Hacker News: dhorthy

New comment by dhorthy in "CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font"

dhorthy — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:20:55 +0000

diabolical

Principal Component Analysis

dhorthy — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:14:13 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577746

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

The Kleene Star

dhorthy — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:53:20 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleene_star

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545181

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by dhorthy in "Anatomy of the .claude/ folder"

dhorthy — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:48:49 +0000

I think one of the main examples that i saw in a swyx article a while back is that using the sort of ALL CAPS and *IMPORTANT* language that works decently with claude will actually detune the codex models and make them perform worse. I will see if I can find the post

New comment by dhorthy in "Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system"

dhorthy — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:44:49 +0000

it is very hard for me to take seriously any system that is not proven for shipping production code in complex codebases that have been around for a while.

I've been down the "don't read the code" path and I can say it leads nowhere good.

I am perhaps talking my own book here, but I'd like to see more tools that brag about "shipped N real features to production" or "solved Y problem in large-10-year-old-codebase"

I'm not saying that coding agents can't do these things and such tools don't exist, I'm just afraid that counting 100k+ LOC that the author didn't read kind of fuels the "this is all hype-slop" argument rather than helping people discover the ways that coding agents can solve real and valuable problems.

Plugtest

dhorthy — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 03:55:49 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugtest

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47203527

Points: 37

# Comments: 10

New comment by dhorthy in "Verified Spec-Driven Development (VSDD)"

dhorthy — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:43:36 +0000

software engineering is still software engineering.

just because you don't type out the characters doesn't mean you're not designing systems and thinking critically and leveraging your experience.

also: do we think this is written by ai? do we care anymore?

New comment by dhorthy in "A Brief History of Ralph"

dhorthy — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 22:43:25 +0000

there is the theoretical "how the world should be" and there is the practical "what's working today" - decry the latter and wait around for the former at your peril

New comment by dhorthy in "A Brief History of Ralph"

dhorthy — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 18:37:15 +0000

I don’t think anyone serious would recommend it for serious production systems. I respect the Ralph technique as a fascinating learning exercise in understanding llm context windows and how to squeeze more performance (read: quality) from today’s models

Even if in the absolute the ceiling remains low, it’s interesting the degree to which good context engineering raises it

New comment by dhorthy in "A Brief History of Ralph"

dhorthy — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 18:35:10 +0000

there are hundreds of useful resources, including many linked in the article itself

New comment by dhorthy in "A Brief History of Ralph"

dhorthy — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 18:34:38 +0000

the note about the crypto token was intended to “okay this is now hype slop and it’s time to move on”

A Brief History of Ralph

dhorthy — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 18:00:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.humanlayer.dev/blog/brief-history-of-ralph

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682325

Points: 73

# Comments: 40

The space and motion of communicating agents (2008) [pdf]

dhorthy — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:55:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rm135/Bigraphs-draft.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46639897

Points: 49

# Comments: 7

New comment by dhorthy in "AI coding assistants are getting worse?"

dhorthy — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:51:02 +0000

I read it. i agree this is out of touch. Not because the things its saying are wrong, but because the things its saying have been true for almost a year now. They are not "getting worse" they "have been bad". I am staggered to find this article qualifies as "news".

If you're going to write about something that's been true and discussed widely online for a year+, at least have the awareness/integrity to not brand it as "this new thing is happening".

New comment by dhorthy in "Refactoring – Not on the backlog (2014)"

dhorthy — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:41:57 +0000

engineers always want to re write from scratch and it never works.

a tale as old as time - my second job out of college back in like 2016, I landed at the tail end of a 3-month feature-freeze refactor project. was pitched to the CEO as 1-month, sprawled out to 3 months, still wasn't finished. Non-technical teams were pissed, technical teams were exhausted, all hope was lost. Ended up cutting a bunch of scope and slopping out a bunch of bugs anyway.

New comment by dhorthy in "Refactoring – Not on the backlog (2014)"

dhorthy — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:09:59 +0000

i had the privilege of working w/ some incredible eng leaders at my previous gig - they were very good at working both upwards and downwards to execute against the "50/50" rule - half of any given sprint's work is focused on new features, and half is focused on bug fixes, chores, things that improve team velocity.

New comment by dhorthy in "Refactoring – Not on the backlog (2014)"

dhorthy — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:56:31 +0000

the people yearn for refactoring

Refactoring – Not on the backlog (2014)

dhorthy — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:23:56 +0000

Article URL: https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/refactoring-not-on-the-backlog/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46503439

Points: 44

# Comments: 20

5 Years, 12 Pivots

dhorthy — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 19:17:41 +0000

Article URL: https://boundaryml.com/blog/5-years-12-pivots

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436857

Points: 16

# Comments: 5

New comment by dhorthy in "Writing a good Claude.md"

dhorthy — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 01:21:49 +0000

I think the key here is “if X then Y syntax” - this seems to be quite effective at piercing through the “probably ignore this” system message by highlighting WHEN a given instruction is “highly relevant”