Hacker News: dcuthbertson

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Classical chess ranks 562nd of 960 starting positions after 460,800 games"

dcuthbertson — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:59:06 +0000

but every setup plays against every other one and earns an "honest" score. /scream

New comment by dcuthbertson in "My agent.md to improve LLM-assisted code quality"

dcuthbertson — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:20:31 +0000

I'm not convinced, yet, that eliminating LLM-generated comments is the right path for me. I do review everything written by an LLM and some comments are actually pretty good, but sometimes I'm just too tired to try to figure out how to reword an oddly worded one.

I just added Sanglard's rules to my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md file, did another code review, and found some LLM-generated comments were really hard to understand. I think they're due to invented metaphors and flowery language instead of using standard terms, so I've added this:

- Comments must be literal. Don't invent figurative language for what a plain technical term already says — write "rows still reference it," not "rows still wear it."

Improving LLM code generation is an iterative process. I'm glad people share their efforts to improve it.

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Don't you mean extinct?"

dcuthbertson — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:55:38 +0000

I worked for a company that measures developer's output in number of commits, PRs created and approved, and Jira tickets per sprint. Management doesn't even insist on that the tickets have any kind of an effort estimate.

It can be pretty depressing, until you learn how to game the system - create tickets for yourself that are tiny amounts of work. I hear that it's getting harder to do that, because management is looking more carefully at tickets generated and it looks like they'll start having developers assign points to their tickets before the tickets are added to the sprint

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Memory Safe Context Switching"

dcuthbertson — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:38:46 +0000

> If a() calls b(), I wouldn't think the stack frame while running b is the ancestor of a.

I think of b as the child/descendant of a because a creates the running instance of b, and that makes a the parent/ancestor of b.

New comment by dcuthbertson in "A glitch in February of the year 0"

dcuthbertson — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:22:02 +0000

> 2000 - 2999: 21st century

You have the right idea, but you made the 21st century a millennium

New comment by dcuthbertson in "The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management (2nd Ed) (2023)"

dcuthbertson — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:28:23 +0000

I too have written C programs for decades. I encountered reference counting when I learned how to write Windows kernel drivers. It was very liberating to see that there were so fewer opportunities for memory leaks when reference counts were applied liberally.

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Why Janet? (2023)"

dcuthbertson — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:17:15 +0000

TIL that statements of obvious exaggeration are called causal, hyperbolic statements. Who knew?

All kidding aside, I've never heard them called causal hyperbolic before. It's a good term.

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian"

dcuthbertson — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:06:22 +0000

> Well, we know that it's impossible to remember everything.

Yet it's possible to remember a lot. Those who pass "The Knowledge" test are truly inspirational. See this 60 Minutes report on London's Black Cab drivers [0]

[0]: https://60minutestonight.com/the-knowledge-60-minutes-report...

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Investors pile into clean energy as Iran war drives push for energy security"

dcuthbertson — Sun, 03 May 2026 15:10:15 +0000

I'm curious as to how low a temperature your heat pump will operate. I live in New England and replaced a whole-house air conditioner with a heat pump, but the heat pump works only to 35F. Much colder than that, and an auxiliary electric heater kicked in. The first Winter cost me about $800 over my gas-fired forced hot water heating system. I had the contractor disable the electric heat in the Spring and rewire the thermostats to start the (high efficiency) furnace when the outdoor temp got too low.

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Antimatter has been transported for the first time"

dcuthbertson — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:52:27 +0000

Imagine your own, household matter/antimatter reaction chamber. I can hardly wait for antimatter to be transported through pipes underground along side water mains, natural gas pipes, and sewer connections.

Rust Training

dcuthbertson — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:30:42 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/microsoft/RustTraining

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503150

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming"

dcuthbertson — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:33:36 +0000

But doesn't No. 2 directly conflict with Pike's 5th rule? It seems to me these are all aphorisms that have to be taken with a grain of salt.

> 2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Good software knows when to stop"

dcuthbertson — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:36:46 +0000

There are few things so valuable as a good user who is willing to work with you. Many years ago I worked at a company that was going to shutdown a very buggy product. There was one user who relied on it heavily and convinced the CEO to make one more release, and I was tasked with working with that customer to make it happen. Over the next month, we fixed the bugs (I coded, he tested). We wound up making a stable and more user-friendly product. It was a real pleasure to work with that guy. The company still mothballs the thing, but I know we had at least one happy customer in the end.

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

dcuthbertson — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:45:09 +0000

https://douglascuthbertson.com/ - my personal blog

New comment by dcuthbertson in "LaTeX Coffee Stains (2021) [pdf]"

dcuthbertson — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 01:43:40 +0000

Now I want a package to add blood stains on my murder mystery screenplay.

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Deliberate Internet Shutdowns"

dcuthbertson — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 11:32:05 +0000

Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Show HN: KiDoom – Running DOOM on PCB Traces"

dcuthbertson — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 18:49:06 +0000

Could you print the designs to paper and make a repeatable flip-card stack? Oh no. How long before it becomes a PowerPoint presentation?!

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Playball – Watch MLB games from a terminal"

dcuthbertson — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 09:28:34 +0000

Remember, all things in moderation - especially moderation.

New comment by dcuthbertson in "GamerNexus to benchmarks GPUs on Linux [video]"

dcuthbertson — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 12:11:53 +0000

This video is worth a look if you care about gaming on Linux. Steve and Wendell are really thinking through which distros to use for testing, what to test, and how to test before jumping into setting up test rigs.

I hope GamersNexus gets to benchmarking games. It will be fun to see benchmarks of popular games running on something other than Windows.

New comment by dcuthbertson in "Knotty: A domain-specific language for knitting patterns"

dcuthbertson — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 21:41:24 +0000

Oh, the missed opportunities, like a little "ribbing" for the versions :^)

Version 1: Knit

Version 2: Purl