?

New comment by blanched in "Flipper One – we need your help"

blanched — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:23:27 +0000

I mean, you posted a comment and started a discussion about "LLM complaints on HN", so I replied to that. I didn't comment about the article itself.

Part of my point is that the line between "written by an LLM" and "written for marketing" is so blurred that you can't always tell anyways.

New comment by blanched in "Flipper One – we need your help"

blanched — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:07:48 +0000

On the one hand, I get what you mean. Some genuinely interesting projects are immediately dismissed because AI was involved.

On the other hand, I have two real problems with AI writing.

1. LLM prose is genuinely unpleasant to read. Its the exact same way that I strongly dislike reading LinkedIn posts or email marketing copy. It's all the same slimy tone that's using a certain sentence structure and rhetoric to try to be interesting without real substance.

2. Sometimes it feels like someone asking you to read an article with no punctuation or grammar: the author couldn't put in time/effort to make this enjoyable to read, so now I have to spend more time/effort reading it.

Personally, I don't read through all marketing copy to see if "this one is going to be good", nor do I want to spend time providing constructive critical feedback on it.