Hacker News: discreteevent

New comment by discreteevent in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

discreteevent — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:03:35 +0000

Scientists don't try everything. First they run it through expert critical review. This candidate wouldn't make it past the theory stage.

New comment by discreteevent in "Schedule tasks on the web"

discreteevent — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:54:29 +0000

> It's not a bug, it's fundamentally just a facet of its (LLM/human) general nature

Fair enough but then that means that MCP is not "a bit like asking if "an API" was a critical link in some cybersec incident"

Because I can secure an API but I can't secure the the "(LLM/human) general nature."

New comment by discreteevent in "Show HN: Dumped Wix for an AI Edge agent so I never have to hire junior staff"

discreteevent — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:09:40 +0000

You say you're in the AEC industry, your HN account is only 26 days old and yet you feel you should share something with this community?

New comment by discreteevent in "If you thought code writing speed was your problem you have bigger problems"

discreteevent — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:14:38 +0000

> How is this really different from careful prompt engineering, and an extensive proposal/review/refine process?

So different that those concepts don't even exist.

I don't have to carefully prompt my compiler in case it might misinterpret what I'm saying. My compiler comes with a precisely specified language.

I never, ever, review the output of my compiler.

New comment by discreteevent in "Leanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering"

discreteevent — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:45:36 +0000

It did but they were meaningless without a human intellect trying to make sense of them.

New comment by discreteevent in "Leanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering"

discreteevent — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:40:41 +0000

The ai is just pattern matching. Vibing is not understanding, whether done by humans or machines. Vibe programmers (of which there are many) make a mess of the codebase piling on patch after patch. But they get the tests to pass!

Vibing gives you something like the geocentric model of the solar system. It kind of works but but it's much more complicated and hard to work with.

New comment by discreteevent in "Leanstral: Open-source agent for trustworthy coding and formal proof engineering"

discreteevent — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:48:40 +0000

The scientific approach is not only or primarily empiricism. We didn't test our way to understanding. The scientific approach starts with a theory that does it's best to explain some phenomenon. Then the theory is criticized by experts. Finally, if it seems to be a promising theory tests are constructed. The tests can help verify the theory but it is the theory that provides the explanation which is the important part. Once we have explanation then we have understanding which allows us to play around with the model to come up with new things, diagnose problems etc.

The scientific approach is theory driven, not test driven. Understanding (and the power that gives us) is the goal.

New comment by discreteevent in "Grief and the AI split"

discreteevent — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:07:56 +0000

Developers make these kinds of improvements all the time. Are you saying that it would have been impossible without AI?

New comment by discreteevent in "Grief and the AI split"

discreteevent — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:00:26 +0000

> You can always change it later.

People seem to think that technical debt doesn't need to be paid back for ages. In my experience bad code starts to cost more than it saved after about three months. So if you have to get a demo ready right now that will save the company then hack it in. But that's not the case for most technical debt. In most cases the management just want the perception of speed so they pile debt upon debt. Then they can't figure out why delivery gets slower and slower.

> ironically it is your camp that advices to not use microservices but start with monolith. that's what i'm suggesting here.

I agree with this. But there's a difference between over-engineering and hacking in bad quality code. So to be clear, I am talking about the latter.

New comment by discreteevent in "Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English"

discreteevent — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:13:09 +0000

> It IS a compiler.

What are you talking about? If an LLM is a compiler, then I'm a compiler. Are we going to redefine the meaning of words in order not to upset the LLM makers?

New comment by discreteevent in "Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English"

discreteevent — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:06:43 +0000

>Human engineers are not deterministic yet people pay them

Human carpenters are not deterministic yet they won't use a machine saw that goes off line even 1% of the time. The whole history of tools, including software, is one of trying to make the thing do more precisely what is intended, whether the intent is right or not.

Can you imagine some machine tool maker making something faulty and then saying, "Well hey, humans aren't deterministic."

New comment by discreteevent in "Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web"

discreteevent — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:06:33 +0000

> Second, GCed languages need to be willing to fit with the web/WASM GC model

Suppose the Go people make a special version of Go for Wasm. What do you think are the chances of that being supported in 5 years time?

New comment by discreteevent in "The Lobster Programming Language"

discreteevent — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:48:11 +0000

People learn by example. They want to start with something concrete and specific and then move to the abstraction. There's nothing worse than a teacher who starts in the middle of the abstraction. Whereas if a teacher describes some good concrete examples the student will start to invent the abstraction themselves.

New comment by discreteevent in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

discreteevent — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 11:07:56 +0000

You have never been on HN before and yet you feel the need to tell the community something vague and useless but which happens to align with LLM hype?

New comment by discreteevent in "Where things stand with the Department of War"

discreteevent — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 09:21:19 +0000

Be careful with this "they are all the same" logic. As an empire, I would rather have the WWII to 2016 USA than the current one and the current one to Russia.

New comment by discreteevent in "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence"

discreteevent — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 09:06:07 +0000

> So from my perspective, nothing changes regarding ownership.

The engineer who worked with you took ownership of the code! Have you forgotten this?

New comment by discreteevent in "Why No AI Games?"

discreteevent — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:12:02 +0000

That article is brilliant.

New comment by discreteevent in "We automated everything except knowing what's going on"

discreteevent — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:58:01 +0000

When I use a library someone understood it when they shipped it. It also had a long stabilisation period where bugs were fixed in it. When I use an LLM, potentially nobody understands what was just shipped and it has had no time to stabilise.

New comment by discreteevent in "Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness"

discreteevent — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:00:21 +0000

> It's nothing short of invigorating to have this degree of control over something so powerful

Is this really that different to programming? (Maybe you haven't programmed before?)

New comment by discreteevent in "AI makes you boring"

discreteevent — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:45:32 +0000

It's not about status. It's about interest. A joiner is not going to have an interesting conversation about joinery with someone who has put some flatpak furniture together.