Hacker News: bumbledraven

New comment by bumbledraven in "The Home-Insurance Coin Flip: Nearly Half of Claims Result in Zero Payout"

bumbledraven — Sun, 31 May 2026 05:55:04 +0000

New comment by bumbledraven in "Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS"

bumbledraven — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:41:36 +0000

TFA links to https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/tailwind-is-smart-steering, which is about Tailwind, but makes multiple distinctions and points that could just as well apply to LLMs, e.g.:

> Builders value getting the work done as quickly and efficiently as possible. They are making something—likely something with parts beyond the frontend—and are often eager to see it through to completion. This means Builders may prize that initial execution over other long-term factors.

> Crafters are more likely to value long-term factors like ease of maintainability, legibility, and accessibility, and may not consider the project finished until those have also been accounted for.

> In my view, the more you optimize for building quickly, the more you optimize for homogeneity.

New comment by bumbledraven in "The agent principal-agent problem"

bumbledraven — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:28:26 +0000

800-word response by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lucovsky, who was on the team that built Windows NT: https://nitter.net/marklucovsky/status/2052828852490285390#m.

It begins:

> In David Crawshaw’s recent post “The agent principal-agent problem” there’s a lot of insight beneath the headline “Code review is broken.” Worth reading carefully.

> Toward the end, David reflects on what he calls the old “cowboy” development culture at Microsoft in the 80s/90s. Not much has been written about that era, mostly because there was no social media, no laptops everywhere, no phones recording daily engineering life.

> A few thoughts from someone who lived it.

Conclusion:

> A lot of software quality did not come from pre-commit review gates.

> It came from tight teams, deep ownership, brutal integration pressure, system-wide stress, and developers who fully understood the machinery they were standing on.

The agent principal-agent problem

bumbledraven — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:29:25 +0000

Article URL: https://crawshaw.io/blog/agent-principal-agent

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48059389

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

I am building a cloud

bumbledraven — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 04:44:19 +0000

Article URL: https://crawshaw.io/blog/building-a-cloud

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47872324

Points: 1115

# Comments: 563

New comment by bumbledraven in "Google has a secret reference desk"

bumbledraven — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 05:42:35 +0000

This article has one neat Google search trick I hadn't known about: `AROUND(#)`. But I am skeptical of much of the rest of it.

Searching for `“can anyone recommend”` to get unfiltered recommendations is an interesting hack, but I feel it's not too reliable. At reddit, you could ask this, and an unknown percentage of responses could be shills or bots.

I'm also skeptical of how much the suggested `@reddit` differs from just `reddit`. The description says it's for social media handles, but reddit is a platform, not an individual user's handle. I suspect google looks for the user's intent to see results from a particular site or social media platform and uses that signal to influence the ranking, and I doubt '@' has much of an effect on that process.

> The results Google omits tend to be less trafficked and less search-optimized, which frequently means they’re more substantive and written for readers rather than algorithms

Really? I call BS. Every time I've looked at the omitted results they've been very similar to ones I've already seen.

I stopped reading after that.

Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug

bumbledraven — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:25:08 +0000

Article URL: https://kirancodes.me/posts/log-who-watches-the-watchers.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47759709

Points: 395

# Comments: 178

What's in a Codebase?

bumbledraven — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:18:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/codebase_spec/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677634

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Being the Adult in the Room

bumbledraven — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 03:06:44 +0000

Article URL: https://tailscale.com/blog/adult-in-the-room

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47622794

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by bumbledraven in "Man beats machine at Go (2023)"

bumbledraven — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:34:25 +0000

Details on the strategy employed by the human are at https://goattack.far.ai:

> We discovered simple adversarial strategies that beat superhuman Go AIs, and find that adding defenses helps but does not eliminate the problem. Our cyclic adversary beats the state-of-the-art KataGo AI more than 97% of the time at superhuman settings. This strategy is simple enough to be replicated by an amateur human player and transfers to other superhuman Go AIs.

New comment by bumbledraven in "Man beats machine at Go (2023)"

bumbledraven — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:32:33 +0000

https://archive.is/EBcVa

Man beats machine at Go (2023)

bumbledraven — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:32:03 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ft.com/content/175e5314-a7f7-4741-a786-273219f433a1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47550972

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

The Flawed Ephemeral Software Hypothesis

bumbledraven — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 07:50:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.blackhc.net/essays/future_of_software/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47540011

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by bumbledraven in "How do you capture WHY engineering decisions were made, not just what?"

bumbledraven — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 01:00:43 +0000

A design doc with a robust "alternatives considered" section.

The hidden control plane lurking in your commodity server

bumbledraven — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:30:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bryan-cantrill-b6a1_i-have-come-to-bury-the-bios-not-to-open-activity-7427489161642758144-NvDk

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051111

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

How I used AI to create an exploit for a CVE before public PoCs existed

bumbledraven — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 02:16:34 +0000

Article URL: https://platformsecurity.com/blog/CVE-2025-32433-poc

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45079751

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bumbledraven in "Optimizing our way through Metroid"

bumbledraven — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 22:39:39 +0000

It would be neat if a fuzzer could help set a new tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) record.

Dynamo, DynamoDB, and Aurora DSQL

bumbledraven — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 14:46:50 +0000

Article URL: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/08/15/dynamo-dynamodb-dsql.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44973466

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bumbledraven in "Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants"

bumbledraven — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 13:54:02 +0000

> You fill Harvard of Stanford with only people with 1600 SATs will turn them into places you dont really want to go to.

Isn’t that basically Caltech? They had a 3% acceptance rate in 2023, the lowest in the nation. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-accepta...

New comment by bumbledraven in "Century-old stone “tsunami stones” dot Japan's coastline (2015)"

bumbledraven — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 15:19:48 +0000

Do you have a citation for this? The most Gemini could say is: "While research has not identified a specific tsunami stone located at the Fukushima Daiichi site that was directly violated, the spirit of these ancient warnings was undeniably ignored." (https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...)