Hacker News: dwh452

New comment by dwh452 in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

dwh452 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:57:46 +0000

There are lots of positives that have resulted from using AI in software engineering. (1) No more long repetitive text editing sessions. I.e. changing namespaces or replacing deprecated APIs with the "correct" ones. AI will make nearly perfect text modifications with ease. (2) No more bike-shedding code reviewers nitpicking over every tiny coding decision. I.e, "you should use std::format instead of std::stringstream". AI will match the existing set of nitpicks so you don't have to. (3) Average Joe's and Jane's can craft applications by just talking to the computer. This might inject a freshness to the current state of software. Currently, we are all forced to use the same bloated applications like Word, Excel, Jira, and Photoshop. We are currently forced to deal with the same set of monopolistic SW companies. Now average folk can solve problems and avoid dealing with Microsoft for a spreadsheet program.

New comment by dwh452 in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

dwh452 — Sun, 03 May 2026 12:37:44 +0000

The mechanistic view gets weirder if you imagine all the states of the system being written down on a giant tape. Not just the "current" state but all the past and future states. What makes this tape not alive or conscious?

New comment by dwh452 in "Backpacks got worse on purpose"

dwh452 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:32:09 +0000

in the old days the brand name was also the company name. now brand names mean nothing.

New comment by dwh452 in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

dwh452 — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 01:01:31 +0000

https://etcutmp.com

New comment by dwh452 in "Why do some gamers invert their controls?"

dwh452 — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 11:31:20 +0000

looking left or right is a rotation not a pivot.

New comment by dwh452 in "Why do some gamers invert their controls?"

dwh452 — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 02:31:24 +0000

i wonder why planes are designed this way?

New comment by dwh452 in "Writing toy software is a joy"

dwh452 — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 16:28:47 +0000

What's sad is how difficult it is to write software today. In the old days your dad could buy a C64 and cobble together an application. It should be vastly easier to do the same kind of thing with vastly better building blocks today. Why can't some Grandma drag and drop some widgets and have a recipe manager with sharing features amongst her friends and family?

New comment by dwh452 in "How were 70s versions of games like Pong built without a programmable computer?"

dwh452 — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 13:45:00 +0000

How were pinball machines built without a programmable computer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg I think the arcade industry was already comfortable dealing with complexity to make the mechanical games. The Rube Goldberg nature of the early video games probably weren't that much of a jump in effort/engineering.

New comment by dwh452 in "Greppability is an underrated code metric"

dwh452 — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 13:08:04 +0000

This sounds like the advice to prefer the variable name 'ii' over 'i' because you can easily search for it. I loath such advice because it causes the code to become ugly. Similarly, there are 'YODA Conditions' which make code hard to comprehend which solves an insignificant error that is easily caught with tooling. The problem with advice like these is you will encounter deranged developers that become obsessive about such things and make the code base ugly trying to implement dozens of style rules. Code should look good. Making a piece of text look good for other humans to comprehend I consider to be job #1 or #2 for a good developer.

New comment by dwh452 in "Virtual Apollo Guidance Computer"

dwh452 — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 04:39:54 +0000

Here's a kick-starter kit that does what you're asking for: https://www.stgeotronics.com/open-dsky I built one and loved it, I wrote my own Arduino C code to drive the device: https://github.com/kjs452/KennysOpenDSKY

New comment by dwh452 in "We need visual programming. No, not like that"

dwh452 — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 02:24:11 +0000

Maybe we need 'programmable visuals' instead of 'visual programming'? Why can't I write a simple one hundred line text file and produce a nice architectural diagram?

New comment by dwh452 in "With fifth busy beaver, researchers approach computation's limits"

dwh452 — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 19:44:33 +0000

I'm curious how the Turing machines can resemble problems which take input? BB(n) is defined as a n-state Turing machine that starts off with an empty tape. Collatz(n) is how many steps are taken before it terminates when starting with input 'n'.

Does this mean a BB(6) machine which resembles Collatz is testing all possible values as part of it program and not part of anything on the tape (since the tape start out empty)?

New comment by dwh452 in "Daniel Dennett has died"

dwh452 — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 17:43:49 +0000

Very sad for me, he was one of my favorite thinkers and his books were the few that made me feel smarter after having read them. His thinking tools remain a great aid to my thinking. The reason for this post though, is to mention that Darwin also died on April 19th.

New comment by dwh452 in "How to actually use the notes you take"

dwh452 — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 17:23:46 +0000

The best thing I have done for making my notes usable is to have a simple grep script that runs anywhere and searches all the notes files I have. My script is case insensitive and matches lines that contains all the strings you searched on.

New comment by dwh452 in "On why Markdown is not a good, or even a half-decent, markup language"

dwh452 — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 23:57:09 +0000

I haven't seen anything new in this space and I just finished a project using a markdown format I invented called Tagged{Text}. I'm happy to present it here for your consideration.

In creating my blog and static site I started using Markdown but couldn't get around the limitations. So I invented a simple file format for tagging text into a tree like structure. It has a formatting style modeled after LaTeX. It has served me well (two websites and two blogs).

I call it an "agnostic markdown format" because no tags are defined ahead of time. The user defines everything and writes python filters to generate the output from the tags. I have lots of python code to parse and generate HTML. It has a macro processor, calculator, git date, and other useful tags.

Here is an article about Tagged{Text}: https://etcutmp.com/taggedtext.html Another website built using this format: https://etcutmp.com/evolve5 Source Code: https://github.com/kjs452/tagged_text Source Code for the second website: https://github.com/kjs452/Evolve5Help

The main python file is: taggedtext.py (the parser). All the other python code are filters to generate or transform the tagged text tree into something else. For example, tt_macros.tt implements the DEFINE{} tag.

New comment by dwh452 in "Rawhide – (rh) find files using pretty C expressions"

dwh452 — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 12:02:29 +0000

I was the original author. Heh, heh -- I'm still alive. I just glanced at the code and it looks like a wonderful rewrite. I couldn't see any of my original gross code. Not only that, they massively added to the functionality. It's really a totally new thing. I just had to chime in here to thank raf for seeing something cool in the original and making a great piece of software. -- Ken

New comment by dwh452 in "This Year, Autonomous Trucks Will Take to the Road with No One on Board"

dwh452 — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 13:50:28 +0000

Next year autonomous consumers with No One at home