Hacker News: dirkc

New comment by dirkc in "Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?"

dirkc — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:08:44 +0000

> circular economy

I get what you mean, but in general circular economy means something different, positive in my opinion. Here is what wikipedia has to say:

> a model of resource production and consumption that involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling materials and products, to extend product life cycle for as long as possible

In the EU it is a hot topic for a lot of non-profit and social innovation work

New comment by dirkc in "Retire the Abstractions"

dirkc — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:34:47 +0000

Many times I wonder if it's possible to collapse abstractions? The idea of making the whole stack simpler. I'm not overly optimistic of LLMs achieving this, but it they do, I will be paying more attention.

New comment by dirkc in "I made a game where you build a CPU from logic gates"

dirkc — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:10:16 +0000

This immediately made me think of nand2tetris.org, but as a game. Is that what NANDGame is?

New comment by dirkc in "Adversarial Code Obfuscation for Defending Against LLM-Based Analysis"

dirkc — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:02:39 +0000

I'm curious about ways to entice agents to perform weird and wacky things when working on a codebase.

New comment by dirkc in "Why don't people use formal methods? (2019)"

dirkc — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:58:28 +0000

Isn't the problem with formal methods that it isn't clear whether or not most of the useful code we use are actually formally verifiable?

The article mentions NP-complete, but is it actually a solvable problem in general?

> For extremely restricted cases, like propositional logic or HM type-checking, it’s “only” NP-complete.

New comment by dirkc in "GCC steering committee announces AI policy"

dirkc — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:44:38 +0000

Earlier today I found this - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11755

I've been thinking lately about different ways to get agents to do interesting things when let loose on a code base. Think mischief, not malice. Something like sneaking in a prompt/context so that all variable names are characters from a certain work of fiction. Or all debug messages must use pirate English.

Adversarial Code Obfuscation for Defending Against LLM-Based Analysis

dirkc — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:40:54 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11755

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49109869

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by dirkc in "Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)"

dirkc — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:59:39 +0000

Thanks, clearly my caffeine intake is at issue

New comment by dirkc in "Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)"

dirkc — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:01:13 +0000

I see a reference to Khan Academy, but not Go?

New comment by dirkc in "Lightweight Spring Boot Monitoring Without Prometheus and Grafana"

dirkc — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:54:57 +0000

For small applications having an observability stack like ELK or Prometheus + Grafana tends to outweigh the application itself ito cost and complexity.

I haven't found something I'm 100% happy with to self host and tend to just go with a hosted solution. I'll give statlite a look!

New comment by dirkc in "Substack writers, you need a website"

dirkc — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:14:23 +0000

I get a cloudflare 502 error for standard.site

New comment by dirkc in "Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs"

dirkc — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:45:13 +0000

Isn't that just saying CapEx is a bigger part of their costs as if that is a positive thing?

New comment by dirkc in "Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)"

dirkc — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:42:30 +0000

I did something similar, for similar reasons. In the end I just did whatever to get it published. If you show up at my door, I'll pour you your choice of beer/coffee. But I agree, it feels very invasive!

On the web side of things DNS only recently started being more private - 10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois.

Two take aways from my experience 1. I'm happy that I invested more in the web 2. The app store gives you distribution - I have a few websites with almost 0 traffic, but the app I wrote gets a handful of downloads a week almost 2 years later?

New comment by dirkc in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

dirkc — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:51:21 +0000

> As for me, I’ve found that the community and activity proxies are still good.

Definitely still something to look into. A project I'm checking in on from time to time is https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash/.

It will be interesting to see how the project activity is unfolds? Are people using it in production. How many errors do they find. What do those fixes entail. What happens with the docs over time. Etc.

I haven't had a change to look in depth, but based on a quick glance I'd say that the activity on the project seems like the tempo you'd expect of a similar open source project.

New comment by dirkc in "Show HN: 18 Words"

dirkc — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:19:46 +0000

Keep the timer, but after 30 seconds, deduct a point, after 60 seconds show an option to reveal the word / give up.

New comment by dirkc in "Rewriting Bun in Rust"

dirkc — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:15:51 +0000

I got curious and had a look at some of the code (>1m .rs). I was surprised to see code for a S3 client in there?

I clearly don't get the value proposition of bun? And even if I accept that you want to bundle your run time, package manager, test runner and bundler, why do you want to include things like a custom S3 client?

New comment by dirkc in "Show HN: 18 Words"

dirkc — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:51:27 +0000

I like the idea, but I didn't like losing after a few words. Now it might just be me not being good at losing, but who is?

Maybe the game can always progress to the next word with your total score being reduced. So if you get all within 30 seconds you score 18/18. That way everyone can play the whole game and share with their friends how far they got:

|X|o|X|X|X|o|o|o|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|X|o|X| 13/18

New comment by dirkc in "Benchmarking coding agents on Databricks' multi-million line codebase"

dirkc — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:33:18 +0000

> as we aggressively adopt AI for engineering

Why do we need to aggressively adopt things rather than thoughtfully adopt things?

It sounds like they are probably punching AI and engineers in the process

New comment by dirkc in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

dirkc — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:29:22 +0000

The challenge is that more and more people are producing project like this - 1,000s of commits and > 200k lines of code - and saying it was carefully created using agent based workflows and not vibe coded.

New comment by dirkc in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

dirkc — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:24:52 +0000

Thanks for all the info you've provided!

Maybe I'm just being a little grumpy. If I really need to look into a repository, I clone it and use vanilla git command line tools to have a look.

It's just annoying that the modern web UI from GitHub takes >1s second to load a page with 34 commits