Hacker News: cvwright

New comment by cvwright in "Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down"

cvwright — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:34:38 +0000

It’s curious how tariffs are always a bad move for the US, but always a good move for other countries.

New comment by cvwright in "Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter"

cvwright — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 22:24:32 +0000

I come from a lower class US background.

I assure you, take one look at us and you’ll instantly see that very few of us are in any danger of starving.

New comment by cvwright in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

cvwright — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:31:53 +0000

As you point out, a HS diploma is largely meaningless these days.

This discussion is about students trying to get into top colleges, which is a completely different population with completely different problems from those doing the bare minimum.

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

cvwright — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:42:52 +0000

Where are these well engineered products made with care? I would love to use more tech like that.

Unfortunately most sites and apps have been low quality and getting worse since well before AI coding became a thing. Examples: Lowes, Home Depot, American Airlines - all shockingly bad for companies of that size.

New comment by cvwright in "AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job"

cvwright — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 15:10:43 +0000

We’ve already had those limits for years on any corporate project with average (or below) developers.

I work with a lot of AI code, and it’s not any worse than what big teams were already producing.

A small team of 2-3 really good humans is in a whole different league, but that has always been a very rare case.

New comment by cvwright in "2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026"

cvwright — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 01:02:25 +0000

We’re at the point where people who talk too fancy get accused of being LLMs, and the people who make human mistakes get scolded for grammar.

New comment by cvwright in "It's not empowering to hand off the details"

cvwright — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 03:00:40 +0000

Sometimes I don’t need my todo app to be “great” or revolutionary in any way. I just need it to work, and bog standard average is perfectly fine for a lot of things.

This frees me up to spend more time at the design level, solving harder or more novel problems.

New comment by cvwright in "The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras"

cvwright — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 03:36:54 +0000

Sounds like a mini version of Habermas’s legitimation crisis playing out in real time

New comment by cvwright in "Searchable field-level encryption on Supabase with CipherStash"

cvwright — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:45:45 +0000

Don’t use deterministic encryption unless your data is already highly random.

Any adversary who knows the distribution of the plaintext data can guess what your encrypted values are, with accuracy that improves as your sample size increases.

There were a bunch of papers on this 10-12 years ago. (Full disclosure: I was an author on some of them.)

New comment by cvwright in "Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media"

cvwright — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 23:38:12 +0000

It was a big year for the culture war. People who had previously been cordial suddenly needed to fight each other over politics and other controversies of the day. The rest of us watched this happen, then slowly backed away.

New comment by cvwright in "Most arguments are about ego, not ideas"

cvwright — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 22:39:57 +0000

You should try writing a design doc with the AI before you have it write the code. It will make random extrapolations from your first prompt, some good and some bad. Then you get a chance to argue back and forth with yourself with the robot as a helper.

New comment by cvwright in "The dead economy theory"

cvwright — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:47:44 +0000

The best early example of this is that Anthropic is already eating the lunch of all the new “AI security audit” companies. And they were only a few years old.

Those guys certainly thought they were being novel and creative, using AI to disrupt an expensive and labor intensive business model. But now with Claude Security, their own market share is going to be gobbled up before they can even get established.

New comment by cvwright in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

cvwright — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:16:48 +0000

Unfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare.

Younger me really enjoyed some of the game programming books by Andre Lamothe.

Most “Learn Language X” books were terrible with over focus on syntax and very little thought into organization.

New comment by cvwright in "Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend"

cvwright — Sun, 24 May 2026 20:08:36 +0000

LLMs are bringing us back to all the “proper” software engineering stuff that we’ve always known we should be doing, but until now we never had enough time/people/money to do it right.

Brainstorming and research before writing a design.

Writing a design or spec before writing the code.

Comprehensive unit tests.

Etc etc etc.

Like you, I get vastly better output from the tool when I create a detailed spec in markdown before I let it start coding. And bonus, the LLM is pretty good at helping with the spec too.

New comment by cvwright in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

cvwright — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:22:00 +0000

You’re arguing that we have too many PhD students in CS, not too few.

I agree with you fwiw.

New comment by cvwright in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

cvwright — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:20:29 +0000

re: incentives, my proposal was always to let schools pay their football and basketball players, but require that grad research assistants are paid the same.

New comment by cvwright in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

cvwright — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:18:07 +0000

I worked a ton in grad school, and it definitely sucked at the time.

But it’s crazy to complain about getting paid to go to school. A grad stipend is there to minimally support you so you don’t have to get another job and can focus on your research. It’s not supposed to be a career!

New comment by cvwright in "Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability"

cvwright — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:23:47 +0000

Even that press release never claimed that Mythos was better than Opus at finding bugs.

They claim the huge advance is in exploiting the bugs.

New comment by cvwright in "Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview"

cvwright — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:59:09 +0000

The word “exploit” may be doing a lot of work here. In my experience Opus 4.6 is perfectly happy to provide test cases that trigger ASAN, even without the super secret squirrel security access.

But if you ask it to get you a shell it’ll probably tell you to get lost.

New comment by cvwright in "Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school"

cvwright — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:57:47 +0000

It’s been said that the British executed about 1% of their population each year for a few hundred years, and that a similar number died in prison.

The claim is that this made Britain a much safer country in later centuries.