Hacker News: evantbyrne

New comment by evantbyrne in "Show HN: Training a model to identify AI web content from structure alone"

evantbyrne — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:38:02 +0000

Human writing was flagged as AI generated by the tool with dubious explanations given. Other human written posts were marked down substantially. I mentioned one feature, which seems to be double counted to mark down posts a whopping 20%, but none of the features listed on the results page gave me confidence in the classifier's ability to distinguish between undergraduate essays and slop.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Show HN: Training a model to identify AI web content from structure alone"

evantbyrne — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:24:27 +0000

Immediately saw false positives on content written before ChatGPT. Not difficult to see how the methodology is wrong when it considers restating the thesis in the conclusion to be signal.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI"

evantbyrne — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:40:22 +0000

If only they taught N+1 > N in Business Math class

New comment by evantbyrne in "Go 1.27"

evantbyrne — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:20:08 +0000

I definitely recall the days when it was not uncommon to see members of the Go community speak out against the idea of generics and other type improvements for allegedly taking away from the language's simplicity. Thankfully that faction lost that argument or otherwise changed their minds, because I have seen first hand how issues with the type system can hold back larger scale libraries.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Go 1.27"

evantbyrne — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:19:33 +0000

Ecosystem is my primary concern when it comes to language choice and I'm not worried about speed differences between Go and Rust. Unfortunately, Python is probably still the most practical choice for backend/pipeline engineering at the moment. That does mean there are Rust libraries being used indirectly though.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Go 1.27"

evantbyrne — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:55:00 +0000

Generic methods are a huge win for the language. I've been waiting on these kinds of improvements to the type system before resuming work on my database toolkit.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Superlogical"

evantbyrne — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:12:06 +0000

It is how I hear people using the term idk what to tell you

New comment by evantbyrne in "Superlogical"

evantbyrne — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:12:27 +0000

"lifestyle business" is sometimes used as a derogatory term to describe setting up a corporation for a hobby that is not really meant to be profitable.

New comment by evantbyrne in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

evantbyrne — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:37:52 +0000

I've been pursuing the public good my entire career, including making major career moves to improve the developing world. You've crafted a delusion to justify your clearly antisocial behavior. You have no right dictating to people that they need to do x, y, and z to have genuine ethics when you are stumping to increase child mortality in Africa. Good day to you sir!

New comment by evantbyrne in "Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs"

evantbyrne — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:19:22 +0000

From their recent announcements it seems Codeberg is operating as a club that just so happens to have a git UI. Perhaps that is amusing if you're playing along, but I can't imagine why I should want to actually host anything at an org with this kind of governance.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Exploit brokers pay $500k for WordPress RCEs. I found one with GPT5.6 and $25"

evantbyrne — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:36:40 +0000

Everything I've used from Automattic has felt that way. If you ever want to torture an engineer, just make them change the layout of WooCommerce checkout.

New comment by evantbyrne in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

evantbyrne — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:27:43 +0000

Not everyone is looking to save a buck at anyone's expense. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking we're the same.

New comment by evantbyrne in "New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium"

evantbyrne — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:40:42 +0000

Some guy floated the idea of putting in a small datacenter in the nearby city and asked for public comment. The next town hall had a huge turnout and multiple people got kicked out for rushing the podium. Meanwhile, people are also protesting and suing to try and stop the nearby solar farm construction. What I'm wondering is why can't we have this level of enthusiasm for actual environmental reform and the transition to clean energy? It almost feels like it is just an anti-progress movement in different clothes.

New comment by evantbyrne in "The revenge of the philosophy majors"

evantbyrne — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:29:18 +0000

Philosophy of science went hard and was hands down the most valuable course in my education. It's very strange that they don't force everyone to take at least some philosophy in university. Can you imagine living in a world where the average person not only thought about what they believed, but were also equipped to ask themselves hard questions about the nature of belief itself?

New comment by evantbyrne in "How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown"

evantbyrne — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:53:51 +0000

Thank you. Was beginning to feel like I was taking crazy pills seeing people claim that 300ms is fast when 30ms has been the target TTFB for as long as I can remember. Maybe Linear takes more time on the backend for totally valid reasons and it needs some help from the frontend, but that's not generalizable, and every bit of JS comes with its own costs.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Agents need control flow, not more prompts"

evantbyrne — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:27:41 +0000

I would hope that when engineers speak of LLM determinism they just mean it as shorthand for close to 1 under expected conditions

New comment by evantbyrne in "20 years on AWS and never not my job"

evantbyrne — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:28:42 +0000

The going rate for 1099 work tends to be higher than this to account for risk, unbillable work, and increased tax rate. Agencies that lend out their developers to clients charge 2-3x this. Remember that engineers can work remotely now which makes regional rates much fuzzier.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Boneyard: Generate pixel-perfect skeleton screens from your real DOM"

evantbyrne — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:07:26 +0000

I was going to say it seems potentially useful, but engagement stats for this on Github and X seem unnatural and the anon crypto author makes it a hard no for me

New comment by evantbyrne in "Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase"

evantbyrne — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:40:46 +0000

Getting up to speed on the business logic was arguably the easiest part of my last job where the product was a liquid biopsy. Regardless of industry, you have to learn how to communicate with stakeholders and collect requirements. The existing software being a mess was a much more significant challenge. They also had similar issues on the data science side, where I would argue they did not lean into modern ML nearly enough and instead opted to do the familiar thing.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase"

evantbyrne — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:32:36 +0000

There are certain non-software industries that seem to have strong hiring preferences for workers who started in the industry over computer science chops, and a lot of those tend to use Java. For example, biotechs.