Hacker News: cvwright

New comment by cvwright in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

cvwright — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 02:46:25 +0000

Right. It’s things like Baltimore (when I lived there) requiring that high speed internet had to roll out in poor areas first, before it could go into the rich neighborhoods.

But this was the early 2000s and the internet was still “new”. Only the richer areas cared and were willing to pay the price. Letting them have first (or even equal!) access would have made it easier to fund the rollout in low income areas.

New comment by cvwright in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

cvwright — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:30:17 +0000

I thought that was kind of how the hard sciences work already?

My grad school friend who was a physicist would write his talk just before his conferences, and then submit the paper later. My experience in CS was totally backwards from that.

New comment by cvwright in "Vulnerability research is cooked"

cvwright — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:46:31 +0000

Find-then-patch only works if you can fix the bugs quicker than you’re creating new ones.

Some orgs will be able to do this, some won’t.

New comment by cvwright in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

cvwright — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:36:38 +0000

You’re conveniently ignoring the Olympic boxing champion from 2024 who beat the absolute shit out of the female competitors.

New comment by cvwright in "An old photo of a large BBS (2022)"

cvwright — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:00:32 +0000

Or maybe this is like fondly remembering the busted economy car that you drove around with your friends? I have my first 386DX sitting on my desk right now and it looks exactly like the top left of that photo.

The hot car that we all lusted after was maybe something like a SGI Indy or an O2.

New comment by cvwright in "Okmain: How to pick an OK main colour of an image"

cvwright — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:15:50 +0000

You’re not wrong, but you probably could have built the thing with Claude in the time it took you to write this comment.

New comment by cvwright in "Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale (2025)"

cvwright — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:48:12 +0000

The closest thing we have is, in security / privacy / cryptography, you can write "attack" papers.

It's not perfect. You don't get any credit unless you can demonstrate a substantial break of the prior work. But it's better than in a lot of other fields.

New comment by cvwright in "Facebook is cooked"

cvwright — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:47:32 +0000

Several people have tried over the years. We all failed, because it doesn’t work.

The economics don’t work because no one is willing to pay.

The network effect doesn’t exist, because real people don’t post enough to get the flywheel started.

All the dark patterns exist because that is what users reward.

Sucks but it’s true.

New comment by cvwright in "I guess I kinda get why people hate AI"

cvwright — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:41:27 +0000

Very likely they got the causality backwards. Every time there’s a big war, technology advances because governments pour resources into it.

New comment by cvwright in "Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?"

cvwright — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 01:21:29 +0000

Just burn the tokens. It’s an upfront cost that you pay once at the beginning of a project, or on a smaller scale at the beginning of a major feature.

For context, I’ve built about 15k loc since Christmas on the $20 plan, plus $18 of extra usage. Since this is a side project, I only hit the limits once or twice per week.

New comment by cvwright in "Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?"

cvwright — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:49:20 +0000

It’s really not. For anything substantial, the things that you do to manage an LLM are the same things that you should be doing to manage a team of human devs, even if the team is just yourself.

Documentation. Comments. Writing a plan and/or a spec before you begin coding. Being smart with git commits and branches.

New comment by cvwright in "Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation"

cvwright — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:10:56 +0000

Having someone else pay for your national defense for 80 years sure doesn’t hurt.

New comment by cvwright in "Velox: A Port of Tauri to Swift by Miguel de Icaza"

cvwright — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:03:49 +0000

What an understatement :)

It’s a lovely language but the compiler has got to be the most unreliable I’ve ever seen.

It crashes semi-frequently. And it will sometimes try to run analyses that are way beyond O(n). So you can have perfectly valid code that it can’t compile, until you simplify or reduce the size of some function.

New comment by cvwright in "Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)"

cvwright — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:07:03 +0000

They made a couple of Intel boxes in the very late 90s / very early 00s, but the company was already on the way out by that point.

New comment by cvwright in "How I estimate work"

cvwright — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 15:17:32 +0000

I think Claude’s estimates are biased towards huge enterprise projects.

I asked it to estimate a timeline for a feature in my hobby project and it confidently replied, “4.5 weeks to code completion”.

Less than 4 hours later, the feature was done. I asked it to compare this against its initial estimate and it replied, “Right on schedule!”

I have completely given up on using it to estimate anything that actually matters.

New comment by cvwright in "Statement by Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands,Norway,Sweden,UK"

cvwright — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:07:16 +0000

By that logic, the European members who didn’t meet their defense spending obligations for years and years have already left NATO too.

New comment by cvwright in "A faster heart for F-Droid"

cvwright — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:59:04 +0000

Unfortunately you can’t even get the RAM for $400 anymore.

New comment by cvwright in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

cvwright — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 18:19:09 +0000

But mining all the tracking data in order to show profitable targeted ads is extremely intensive. That’s what kicked off the era of “big data” 15-20 years ago.

New comment by cvwright in "Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): An incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy"

cvwright — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:56:48 +0000

The redneck version that I heard as a kid was way worse than that. Things I won’t repeat…

New comment by cvwright in "Why We Abandoned Matrix (2024)"

cvwright — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 19:32:05 +0000

Don’t blame the user - blame Matrix for designing the system like this.

> They have to be stored somewhere. You want private keys on the public server?

Yes. Encrypted. The feature is called “dehydrated devices” and the Matrix team has been working on it for quite a while now.