Hacker News: etamponi

New comment by etamponi in "Timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face"

etamponi — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 11:56:28 +0000

Isn't this a show of security negligence rather than of exceptional agent capabilities? Don't get me wrong, I am pretty impressed that an agent was able to use these vulnerabilities. But I am way more impressed by the vulnerabilities...

New comment by etamponi in "Egyptian Fractions (2006)"

etamponi — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 18:36:07 +0000

I see! Thanks!

New comment by etamponi in "Egyptian Fractions (2006)"

etamponi — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 07:17:04 +0000

Very interesting! One thing I don't understand is: doesn't this assume that they could do the calculations to get the coefficients... Using decimal notation? How could they for example know that 18/20 = 9/10? This is straightforward in decimal, but in their notation... Not really? So I am not super convinced this is the actual algorithm they used. Or am I missing something?

It's Like Minesweeper

etamponi — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:29:53 +0000

Article URL: https://etamponi.github.io/posts/its-exactly-like-minesweeper/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48443544

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: Is Claude Code web down?

etamponi — Sat, 09 May 2026 22:56:32 +0000

I can't access my active sessions from my phone app nor from the web page.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48079074

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

Ask HN: Are agents _still_ writing most of your code?

etamponi — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:23:46 +0000

At the beginning it was very cool to see them write a lot of code for me, in particular while I was ramping up on a new codebase. But I am seeing myself using agents less and less as I get more acquainted with the codebase. I might use them as a glorified copy n paste or to get a tool running. And they're indeed very useful to get the gist of a part of the code I don't fully grasp. But I am back to writing I'd say 90% of the code myself. Is this your experience as well?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632484

Points: 6

# Comments: 4

New comment by etamponi in "Car Seats as Contraception"

etamponi — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:53:48 +0000

It's the classical trolley problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

New comment by etamponi in "No Coding Before 10am"

etamponi — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:58:11 +0000

Good point. To clarify my stance: what I meant is that the narrative of the article is the following: AI made us change the playbook and so now, because of AI, the playbook is this one. Which is like saying that Sun Tzu wrote the cited line of the Art of War in a second edition, whereas his first version was "completely different".

New comment by etamponi in "No Coding Before 10am"

etamponi — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:03:24 +0000

It blows my mind how these posts seem like everyone is victim of a collective amnesia.

Literally every single point in the article was good engineering practice way before AI. So it's either amnesia or simple ignorance.

In particular, "No coding before 10am" is worded a bit awkward, as it simply means "think before you write code", which... Does it need an article for saying it?

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

etamponi — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 21:54:32 +0000

The unfortunate reality is that (1) and (2) is what many, many engineers would like to do, but management is going EXACTLY in the opposite direction: go faster! Go faster! Why are you spending time on these things

New comment by etamponi in "We mourn our craft"

etamponi — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 22:03:18 +0000

> So as a senior, you could abstain. But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you, because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike. Eventually your boss will start asking why you’re getting paid twice your zoomer colleagues’ salary to produce a tenth of the code.

I might be mistaken, but I bet they said the same when Visual Basic came out.

Alphabet Q4 2025 Earnings release [pdf]

etamponi — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:32:15 +0000

Article URL: https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2025/q4/2025q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46892097

Points: 24

# Comments: 3

New comment by etamponi in "They lied to you. Building software is hard"

etamponi — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:34:48 +0000

The point of the article is that the jump start that AI gives you is not the same as the one that well thought frameworks give you. What AI writes falls apart and leaves you with the ruins.

New comment by etamponi in "They lied to you. Building software is hard"

etamponi — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:30:43 +0000

It that's the essence, then of course 9/10 is accident. I think that's not software engineering though.

The essence: I need to make this software meet all the current requirements while making it easy to modify in the future.

The accident: ?

Said another way: everyone agrees that LLMs make it very easy to build throw away code and prototypes. I could build these kind of things when I was 15, when I still was on a 56k internet connection and I only knew a bit of C and html. But that's not what software engineers (even junior software engineers) need to do.

New comment by etamponi in "Automatic Programming"

etamponi — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 14:40:07 +0000

This. Thanks. It's a relief to see I am not the only one completely disappointed. I still believe that these posts are just an ad stunt to publicize their soon-to-be released AI tool. If they really believe what they're writing, it's really sad.

New comment by etamponi in "How I estimate work"

etamponi — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:31:30 +0000

I think this post unveils a great truth that I never grasped: estimates are a political tool to decide what gets done and what doesn't get done. Thanks for putting it so nicely!

One thing that I'd like to understand then is _why_... Why doesn't management use a more direct way of saying it? Instead of asking for estimates, why don't they say: we have until date X, what can we do? Is it just some American way of being polite? I am sincerely curious :)

New comment by etamponi in "How I estimate work"

etamponi — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:28:08 +0000

> But plenty can be estimated more accurately.

As a person that has never encountered a complex software project that can be accurately estimated, I am being a bit skeptical.

The author did make examples of when estimation is possible: easy projects with a very short time horizons (less than an a couple of days, I'd say).

I'd love to hear some examples of more complex software projects that can be estimated within a reasonable variance.

However, I think it should also be acknowledged that the point of the article seems to be in a different direction: it _doesn't really matter_ that you have a good time estimate, because asking for an estimate is just a somewhat strange way for the management chain to approach you and then tell you how much time you have to deliver.

New comment by etamponi in "Proof of Corn"

etamponi — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 23:58:28 +0000

I hope the budget has been written by AI, so that we can take a shortcut and immediately answer the question "Can AI grow corn?" with a "No".

I am extremely worried by the amount of hype I see around. I hope I am being in a bubble.

New comment by etamponi in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

etamponi — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:27:45 +0000

> Hours instead of weeks.

And then goes on describing two things for which I bet almost anyone with enough knowledge of C and Redis could implement a POC in... Guess what? Hours.

At this point I am literally speechless, if even Antirez falls for this "you get so quick!!!" hype.

You get _some_ speed up _for things you could anyway implement_. You get past the "blank screen block" which prevents you from starting some project.

These are great useful things that AI does for you!

Shaving off _weeks_ of work? Let's come back in a couple of month when he'll have to rewrite everything that AI has written so well. Or, that code would just die away (which is another great use case for AI: throw away code).

People still don't understand that writing code is a way to understand something? Clearly you don't need to write code for a domain you already understand, or that you literally created.

What leaves me sad is that this time it is _Antirez_ that writes such things.

I have to be honest: it makes me doubt of my position, and I'll constantly reevaluate it. But man. I hope it's just a hype post for an AI product he'll release tomorrow.

New comment by etamponi in "Lessons from 14 years at Google"

etamponi — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:16:56 +0000

> The engineer who truly understands the problem often finds that the elegant solution is simpler than anyone expected.

> The engineer who starts with a solution tends to build complexity in search of a justification.

I do agree this is a good point, I just find it funny that it comes from "staying 14 years at Google".

This is literally the reason why I left Google first, and Meta second. Finding simple solutions will get you absolutely nowhere in a place like those. You have to find complex solutions with a lot of stakeholders, alignment, discussions, escalations... Why ship one button if you can ship 100 and get you, your team and your manager promoted in the process?