Hacker News: cwyers

New comment by cwyers in "Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches"

cwyers — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:44:55 +0000

```The associate agreed with me that they should not deprecate the old app until the new app can handle this configuration. I asked them to raise this up the chain: they need to push back the deprecation date.```

There's no way a CSR has any power over this.

New comment by cwyers in "What happens if Japan takes in zero immigrants?"

cwyers — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:46:07 +0000

I am really shocked at the tone of so many of the comments here. Did HN become a breeding ground for xenophobia at some point? Has it always been that and is it just way more mask off now?

New comment by cwyers in "From Rust to Ruby"

cwyers — Wed, 27 May 2026 05:26:55 +0000

> and then when the work was done they were happy with the result

It's worse than that -- they don't even know the result! They never tried to run it!

New comment by cwyers in "The Biochemical Beauty of Retatrutide: How GLP-1s Work"

cwyers — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:41:45 +0000

I was on a GLP-1 a few years ago and lost 70 lbs. After I got off, I kept a ton of diet changes (no more Pepsi or Gatorade and a lot of water instead, switching to whole grains and fiber/protein variants on pasta, etc.) and gained the weight back in a year and a half. The literature backs this up: keeping up weight loss is hard.

New comment by cwyers in "Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged"

cwyers — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:35:34 +0000

Because it passes the existing test suite? And he knows what's in the test suite?

New comment by cwyers in "LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction"

cwyers — Mon, 04 May 2026 05:18:39 +0000

If people can figure out how to write RFCs about IP over carrier pigeons for April Fools, they can figure out how to conceive of LLMs as a layer of abstraction beneath a protocol as well.

New comment by cwyers in "John Bradley, author of xv, has died"

cwyers — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 05:43:31 +0000

I was wondering why HN was linking to Vox Day. The answer "because the alternative is worse" is probably the most justifiable one I can think of.

New comment by cwyers in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"

cwyers — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 03:59:57 +0000

There's a lot of people in this thread that assume that Sam Altman is the one who is being dishonest here, and I kind of understand, but the other two parties who could just as easily be lying are Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, and of the three of them if you think sama is the _most_ likely to lie I feel like you have not been paying attention.

New comment by cwyers in "GPT-5.3-Codex"

cwyers — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:44:12 +0000

Codex now lets you tell the LLM tgings in the middle of its thinking without interrupting it, so you can read the thinking traces and tell it to change course if it's going off track.

New comment by cwyers in "Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S."

cwyers — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 09:54:37 +0000

Ironically they had the foresight, they were just too early/didn't execute. They ran an online service (co-owner with IBM and CBS) called Prodigy that competed with AOL and CompuServ, and they tried to do online shopping there.

New comment by cwyers in "Ruby 4.0.0"

cwyers — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 18:34:00 +0000

Just use WSL2 and Docker Desktop. VS Code has DevContainer support so you can standardize on a Docker image for your project.

New comment by cwyers in "I have to give Fortnite my passport to use Bluesky"

cwyers — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:41:27 +0000

It's as much of a stretch as describing using an Azure service as "I have to use Halo" or AWS as "I have to use Rings of Power."

New comment by cwyers in "Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest"

cwyers — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:33:50 +0000

"Slop" is at _least_ as fair a description of "we had an LLM rewrite HN headlines" as "we rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it" is of "we removed our biggest source of crashes on Android by getting rid of Go FFI issues."

New comment by cwyers in "Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles"

cwyers — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:15:09 +0000

I mean, he's _allowed_. The Compiler Police aren't going to roll up to his house and take away his Jai compiler if there isn't a quorum of HN users blessing his efforts. But people can point out they don't feel the juice is worth the squeeze. Also, Blow is certainly an advocate for his position, which means this kind of public debate is germane to the question of if _other_ people should adopt Jai.

New comment by cwyers in "Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles"

cwyers — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:02:58 +0000

If you have bills to pay, it really is.

New comment by cwyers in "Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles"

cwyers — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:00:55 +0000

The point is that Blow has two blockbuster hits under his belt and can afford to take a decade to ship a single game. Most people would go broke never having shipped a game if they tried to do things Blow's way.

New comment by cwyers in "I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model"

cwyers — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 22:37:33 +0000

Yeah, there's only two differences between using Markov chains to predict words and LLMs:

* LLMs don't use Markov chains, * LLMs don't predict words.

New comment by cwyers in "Perl's decline was cultural"

cwyers — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 19:05:43 +0000

Node.js is the most popular web framework/technology in the StackOverflow developer survey. Express is more popular than FastAPI, Django, Flask and Rails in the same survey. Just... what are you talking about?

New comment by cwyers in "Perl's decline was cultural"

cwyers — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 18:46:01 +0000

I was surprised by that, too, and assumed it was a decade-old article until I saw the date at the bottom. Both being mentioned before Python is wilder, as is the total exclusion of JavaScript.

New comment by cwyers in "GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches"

cwyers — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 18:19:50 +0000

You can actually look at history and see what happens when IBM tries to wrest control of the PC platform back with the PS/2, which was a flop with consumers because it wasn't backwards compatible enough with IBM's own previous PCs or the wider PC market that developed. A bunch of PC clone manufacturers got together and came up with the EISA bus standard so they wouldn't have to pay IBM license fees for MCA, and made it backwards-compatible with ISA cards people already had. It was successful enough that IBM ended up adopting EISA for some of their PCs.

The other notable thing about the situation is that three companies ended up simultaneously responsible for a large part of the PC platform, originally -- IBM, Microsoft and Intel. They all worked in various ways to encourage competition to each other -- the reason we see OS competition on the PC platform is that IBM and Intel both found it in their interests to allow other OSes on the platform to reduce Microsoft's leverage over them. IBM in fact created one of the competing PC OSes out the gate, OS/2, which was originally an IBM/Microsoft joint project until they started feuding. Now, OS/2 is dead, but IBM's interest in being able to support their own OS instead of Microsoft's is a big reason the PC platform was built in an OS agnostic way. People criticize UEFI for locking down the PC platform more than the previous BIOS implementations, but UEFI is still _way_ more open than basically any other platform, most of which don't have a standard for bootloaders at all. It's really the absense of a standard for bootloaders that keeps most Android phones locked down. Two Android phones from the same OEM might have different bootloaders, much less two phones from different manufacturers. We've yet to see an alternate OS with the resources to support implementing their own bootloaders for a majority of Android phones.