Hacker News: ergl

New comment by ergl in "Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing"

ergl — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:23:58 +0000

> These people didn't get promoted or hired because of nepotism. A lot of them moved up the engineering ladder and are familiar with how software engineering works and the incentives involved.

Good one!

New comment by ergl in "High Performance Git"

ergl — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:32:24 +0000

I'm sorry if I have offended you.

You probably have a great deal of understanding and knowledge about Git, and this book might be a good resource.

I'm not asking you to do anything differently, and yet I think it's important to realize that people have a deep aversion to text that appears to be LLM generated.

By "shame", I meant that just from a skim of the contents of this book, it can be hard to distinguish it from any other LLM generated text by any other author who has no idea what they're talking about.

That makes people (like me) inclined to discount what it has to say, potentially losing out on good technical content.

New comment by ergl in "High Performance Git"

ergl — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:57:40 +0000

> The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.

Personally I have an extremely hard time reading text like this and it makes me lose trust in the author. Publishing potentially useful Git knowledge this way is a shame.

New comment by ergl in "High Performance Git"

ergl — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:51:59 +0000

The author works at OpenAI, so it's no surprise that they've stopped noticing how grating this kind of structure is to read.

New comment by ergl in "High Performance Git"

ergl — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:09:16 +0000

Surprise, surprise, another piece of LLM-generated slop on the front page of HN.

From chapter 1:

> When Git slows down, engineers adapt in bad ways. They stop asking questions the history could answer. They batch work to avoid sync cost. They keep messy branches alive longer, postpone cleanup, and treat the repository like something slightly dangerous.

From https://gitperf.com/epilogue.html

> Once machines start producing code at machine cadence, the model from this book does not break. What changes is the pace: more branches, more commits, more automation, and more surrounding metadata. The traffic gets louder, and the features that keep Git legible under pressure move from "nice to have" to "essential."

> These stop looking like side optimizations. They are what keep machine-scale Git traffic usable.

New comment by ergl in "Ask HN: Do you read differently now that anything could be AI generated?"

ergl — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 11:01:45 +0000

I feel I have a much more adversarial relationship with articles, comments and blogs online. I've been seeing old colleagues or acquaintances that I used to admire start to publish clearly AI generated blogs and I've noticed that my respect for them has taken a nosedive.

The online world feels much less useful now and I've been trying to read more physical books and to generally spend less time online (unfortunately one can't escape slop, as I've already seen clearly generated illustrations and photographs in billboards and subway adverts).

New comment by ergl in "Anduril, Palantir and SpaceX are changing how America wages war"

ergl — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:56:14 +0000

> those of us in the space are aligned with America irrespective of who's in the White House

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department"

New comment by ergl in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

ergl — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:16:13 +0000

Do you have any more platitudes to add so I can fill my dismissive HN comment bingo card?

New comment by ergl in "CEO of largest public hospital says he's ready to replace radiologists with AI"

ergl — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:24:19 +0000

The real travesty here is that a hospital has a CEO.

New comment by ergl in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

ergl — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:46:41 +0000

I'd be curious to know why you decided to bet on weather patterns in the first place. Seems like a very roundabout way to lose money.

New comment by ergl in "Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability"

ergl — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 08:12:31 +0000

From the bottom of the linked article:

> Full disclosure: iFixit has an ongoing business relationship with Lenovo, and we are hopelessly biased in favor of repairable products.

New comment by ergl in "Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users"

ergl — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 08:27:17 +0000

I hope OP took more effort in making Viva understand the problem than the obvious zero effort it took writing this post, given it is completely AI generated.

New comment by ergl in "In Tehran"

ergl — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 07:53:53 +0000

I would suggest reading into the history of South Korea after the war. Nothing suggests to me that it was a good outcome. As a small sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising

New comment by ergl in "You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say"

ergl — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 18:53:18 +0000

> Fascism rose in Spain, and Italy, and was defeated.

Someone forgot about the 40-year long fascist dictatorship Spain was under

New comment by ergl in "996"

ergl — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 17:10:15 +0000

996 can only be celebrated in a deeply rotted culture without worker rights and labor protections. Embarrasing.

New comment by ergl in "Who does your assistant serve?"

ergl — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:06:05 +0000

This article is akin to pondering if people should cook their own meth because the dealer they used to have is now selling adulterated stuff that's less powerful.

New comment by ergl in "Telo MT1"

ergl — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 16:21:19 +0000

This is literally an ad.

Haveli Investments to buy Couchbase for $1.5B

ergl — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 19:16:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/haveli-investments-buy-ai-database-firm-couchbase-about-15-billion-2025-06-20/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44331003

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by ergl in "Homomorphically Encrypting CRDTs"

ergl — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 19:01:24 +0000

You don't need ordering guarantees for diffs: apply them out of order and the final result should be the same (that's one of the key properties of CRDTs).

New comment by ergl in "Successful people set constraints rather than chasing goals"

ergl — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 10:20:48 +0000

> Other big constraints are: marriage, religion, and choosing to go the VC vs. bootstrapped route in a SaaS business.

This gave me a chuckle. On of these is definitely _not_ like the others.