Hacker News: entropyneur

New comment by entropyneur in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

entropyneur — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:05:03 +0000

I had human teachers who did that in middle/high school. Took me many years to pick out all the hallucinated bits of "knowledge". I don't think the current models are any less reliable that what we currently have on average.

New comment by entropyneur in "Zed 1.0"

entropyneur — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:31:53 +0000

I've tried switching from JetBrains IDEs just a few days ago. The speed and memory footprint are very impressive. I ended up badly missing refactorings and some other features and configuring a debugging session looked like something that needs more time than I had on my hands. So went back for now. I hope they add more IDE features eventually. There's not much a pure text editor can offer over Emacs after all. But this announcement sounds like they are prioritizing agents integration - the same thing that seemingly made JetBrains drop the ball on their core advantages.

New comment by entropyneur in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

entropyneur — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:05:27 +0000

Satoshi is a paper billionaire - he can't use a small fraction of his "wealth" to hire proper security. Simultaneously his "assets" are much more attractive to criminals. Imagine holding a regular billionaire hostage and demanding they give you a billion dollars. They'd probably have to sell 1B worth of stock, then convert it to cash (or crypto), etc. all of that requiring multiple interactions with different people and institutions.

New comment by entropyneur in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

entropyneur — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 06:54:07 +0000

The real winner in this war is Israel. Iran's military might is now a shadow of its former self while all the costs have been paid by someone else: American taxpayers, gas consumers around the world, Arab states. Even the political costs are on Trump.

New comment by entropyneur in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

entropyneur — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:14:19 +0000

I am working on a P2P VPN app that lets you route your traffic through a friend's Internet connection easily. It has a few distinct uses, but right now I am testing whether emigrants from authoritarian countries will be interested in providing censorship-free connectivity to their family/friends at home.

It's called Spora: https://spora.to/

The current MVP is about 90% vibe-coded while being a fairly sophisticated piece of software.

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

entropyneur — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:56:00 +0000

It's not the extension developer who should decide this, but the browser user.

New comment by entropyneur in "AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion"

entropyneur — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:50:31 +0000

Not a mental health crisis like the guy in TFA had, but I've definitely experienced states I would characterize as overexcitement while calibrating my expectations of these new tools to their abilities.

New comment by entropyneur in "Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line"

entropyneur — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:19:29 +0000

It was close enough for me and I do acknowledge the cruelty and abstain from many kinds of meat. I was super excited when I tried it first. But after about a year of being part of my regular diet it started being disgusting unfortunately. Now I can only eat it once a in a while.

New comment by entropyneur in "Iranians describe scenes of catastrophe after Tehran's oil depots bombed"

entropyneur — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 09:14:36 +0000

It may indeed be the case that the candidate promised one thing and the voters acting irrationally (or correctly assuming he's a liar) voted with an expectation of him doing the exact opposite. The GP, however didn't say anything about voting. He was talking specifically about the mismatch between campaign promises and actions taken once in office.

New comment by entropyneur in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

entropyneur — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 07:32:52 +0000

I am working on a P2P VPN app that lets you use a friend abroad as your VPN provider with no special setup: https://spora.to

It's mainly for censorship evasion (should be much harder to block than the regular centralized VPNs), but also for expats to access geo-blocked domestic services.

It's at the MVP stage and honestly it evoked much less interest in people than I hoped it would, but I'm still going on despite my better judgement.

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

entropyneur — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 06:53:28 +0000

Same at 42. I've been making software for 30 years and the gap between what I can envision and what I can code in a single day is so huge that it takes all the steam out of me. With agentic coding I can move at a pace that feels right again.

New comment by entropyneur in "RFC 9849. TLS Encrypted Client Hello"

entropyneur — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:36:27 +0000

If only we had some technology that would relieve us of the need to share IP addresses among multiple servers, this might have been unnecessary.

New comment by entropyneur in "We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science"

entropyneur — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:53:30 +0000

Comparatively few people live under worse authoritarianism than the one in China. Definitely not enough to form a talent pool that would make any dent in whatever China already has. Especially when you factor in education quality.

New comment by entropyneur in "We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science"

entropyneur — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:01:18 +0000

Why would anyone want to become a Chinese citizen? How's everyone discussing linguistics while completely ignoring the authoritarian elephant in the room?

New comment by entropyneur in "US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere"

entropyneur — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:54:39 +0000

Previous discussion: https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-...

Weird title, but worthy of discussion. From the little info available so far this appears to be little more than political posturing. If you want to fight censorship, an "online portal" to access all the censored content is the wrongest possible way to go about it. But we'll see.

New comment by entropyneur in "How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe"

entropyneur — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:51:46 +0000

Why is it depressing? Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving, I wouldn't want to do a job that a robot could do instead just so that I could be kept busy. That sounds like an insult to human dignity tbh.

New comment by entropyneur in "AI-First Company Memos"

entropyneur — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:46:14 +0000

Emacs is an interesting analogy. I've switched from IDEs to Emacs at some point in my career, and inertia obviously wasn't the reason. Then another 15 years later I went back to using IDEs (inspired by Carmack's interview). 2 years in I realized it destroyed my ability to generate and maintain mental maps of the codebase and generally remember things about it, although I think it's still a net gain so I stick with it. Agentic coding poses the exact same problem and the exact same tradeoff. And I think the jury is still out on whether it's worth it. At the very minimum you need to take proactive measures least you end up with a codebase no one can maintain (other than maybe future AGI).

New comment by entropyneur in "AI-First Company Memos"

entropyneur — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:33:59 +0000

Reading this thread suggests being "AI-first" is hardly a talent magnet.

New comment by entropyneur in "Eight more months of agents"

entropyneur — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 08:26:12 +0000

> I deeply appreciate hand-tool carpentry and mastery of the art, but people need houses and framing teams should obviously have skillsaws.

Where are all the new houses? I admit I am not a bleeding edge seeker when it comes to software consumption, but surely a 10x increase in the industry output would be noticeable to anyone?

New comment by entropyneur in "Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"

entropyneur — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 07:55:27 +0000

I am with you on this, although I was able to ship with Aider before as it uses less autonomous approach than the current wave of agentic tools.

I don't even care about abstract code quality. To me code quality means maintainability. If the agents are able to maintain the mess they are spewing out, that's quality code to me. We are decidedly not there yet though.