Hacker News: davepeck

New comment by davepeck in "Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982"

davepeck — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:02:34 +0000

Some of my fave C64 memories as a kid: listening to cassette tapes with stuff stored on them, punching in COMPUTE! listings with MLX, discovering 6510 and learning the Merlin assembler, long runs in Moon Patrol, making sprites with Gary Kitchen’s GameMaker, trying to understand how GEOS could possibly work, wearing out the spiral binding of the Programmer’s Reference Guide.

New comment by davepeck in "There's no such thing as a small software team anymore"

davepeck — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:46:53 +0000

A wise troll once said:

> best weapon against complexity spirit demon is magic word: "no"

In counterpoint, I believe small teams can remain small. Small teams can ship simple monoliths with high velocity, commit count, and quality. Service orientation didn’t suddenly become low-cost because of agents; the boundaries between multiple services that version and deploy independently are still tricky beasts to wrangle. And it’s not clear why “running more agents” is inherently desirable or impactful; my small team’s (admittedly anecdotal) experience is that the value quickly saturates.

New comment by davepeck in "Yadda 3.0.0: BDD in the Age of AI Agents"

davepeck — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:51:47 +0000

It may be an age thing. 15-ish years ago, TDD, BDD, Red/Green Testing, and a whole bunch of others were hot topics. They’re still useful approaches to know about, even if some (like, IMO, BDD) didn’t really stand the test of time.

New comment by davepeck in "The Anti-Palantir Manifesto"

davepeck — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:49:22 +0000

My strong feeling while reading this “philosopher CEO”’s manifesto: consumer VPNs primarily help customers fight for their right to stream Netflix. This doesn’t strike me as effective advertisement.

New comment by davepeck in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

davepeck — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 20:48:08 +0000

> the entire point of the ipad is that it's a handicapped tool

amusing nonsense

How I Host

davepeck — Sun, 24 May 2026 03:17:52 +0000

Article URL: https://davepeck.org/2026/05/23/how-i-host/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254011

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by davepeck in "Changes to GitHub Copilot individual plans"

davepeck — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:00:41 +0000

This thread is pretty quiet for what strikes me as a substantial set of changes with, presumably, more substantial changes still to come for anyone not grandfathered into a Pro plan.

I get the impression that the intersection of HN posters and Copilot users is quite small in practice; that Claude Code and Codex suck up all the oxygen in this room. But it seems plausible we’ll see similar “true costs greatly exceed our current subscription pricing” from Anthropic and OpenAI someday soon…

New comment by davepeck in "UNIX99, a UNIX-like OS for the TI-99/4A (2025)"

davepeck — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:50:38 +0000

My parents bought one for the house when I was in elementary school. I still remember the sound of the Speech Synthesizer, discovering 20 GOTO 10, and playing Hunt the Wumpus.

New comment by davepeck in "Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents"

davepeck — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:02 +0000

CEOs have many audiences; great CEOs communicate capably with each.

FWIW it's not entirely clear to me who Entire's long-term customer is, but the (interesting!) CLI that shipped today is very much for developers who are busy building with agents.

New comment by davepeck in "Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents"

davepeck — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:03:36 +0000

Dohmke never spoke clearly to developers when he was GitHub's CEO.

New comment by davepeck in "An Update on Heroku"

davepeck — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 21:39:39 +0000

Watching their public roadmap to see what happens. Right now, it looks about the same as it has for a while: useful new features and expected maintenance, moving along at a reasonable if not blistering clip.

https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130

New comment by davepeck in "CPython Internals Explained"

davepeck — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 19:08:53 +0000

Oh, that's very interesting work. And, yes, I'd also be surprised if (today's) agentic tools were at all helpful for that: it's way outside of distribution, and conceptual correctness truly matters.

New comment by davepeck in "CPython Internals Explained"

davepeck — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:35:54 +0000

I made some small contributions to cpython during the 3.14 cycle. The codebase is an interesting mix of modern and “90s style” C code.

I found that agentic coding tools were quite good at answering my architectural questions; even when their answers were only half correct, they usually pointed me in the right direction. (I didn’t use AI to write code and I wonder if agentic tools would struggle with certain aspects of the codebase like, for instance, the Cambrian explosion of utility macros used throughout.)

New comment by davepeck in "CPython Internals Explained"

davepeck — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:31:41 +0000

Per PEP 744, cpython shipped with an experimental JIT (default disabled) in 3.13. It remains experimental in 3.14.

See https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.13.html#an-experimental...

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

davepeck — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 16:57:27 +0000

This is self-destructive defeatism. It is also flat wrong on its substantive points.

New comment by davepeck in "Mathematics for Computer Science (2018) [pdf]"

davepeck — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:06:49 +0000

Give https://www.paper2audio.com/ a try; it is targeted at just this use case. It’s a Seattle-local startup.

R1: A Foundational Model for Small Molecule Drug Discovery

davepeck — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 17:13:36 +0000

Article URL: https://rhizomeresearch.ai/blog/announcing-r1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46234088

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by davepeck in "What's New in Python 3.14"

davepeck — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 15:42:03 +0000

If you’re curious about or playing with t-strings, see https://t-strings.help/

New comment by davepeck in "Tdom: HTML templating with t‑strings"

davepeck — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 16:27:23 +0000

I'd never heard of it, alas. Luckily, they live in pretty different language ecosystems.

New comment by davepeck in "Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters"

davepeck — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 21:52:34 +0000

Hi! Thanks for your deeply non-silly reply; it's nice to (virtually) meet a cofounder.

If you have time, I'd love to hear your thoughts on Mullvad's campaign here in Seattle.

For what it's worth, I suppose my perspective boils down to: the first three issues aren't issues here in town, or can be addressed in more direct ways (we have a wide choice of providers; 1st party browsers and services cover the gamut of tracking concerns; etc). Circumventing geographical restrictions is useful, but -- perhaps understandably! -- doesn't appear to be what Mullvad is advertising on the trains I ride.