Hacker News: dathanb82

New comment by dathanb82 in "Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source"

dathanb82 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:41:51 +0000

I mean, he left Palantir over a decade ago and now he’s supposedly retired (again) - I bet he’s pretty chill about it these days.

New comment by dathanb82 in "The unbearable cheapness of open weight models"

dathanb82 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 05:27:39 +0000

If "inference is cheap," why is OpenAI spending a ton getting Broadcom to design custom AI chips that make inference cheaper? Reports suggest their custom silicon isn't all that good for training, it's all to make inference more efficient. That shouldn't be necessary if inference is already quite cheap.

New comment by dathanb82 in "The Eternal Sloptember"

dathanb82 — Mon, 25 May 2026 05:17:59 +0000

Two other similarities: they both rely on burning huge amounts of electricity, and have driven up costs of GPUs around the world.

New comment by dathanb82 in "The Eternal Sloptember"

dathanb82 — Mon, 25 May 2026 05:15:58 +0000

This is a good take. The most effective combination of AI and skilled practitioner is using AI to amplify the abilities of the skilled practitioner. And in particular, max benefit comes from exploiting comparative advantage. AIs are really good at boilerplate -- in many cases better than humans because humans will optimize the process by doing copy/paste and often inject errors in the process -- whereas humans are better at abstract and critical reasoning. There's a very real and valuable use case for AI, but it's not replacing humans, it's taking the things that humans don't like doing (and that a computer can do well already) off the human's plate, so humans can focus more exclusively on the things that they do better than the AI. And at least with the current architecture of AI models, there will _always_ be higher-level reasoning that humans do better than the machine.

New comment by dathanb82 in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

dathanb82 — Mon, 11 May 2026 06:03:04 +0000

I’ve also heard it being called “comprehension debt,” which I like a little more because I think it’s more precise: the specific debt being accrued is exactly a lack of comprehension of the code.

New comment by dathanb82 in "Introduction to Obsidian"

dathanb82 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:00:26 +0000

Vimwiki?

New comment by dathanb82 in "GitHub Stacked PRs"

dathanb82 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:24:19 +0000

Unless you have a “every commit must build” rule, why would you review commits independently? The entire PR is the change set - what’s problematic about reviewing it as such?

New comment by dathanb82 in "Welcome to FastMCP"

dathanb82 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:06:07 +0000

Skills are part of the repo, and CLIs are installed locally. In both cases it's up to you to keep them updated. MCP servers can be exposed and consumed over HTTPS, which means the MCP server owner can keep them updated for you.

Better sandboxing. Accessing an MCP server doesn't require you to give an agent permissions on your local machine.

MCP servers can expose tools, resources, and prompts. If you're using a skill, you can "install" it from a remote source by exposing it on the MCP server as a "prompt". That helps solve the "keep it updated" problem for skills - it gets updated by interrogating the MCP server again.

Or if your agentic workflow needs some data file to run, you can tell the agent to grab that from the MCP server as a resource. And since it's not a static file, the content can update dynamically -- you could read stocks or the latest state of a JIRA ticket or etc. It's like an AI-first, dynamic content filesystem.

New comment by dathanb82 in "TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool"

dathanb82 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:20:22 +0000

Oh man, Turbo Pascal was my first "real" programming language -- it was all various flavors of BASIC before, and mostly toy projects. The developer experience with Turbo Pascal (by which I guess I mostly mean Turbo Vision) was honestly pretty great

New comment by dathanb82 in "Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude"

dathanb82 — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:59:01 +0000

The use of XML as a data serialization format was always a bad choice. It was designed as a document _markup_ language (it’s in the name), which is exactly the way it’s being used for Claude, and is actually a good use case.

New comment by dathanb82 in "The wonder of modern drywall"

dathanb82 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:54:20 +0000

And do what? Leave the ducting, pipes, and electrical lines exposed for the one time in 20 years you need to do something with them?

In addition to being much more attractive than exposed infrastructure, drywall and the insulation that gets put behind it help make your house much more energy efficient.

New comment by dathanb82 in "Guinea worm on track to be 2nd eradicated human disease; only 10 cases in 2025"

dathanb82 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:41:13 +0000

As you might expect from the description -- largely passed on via contaminated water -- the guinea worm is mostly present in areas of extreme poverty. Even if such a treatment were feasible, it would be inaccessible to most of the relevant population.

New comment by dathanb82 in "Aging muscle stem cells shift from rapid repair to long-term survival"

dathanb82 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:26:40 +0000

It’s probably even more pronounced, since it’s unlikely that someone is going to _average_ 180bpm for their entire workout, especially as they get older.

New comment by dathanb82 in "Stepping down as Mockito maintainer after ten years"

dathanb82 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:23:01 +0000

The auto-attach flag isn’t a huge deal, since it’s a one-liner that can be statically documented and the fix works in all cases. The bigger issue is the JDK / runtime team’s stance that libraries should not be able to dynamically attach agents, and that the auto-attach flag might be removed in the future. You can still enable mockito’s agent with the —javaagent flag, but you have to provide the path to the mockito jar, and getting that path right is highly build-system-dependent and not something the mockito team can document in a way that minimizes the entry threshold for newcomers.

New comment by dathanb82 in "Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?"

dathanb82 — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 20:09:12 +0000

Just shy of $600K in 2022, based on data from IRS and BLS: https://smartasset.com/data-studies/what-it-takes-to-be-in-t...

New comment by dathanb82 in "Following the Unix philosophy without getting left-pad (2021)"

dathanb82 — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 20:03:50 +0000

It's available (usually as an optional feature) in lots of languages where dependencies are linked statically. The most standard terminology I'm aware of for it is "dead code elimination"

In Javascript, webpack (as well as other module bundlers) supports it, though they call their dead code elimination mechanism "tree shaking".

New comment by dathanb82 in "Differential Datalog: a programming language for incremental computation"

dathanb82 — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 18:58:38 +0000

Lets you define queries over some data set declaratively, and instead of recomputing the query over the entire data set every time you want an updated answer, it uses Differential Dataflow <https://github.com/frankmcsherry/differential-dataflow> to efficiently(^1) calculate the new results by updating the results of the previous query execution in response to new updates to the data set.

^1: I'm not an expert on Differential Dataflow, so I don't know what "efficiently" means in this context, other than "should be faster than running the query from scratch."

New comment by dathanb82 in "Helix: Post-Modern Text Editor"

dathanb82 — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 19:23:47 +0000

Every time I see a "X: a [new/better/best/modern/postmodern/blazingly fast] Y" post on HN, I just know it's going to be written in Rust

New comment by dathanb82 in "What’s wrong with medieval pigs in videogames"

dathanb82 — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 18:11:18 +0000

"I wouldn't use a gun that sounded like that" - me to my wife just about every time we watch an action movie

New comment by dathanb82 in "What’s wrong with medieval pigs in videogames"

dathanb82 — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 18:10:00 +0000

Unless the purpose of the game is educational, I don't think it's incumbent on them to educate their players about anything. Just like I don't expect everyone who sells something at the Renaissance Faire to use medieval furnaces for their blacksmithing or to eschew lathes for turning wood bowls. It's not their responsibility.