Hacker News: ef2k

New comment by ef2k in "DeepSeek Harness developer preview"

ef2k — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:13:39 +0000

Anythign that needs to be cleaned up or undone goes in ctx.effect. It returns the "inverse" (the cleanup function) when the plugin loads. Cordis then stores it and runs it when the plugin unloads. Take a look at 5.1.1 in the paper.

New comment by ef2k in "DeepSeek Harness developer preview"

ef2k — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:55:02 +0000

What's buried under the lede: this harness is using Cordis v4 (the paper that dropped today). Cordis has already been used for four years in a different project called Koishi that uses v3. Cordis itself is a way of hot loading and unloading plugins without restarting a running process. The cool part is that when it unloads it can revert any state and side effects it created, cleaning up its connections, memory allocations, registered handlers, etc. and it can also deactivate any dependencies it relied on without disturbing other plugins.

New comment by ef2k in "Only 2.6% of the most visited websites have fully valid HTML"

ef2k — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:44:56 +0000

The number is eye-catching but it's measuring how non-conforming the source code is, as opposed to whether it results in the intended DOM. This is why HTML validators largely went out fashion since it's more practical to consider source "valid" if it renders correctly in the browser. The way the browser handles non-conforming source code is part of the spec [1].

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parse-er...

New comment by ef2k in "Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It"

ef2k — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:12:00 +0000

I don't know if it's a coincidence but this is the same thing an AI explained to me when prompted something like "what replaces SaaS now that AI can build most things on demand". That was like a year ago. I have no proof for this, but we might all just be getting similar responses from similar contextual bubbles and landing on the same conclusions.

New comment by ef2k in "Show HN: Oak – Git replacement designed for agents"

ef2k — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:57:05 +0000

to be fair, #2 exists because monorepos and submodules are somewhat antithetical concepts. A monorepo is supposed tobe the single source of truth for the codebase, while submodules are pointers to external repos with their own history. That alone will increase the source of churn for teams that are constantly merging.

New comment by ef2k in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

ef2k — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:35:38 +0000

> All my finance and payment domain expertise, all the debugging intuition and distributed system knowledge earned through hours of sweat and tears, is now promptable.

I think the author downplays how much of that knowledge is used on knowing what to zoom in on, what to prompt, or what to look for.

New comment by ef2k in "Malicious npm packages detected across Red Hat Cloud Services"

ef2k — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:39:02 +0000

perfect time to drop a reminder: vendoring might seem annoying, but it's way safer than trusting a remote registry.

New comment by ef2k in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

ef2k — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:01:12 +0000

It's telling how rhetoric and conjecture are now normalized in company and business culture. When we were at the peak of remote work, companies were reporting record high revenues.

New comment by ef2k in "Bitwarden CLI compromised in ongoing Checkmarx supply chain campaign"

ef2k — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:52:40 +0000

The issue was a compromised build pipeline that shipped a poisoned package.

But PSA: If something is critical to the business and you’re using npm, pin your dependencies. I’ve had this debate with other devs throughout the years and they usually point to the lockfile as assurance, but version ranges with a ^ mean that when the lockfile gets updated, you can pull in newer versions you didn’t explicitly choose.

If what you're building can put your company out of business it's worth the hassle.

New comment by ef2k in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"

ef2k — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:44:19 +0000

A few years ago, intentionally fingerprinting or tracking your users without disclosure was spyware and unethical. Alas, here we are.

Anyway, what they're calling "spectroscopy", is a combination of extension probing and doing residue detection (looking for what extensions might leave behind in the DOM).

An ad blocker is not necessarily equipped to help since the script is embedded with the application code. Since they're targetting Chrome, switching browsers will help with the probing but not the detection part and you'll still be fingerprinted.

The only way forward is for browser vendors to offer a real privacy or incognito mode where sites are sandboxed by default. When the default profile is identical across millions of users there won't be anything unique to fingerprint.

New comment by ef2k in "US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]"

ef2k — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:55:49 +0000

This would make more sense if email was 100% guaranteed to be delivered. Not sure if this angle was argued, but just like regular mail, just because something was claimed to be delivered is not enough to prove that it was, hence the existence (in the US) of certified mail and signature return receipts.

New comment by ef2k in "My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs"

ef2k — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 07:25:00 +0000

I hear you, a lot of engineers have been there. Things are changing though, roles are evolving and the org chart is starting to flatten.

A couple of things worth separating: strategic direction in most orgs is already handed down from the VP or exec level, the PM is usually executing on that mandate.

Now that coding agents exist, both the PM and the engineer end up prompting a coding agent. So, over time, the roles converge and product ownership just becomes part of building.

New comment by ef2k in "My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs"

ef2k — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 06:56:38 +0000

That sounds more like a project or engineering manager role. Work environments obviously vary, and sometimes roles are assumed to counter dysfunction. But the PM here is the product manager, which owns the product direction. The argument is that their role can now venture into building. My comment extends it further that they can actually become the builders, absorbed into engineering and design.

New comment by ef2k in "My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs"

ef2k — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 03:32:39 +0000

My hot take: the dedicated PM role is becoming optional. Engineers already understand feasibility and tradeoffs, and they often end up informing the PM anyway, which usually comes at the cost of meetings and slow decisions. With clear quarterly goals, engineering and design can own product together. They would shape scope, ship in increments, measure, and iterate. So the "product" function still exists, but its not a separate PM attached to it.

New comment by ef2k in "Enable CORS for Your Blog"

ef2k — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 07:08:28 +0000

To be fair, they do explain their motivation. It's an in-browser RSS reader, so it's fetching the RSS feed directly without a proxy server. There's not much risk since the content is public and non-credentialed. The bigger risk is misconfiguring CORS and inadvertently exposing other paths with the wildcard.

New comment by ef2k in "I'm not worried about AI job loss"

ef2k — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:26:04 +0000

The article frames the premise that "everything will be fine" around people with "regular jobs", which I assume means non knowledge work, but most of public concern is on cognitive tasks being automated.

It also argues that models have existed for years and we're yet to see significant job loss. That's true, but AI is only now crossing the threshold of being both capable and reliable enough to be automate common tasks.

It's better to prepare for the disruption than the sink or swim approach we're taking now in hopes that things will sort themselves out.

New comment by ef2k in "Show HN: Pgclaw – A "Clawdbot" in every row with 400 lines of Postgres SQL"

ef2k — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:56:33 +0000

Nice. These are the kind of boundary pushing projects I like to see. It challenges assumptions of where application logic should live. The implications around cost, latency, and recovery are going to be interesting.

New comment by ef2k in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

ef2k — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:57:48 +0000

This brings some interesting situations to light. Who's ultimately responsible for an agent committing libel (written defamation)? What about slander (spoken defamation) via synthetic media? Doesn't seem like a good idea to just let agents post on the internet willy-nilly.

New comment by ef2k in "ai;dr"

ef2k — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:22:45 +0000

I really liked this post. It's concise and gets straight to the point. When it comes to presenting ideas, I think this is the best way to counter AI slop.

New comment by ef2k in "TikTok is tracking you, even if you don't use the app"

ef2k — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:59:39 +0000

Nothing new here. This is why they eventually rolled back Chrome's initiative to automatically reject third-party cookies. Industry backlash was that the analytics of too many sites would break. Best thing to do is to switch to a privacy centric browser.