Hacker News: farmeroy

New comment by farmeroy in "AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford"

farmeroy — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:44:24 +0000

I really like this. I'm currently doing a part time BSc and my current module explicitly allows AI usage as long as you 'cite it'. The guidelines are out of date in that they assume you are using a chatbot and not a coding harness. The temptation to have claude write all my pandas code has become too difficult for my self control, but at the same time I actively feel my education is suffering from using it. As I write my final paper I am thankful that I at least despise AI writing too much to use it for the actual marked assessment, but I still feel that I have cheated myself out of part of my education and probably wasted a lot of time going fast in the wrong direction because generating data frames, graphs, statistics, etc. is just so easy with claude

New comment by farmeroy in "Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk apparently used AI to write her latest novel"

farmeroy — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:02:43 +0000

I think Burroughs would have leaned into AI... probably would have cut up its responses anyway! We all know that LLMs are terrible at producing interesting writing so I agree with other comments here along the lines of... even if a writer includes generated text, if it rises to the task and the author has somehow made it interesting, good for them!

New comment by farmeroy in "I want to live like Costco people"

farmeroy — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:49:15 +0000

sounds like you just want to live in europe (or probably anywhere outside of the US?). You can typically go buy a half (or quarter) loaf of bread from a baker, and street markets let you buy all the small quantities you want by the kilo

New comment by farmeroy in "Website streamed live directly from a model"

farmeroy — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 22:25:30 +0000

I kind of find this absolutely infuriating for reality, but super fun for diagrams of things like 'interdimensional subcutaneous engineering' or whatever scifi/fantasy word salad you want to throw at it

New comment by farmeroy in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

farmeroy — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:57:10 +0000

At least with the folks i hang around, liver damage from years of over-drinking is probably more likely

New comment by farmeroy in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

farmeroy — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:36:42 +0000

I've known people who've overdosed on Tylenol and died. I'm not saying that ibuprofen won't give you acid reflux and won't damage your kidneys, but due to I tend to take a lot of ibuprofen and also for take another medication that constricts my arteries and for get a lot of blood/urine work done... and my kidney function is good and despite everything I'm generally healthy. So I would say, like many things, what medicines you take probably depend on your specific body and situation. Regardless, you won't die accidentally from an acute ibuprofen overdose. You just might die from taking tylenol if you don't realize your liver is already damaged for other reasons. So there you go!

New comment by farmeroy in "Lumina – a statically typed web-native language for JavaScript and WASM"

farmeroy — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:48:42 +0000

What's differentiates this from something like gleam/lustre?

New comment by farmeroy in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

farmeroy — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:08:14 +0000

I think developers fall into two camps:

1. you care about shipping working, tested code that solves a specific business/user problem

2. you care about closing tickets that were assigned to you

New comment by farmeroy in "Please just try HTMX"

farmeroy — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:18:53 +0000

1000% this. I actually am using htmx at ${JOB} and this is essentially the only downside to htmx. I want to know which template partial is getting swapped. My IDE doesn't know. I need to track countless html ids to know what will be swapped where... how? It hasn't been a big deal because I alone write the frontend code so I have all my hacks to navigate and my intimate knowledge of the code, but if we need more devs on the frontend, or if the frontend drastically grows feature wise, i will need to tackle this issue post haste. I think template partials could help, but then we also would end up with giant template files and that would also be annoying.

New comment by farmeroy in "Ask HN: How would you set up a child’s first Linux computer?"

farmeroy — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 17:11:55 +0000

We set my son up with a linux computer when he was 9 - he was always dragging broken electronics home off the street, so when he found an old beat up thinkpad we managed to get it running with a little tenderness and linux mint! He's been on linux ever since, constantly upgrading computers by getting second hand/free laptops (it helps that his uncle works in IT and can grab a nice Dell or two now and again). It's always fun to put linux on a new machine! In any case, for him it has been great - the desktops are super customizable. Like everyone who gets into linux, it's been fun for him to install pretty TUIs and silly command line interfaces (bob ross quotes was a recent one). There are so many fun hacking tutorials on youtube. Lots of hours on kdenlive and blender. When he was younger he LOVED minetest, which is a hackable version of minecraft. Some other commenters have said the libreoffice is a big issue for people making the switch. Obviously not a big deal for an 8 year old! But my kid is about to go into highschool now. His school uses google classroom for everything so it's still not an issue. so many games that kids play are just in the browser? thankfully my son thinks fortnite and roblox are stupid ways to spend his time. it seems like if they really _need_ to _game_ its another issue, but that shouldn't be a problem for 8 year olds?

There are have been so many benefits. He's been a great touch typer from a young age (compared to his peers especially, who mostly used phones). I mean, being on linux exposes you to using the command line, which makes you _want_ to hack, so he's learned about network. You also avoid the barrage of ads that microsoft is currently assaulting the rest of the world with in their start menu.

New comment by farmeroy in "HTMX is hard, so let's get it right"

farmeroy — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 20:14:52 +0000

I've been building a largish webapp with htmx and I've leaned into web components for these more complicated interactions. I've found htmx great for everything that _should_ involve a call to the backend, anything that does need to fetch data or perform some crud operations, then i can return the necessary markup with oob swaps etc. and mostly forget about client side state

But yeah it's great to see people sharing their approaches!

New comment by farmeroy in "Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork"

farmeroy — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 03:44:22 +0000

I want this to be the plot of bladerunner - deckard must hunt down errant replicants before they completely go insane due to context limits

New comment by farmeroy in "Study finds solo music listening boosts social well-being"

farmeroy — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 03:26:03 +0000

SO I worked as a professional musician for over a decade before a career change to software development... and since that change, the act of _listening_ to music has completely disappeared from my life. I cannot work or study with music on, I do not put music on when I'm home alone, I do not listen to music when driving... And for many years I gave up completely playing music even as a hobby. So although for most of my life I would have been shocked that someone could entertain the idea of living without music, I am actually now more shocked that people can do things like study or program with music on at all. In all that time though I was always impressed and surprised by what people would consider music :D

New comment by farmeroy in "Egoless Engineering"

farmeroy — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 03:48:57 +0000

Part of me wants to say that it's best to work in a 'low-ego' environment as opposed to a 'high-ego' one - or to avoid working with people who have 'huge egos'... but I honesty find any discussion about 'egos' relatively devoid of meaning. As someone else said, it's difficult to find people who work without ego (whatever working without ego would mean). Most of my professional experience is as a working musician, and it goes without saying that artists have egos, in the sense that they try to bring something from their inner selves to the outer world, and that they invest a lot of effort in learning how to do so properly. Sometimes I've felt that the best musicians I've worked with were "low ego" but this could be just that they are supremely confident and also not lacking in affirmation from their audiences - and if they are kind, from their fellow musicians. The worst people I've worked with are talented people who can't seem to find the affirmation they crave, but feel they deserve. They feel constantly slighted and left behind. As a band leader, I realized I simply have to stroke these people's egos - no matter how confident, skilled, or amazing some people seem they are riddled with self doubt and absolutely need outside affirmation. I used to fight it, but eventually learned it was my job as a manager of sorts to do so...

New comment by farmeroy in "California teacher dies from suspected rabid bat bite"

farmeroy — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 03:32:38 +0000

This terrifies me

New comment by farmeroy in "California's most neglected group of students: the gifted ones"

farmeroy — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:24:40 +0000

I'm sorry, California does indeed allow children to skip grades. I also live in California and can think of 2 kids in my son's school who have skipped a grade. It is totally permitted - we've even discussed skipping our son one grade because he too is bored and capable of more, not only in maths but in every subject. We decided against it for social reasons.

New comment by farmeroy in "School is Not Enough: Learning is a consequence of doing (2021)"

farmeroy — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 04:15:28 +0000

"For a simple example, a better home craft than lemonade might be a pastry, taken seriously. Not sugar cookies or muffins, but the kind of thing that is plain for a 13-year-old to understand, harder for him to make, and very difficult to master. If a child committed to a batch a day, documenting progress, perhaps in time he would have something worth selling."

1. is lemonade a home craft? 2. who is forcing their children to bake sourdough croissants? 3. is craft baker really the career path of the future?

New comment by farmeroy in "School is Not Enough: Learning is a consequence of doing (2021)"

farmeroy — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 03:39:00 +0000

They teach gym

New comment by farmeroy in "All possible plots by major authors (2020)"

farmeroy — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 22:34:10 +0000

I clicked on this link with one of my two index fingers and felt the joy of a person feeling enjoyment

New comment by farmeroy in "All possible plots by major authors (2020)"

farmeroy — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 22:28:02 +0000

I want an author who's work is completely unidentifiable from one release to the next. Or to find a dozen authors who have inconceivably and independently created identical manuscripts. Surely if there were a library with all possible books, we would find one of those two things...