Hacker News: bshanks

New comment by bshanks in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

bshanks — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:14:15 +0000

The main issue here is not UX, but rather that you did something which degraded quality without transparency. You should have documented this and also highlighted the change in an announcement. There should never be an undocumented change that reduces quality. There should never be something the user can do (or fail to do) that reduces quality without that being documented. To regain trust, Anthropic should make an announcement committing to documenting/announcing any future intentional quality-reducing changes.

In addition, the following is less important, but as other commenters have stated: walking away from a conversation and coming back to it more than an hour later is very common and it would be nice if there were a way for the user to opt to retain maximum quality (e.g. no dropped thinking) in this case. In the longer term, it would be nice if there were a way for the user to wait a few minutes for a stale session to resume, in exchange for not having a large amount of quota drained (ie have a 'slow mode' invoked upon session resumption that consumes less quota).

New comment by bshanks in "Amazon is ending all inventory commingling as of March 31, 2026"

bshanks — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:27:36 +0000

Note that inventory already in Amazon fulfillment centers as of March 31, 2026 is still commingled

"Also what happens after March 31st with the leftover commingled inventory that’s already there?

No action is required for stickerless inventory currently in-transit to or stored in our fulfillment centers. These products will continue to sell under their original SKUs.

However for a reseller, after March 31, 2026, all new inventory must use Amazon barcodes. Please review the FBA Barcode Choice and Labeling FAQ for additional information." -- https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t...

New comment by bshanks in "Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project"

bshanks — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 03:28:03 +0000

New comment by bshanks in "Uxn"

bshanks — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 18:31:07 +0000

I also found https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/libreplanet2022/tree/master/item/... to understand the context

New comment by bshanks in "Uxn"

bshanks — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 18:19:04 +0000

One of the authors talks about using C with SDL or libdraw here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715080

Since they were on a boat with a Raspberry Pi and not much battery power or internet, in addition to execution speed and portability, they were probably also concerned with:

- speed of compilation and linking (on small machines like Raspberry Pi)

- binary size of anything that might have to be updated or shared over the internet

- having to troubleshooting emergent issues without the ability to lookup documentation or download updates or tools from the internet

In this situation, a simpler language on a simpler VM is probably going to be faster to develop with than compiling/linking a subset of C, and after the initial implementation of the VM, might present less opportunity for an unintended interaction of leaky abstractions in your libuxn and your toolchain to ruin your day on a day when you don't have internet connectivity to check Stackoverflow or to update some buggy dependency.

New comment by bshanks in "Getting 50% (SoTA) on Arc-AGI with GPT-4o"

bshanks — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 19:19:27 +0000

Yes, I think it's very possible that human brains unconsciously generate-and-test surprisingly large numbers of small candidate programs when solving a problem.

This approach is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel, which is a good fit for biological neural architectures, which have very many computing nodes but each node is very slow (compared to electronic computer CPUs/GPUs).

New comment by bshanks in "Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project"

bshanks — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 20:25:08 +0000

The first thing to do is to put LLMs to work to generate large knowledge bases of commonsense knowledge in symbolic machine-readable formats that Cyc-like projects can consume.

New comment by bshanks in "CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred"

bshanks — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 08:19:52 +0000

I don't understand why an Income Sharing Agreement would be classified as loans. They seem more like equity than debt; the amount that students would pay depends on their future income, and can be arbitrarily small or large (right? or maybe I am misunderstanding the terms of these agreements).

I had thought that debt is when you have to pay back at least the "principal" no matter what, and equity is when the financier shares the risk of you failing. Maybe that's not correct, though?

Does the definition of a "loan" include any sort of financing, even if the amount that needs to be "paid back" to the "lender" can be arbitrarily small or large? That would make equity financing a special case of debt.

New comment by bshanks in "Xz: A microcosm of the interactions in open source projects"

bshanks — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 16:14:35 +0000

Even if other users (or possibly, sock puppets of the attacker) had not been complaining, the original maintainer probably would have began to trust the attacker after enough real contributions.

Why Python's integer division floors (2010)

bshanks — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 23:52:07 +0000

Article URL: http://python-history.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-pythons-integer-division-floors.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39518329

Points: 103

# Comments: 98

Herbgrind analyzes binaries to find inaccurate floating point expressions

bshanks — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 22:35:09 +0000

Article URL: https://herbgrind.ucsd.edu/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39517573

Points: 70

# Comments: 13

Common Lisp's block / return-from and unwind-protect

bshanks — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 01:37:35 +0000

Article URL: http://axisofeval.blogspot.com/2024/01/common-lisps-block-return-from-and.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074568

Points: 126

# Comments: 61

Organizing multiple Git identities

bshanks — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 01:43:24 +0000

Article URL: https://garrit.xyz/posts/2023-10-13-organizing-multiple-git-identities

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37886049

Points: 263

# Comments: 89

What’s the Smallest Variety of CHERI? (2022)

bshanks — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 06:32:47 +0000

Article URL: https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2022/09/whats-the-smallest-variety-of-cheri/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37477526

Points: 46

# Comments: 11

My Mental Model of Transducers

bshanks — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 21:35:27 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2023/09/09/transducers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37450524

Points: 26

# Comments: 2

GitHub has too many hidden features

bshanks — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 22:22:31 +0000

Article URL: https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/github-has-too-many-hidden-features/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37398611

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Compiler Development: Rust or OCaml?

bshanks — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 21:05:12 +0000

Article URL: https://hirrolot.github.io/posts/compiler-development-rust-or-ocaml.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37026757

Points: 154

# Comments: 101

Redpanda’s official Jepsen What we fixed, and what we shouldn’t

bshanks — Sun, 14 May 2023 00:34:23 +0000

Article URL: https://redpanda.com/blog/redpanda-official-jepsen-report-and-analysis

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35934231

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bshanks in "System design and the cost of architectural complexity (2013)"

bshanks — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 19:42:47 +0000

This thesis provides empirical support that a specific measure of software architectural complexity is costly. Specifically, they look thru source code in an automated manner, construct the graph whose nodes are source code files and whose edges are the following cross-file relationships (page 73, section 5.1.2.1):

- The site of function calls to the site of the function's definition

- The site of class method calls to the site of that class method's definition

- The site of a class method definition to the site of the class definition

- The site of a subclass definition to the site of its parent class' definition

- The site at which a variable with a complex user-defined type is instantiated or accessed to the site where that type is defined. (User-defined types include structure, union, enum, and class.)

Then they compute the transitive closure of this graph.

Then they compute two metrics for each node by looking at the transitive closure graph (page 76, section 5.1.2.3):

- Visibility Fan In (VFI): how many other nodes have edges that go from the other node to this node?

- Visibility Fan Out (VFO): how many other nodes have edges that go from this node to the other node?

They observe that by looking at the VFI metric across various files, files tend to sharply cluster into either 'low VFI' or 'high VFI', and similarly for VFO (although some files may be high in one metric and low in the other) (page 79, section 5.1.3).

They then classify each file as:

- low VFI, low VFO: 'peripheral'

- high VFI, low VFO: 'utility'

- low VFI, high VFO: 'control'

- high VFI, high VFO: 'core'

They then find that 'core' files are the most costly, in terms of defect density, developer productivity, and probability of staff turnover.

Repeat yourself, do more than one thing, and rewrite everything (2018)

bshanks — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 13:25:19 +0000

Article URL: https://programmingisterrible.com/post/176657481103/repeat-yourself-do-more-than-one-thing-and

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35151088

Points: 255

# Comments: 116