Hacker News: ern

New comment by ern in "Why does paper fold so well?"

ern — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:35:22 +0000

I'm not from the UK, but the soft power of BBC Radio 4 in the late 90s and early 2000s (the Real Player era) made the UK seem like an advanced nation to my young and intellectually curious self. If lived in the UK at the time, I'd have been immensely proud of the quality of the programming.

New comment by ern in "Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models"

ern — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 07:34:42 +0000

Holy crap, I didn't realize that some many people had been killed, over 200 according to a New York Times report: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/world/americas/us-boat-st...

New comment by ern in "US Government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

ern — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:45:32 +0000

Am I missing something, but given that it flows through Anthropic’s servers I would have thought the US would just have used it to Hoover up the data of foreign users? Now overseas users have an incentive to use local models or those hosted elsewhere?

New comment by ern in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

ern — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:42:36 +0000

Don’t legally serious second Amendment supporters regard “arms” as things that can be carried, and are evolved from/analogous to their 18th century hand-carried guns?

It would be hard to classify AI (or tanks, artillery, missiles, aircraft) as “arms” that can be “borne” in that sense.

New comment by ern in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

ern — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:05:12 +0000

Something I hate about ChatGPT is that it assumes I want my text to be rewritten instead of engaging with the content.

I like my writing style. Sure it may leave some sort of linguistic fingerprint and it may not meet some LLM’s idea of what “good” looks like, but I don’t care.

What’s worrying is that the rewrite-by-default behavior is probably there because most users want it.

New comment by ern in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

ern — Sat, 23 May 2026 19:16:47 +0000

I know this is going to. be contentious, but US mainstream discourse seems to have completely eliminated the distinction between illegal and legal immigration, in the last 10 years. Everyone seems to be a "migrant".

New comment by ern in "Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels"

ern — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:24:58 +0000

Tesla’s Solar Roof uses string inverters rather than micro-inverters or power optimizers, which means that partial shading on any section of the roof can shut down production for that entire string. This is a significant design limitation that competing solar installers address with panel-level optimization technology from companies like Enphase and SolarEdge.

This seems to be overblown. I've seen plenty of string inverters around without issues, I'm not sure why this being used against Tesla in particular.

New comment by ern in "Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]"

ern — Sun, 17 May 2026 20:10:55 +0000

The clean linear history thing is something I never really got, despite using git for 12 years now. I worked with some smart developers whose rule was "rebase if you want, but if too complicated, just merge", and it didn't hurt the delivery or maintainability of the code they wrote.

New comment by ern in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

ern — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:41:59 +0000

Engineering has always been about more than writing code.

That's true, but it's interesting how FizzBuzz as said to be the bete noir of the average dimwitted software developer, and how much cutting-edge engineering organizations used to emphasize code in their recruitment processes.

If writing code is being replaced by "engineering judgement" it's going to need a much smaller cohort of developers. Too many opinions spoil the broth, after all.

New comment by ern in "Mythical Man Month"

ern — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:27:05 +0000

I suspect that the goalposts for AI-assisted coding will be moved the same way they've been moved for the Turing Test.

The Turing Test used to matter until it didn't (does anyone even talk about it? was there a big news conference when it was solved?). Likewise every time it becomes easier to ship software, the bar will be pushed higher by sceptics. Ultimately the gatekeeping is going to become meaningless as software becomes "too cheap to meter".

New comment by ern in "The bottleneck was never the code"

ern — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:32:57 +0000

For something that was supposedly always unimportant, huge amounts of energy were spent recruiting developers based on how they produced and interacted with code.

FizzBuzz was a litmus test that showed how hopeless the average developer was. Coding interviews were the real test of programming ability. Now we're being told none of that ever mattered for real?

We should just admit that the game has changed (possibly, I'm not 100% convinced). Code WAS the bottleneck and coding ability was the bottleneck, but it may not be going forward.

New comment by ern in "DeepSeek V4 Pro at 75% off until 31 May"

ern — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:10:52 +0000

A few days ago we were hearing about how the "free lunch is over", now we're seeing discounts and increased usage limits.

New comment by ern in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

ern — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:26:32 +0000

In my experience, managers don't have to be hands-on, but they need to be able to recognize people with talent and unblock them do their jobs, to be able to spot process improvements, including channelling the AI hype to productive outcomes, and to be a steadying influence in a crisis (without adding noise). If a manager doesn't have technical ability, its impossible for them to do those things.

New comment by ern in "Vercel April 2026 security incident"

ern — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:48:16 +0000

I think they simply just haven't figured out that the barrier to entry is so low, that no one really cares what their app can do, even if does something genuinely useful.

New comment by ern in "Vercel April 2026 security incident"

ern — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:46:53 +0000

I've done a ton of low-effort vibe-coded projects that suit my exact use cases. In many cases, I might do a quick Google search, not find an exact match, or find some bloated adware or subscription-ware and not bother going any further.

Claude Code can produce exactly what I want, quickly.

The difference is that I don't really share my projects. People who share them probably haven't realized that code has become cheap, and no one really needs/wants to see them since they can just roll their own.

New comment by ern in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."

ern — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 02:09:58 +0000

I caught myself structuring a comment like an LLM on another site. It's expected that people who chat heavily to LLMs will start to mirror their styles.

New comment by ern in "How will OpenAI compete?"

ern — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:19:07 +0000

I'm surprised how many of my technical team use free ChatGPT in their personal lives. The rest have Claude subscriptions. I'm the only one with ChatGPT and Claude subs and I'll be switching from Claude Pro to Ckaude Max and cancelling ChatGPT, since I only use it when I hit my Claude quota.

New comment by ern in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

ern — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 01:51:35 +0000

I'd used both CC and Copilot Agent Mode in VSCode, but not the combination of CC + Opus 4.5, and I agree, I was happy enough with Copilot.

The gap didn't seem big, but in November (which admittedly was when Opus 4.5 was in preview on Copilot) Opus 4.5 with Copilot was awful.

New comment by ern in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

ern — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:11:19 +0000

I have been out of the loop for a couple of months (vacation). I tried Claude Opus 4.5 at the end of November 2025 with the corporate Github Copilot subscription in Agent mode and it was awful: basically ignoring code and hallucinating.

My team is using it with Claude Code and say it works brilliantly, so I'll be giving it another go.

How much of the value comes from Opus 4.5, how much comes from Claude Code, and how much comes from the combination?

New comment by ern in "I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me"

ern — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:58:54 +0000

I firmly believe that the heuristics that teachers/lecturers/instructors worldwide use to avoid engaging with reams of mundane text have been successfully by LLMs, and that's why they were so hostile to them initially.

They have to actually read material, and not just use the structure as a proxy for ability.