Hacker News: geraldwhen

New comment by geraldwhen in "Scriptc by Vercel: TypeScript-to-Native compiler, no JavaScript engine in binary"

geraldwhen — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:38:18 +0000

“Better”, maybe or maybe not. But there’s an underlying truth here. If you’ve ever LOOKED at the open source libs you use, some of them are very very rough.

Going in to a project hoping to make a change and seeing no tests and spaghetti used to be soul crushing. These days I’d have Claude go refactor and add tests and make pull requests for me to look at to fix it.

New comment by geraldwhen in "Write code like a human will maintain it"

geraldwhen — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:28:09 +0000

The change is exponential and happening daily. The future is smaller teams spending a lot of money on AI credits.

New comment by geraldwhen in "Write code like a human will maintain it"

geraldwhen — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:24:39 +0000

It’s a new form of development. The thing that the author didn’t state is that to work the code base at all, you must also use these tools and workflows.

Manual edits literally aren’t possible. You can’t grok the code growth and the new patterns fast enough to be productive.

This does work. I’ve seen it in real products. Nobody has a real mental model of the code flows. But with enough money in Claude credits it doesn’t matter.

The spend to support this development model is something like $50/day/developer.

New comment by geraldwhen in "PostgreSQL and the OOM killer: Why we use strict memory overcommit"

geraldwhen — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 16:40:09 +0000

Is this an AI response?

New comment by geraldwhen in "Japanese verb conjugation the simple hard way"

geraldwhen — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:40:58 +0000

This is so obviously incorrect that I have to wonder if it was an AI response.

New comment by geraldwhen in "What the fuck happened to nerds"

geraldwhen — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:26:07 +0000

There’s an app on the App Store that only has the purpose of YouTube without ads.

Can’t get more layman.

New comment by geraldwhen in "What the fuck happened to nerds"

geraldwhen — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:37:40 +0000

There are currently multiple trivial ways for a layman to block all YouTube ads.

New comment by geraldwhen in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

geraldwhen — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:42:30 +0000

Residential proxies won’t get flagged and are easy to obtain, if expensive.

New comment by geraldwhen in "Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs"

geraldwhen — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:43:39 +0000

It seems clear that it was a money spending machine, not a money printing machine.

New comment by geraldwhen in "LÖVE: 2D Game Framework for Lua"

geraldwhen — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:05:04 +0000

I’ve 100%’d Balatro and wheel of fortune is quite strong. It’s never worth taking before you’re at max interest though.

New comment by geraldwhen in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

geraldwhen — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:04:18 +0000

Business bros will not pay high salaries to maintain software. Software maintenance will always end in India with developers making $20/hr. Or less.

AI makes it look like these developers can do the same job the Americans did building the product to begin with. Even if things fall apart in the end, it won’t stop the attempt to order of magnitude reduce the cost for maintenance.

New comment by geraldwhen in "Silver plunges 30% in worst day since 1980, gold tumbles"

geraldwhen — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 22:19:22 +0000

Probably the opposite. Corrections happen quickly and all at once, somewhat similar to growth.

It would be more surprising if the 30% drop was spread out over a month.

New comment by geraldwhen in "Are we all plagiarists now?"

geraldwhen — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:05:02 +0000

Expulsions don’t happen. International students have been cheating rampantly for decades. Universities are happy enough to collect their tuition.

New comment by geraldwhen in "Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams"

geraldwhen — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:18:30 +0000

Interviews have the same issues. But if you do anything more than read off templated questions like a robot, you can be accused of discrimination.

It is a sad world we live in.

New comment by geraldwhen in "Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams"

geraldwhen — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:13:36 +0000

In the modern era, you are purchasing a diploma. I witnessed dozens of students blatantly cheat without any consequence. We all got the same degree.

Colleges exist to collect tuition, especially from international students who pay more. Teaching anything at all, or punishing cheating, just isn’t that important.

New comment by geraldwhen in "iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan"

geraldwhen — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 15:57:23 +0000

Agreed. This is the only context in which I still use Google.

New comment by geraldwhen in "iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan"

geraldwhen — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 22:11:19 +0000

Google has no actual content left to find. It’s AI spam website after AI spam website.

And if you find any content, it’s on a website riddled with ads.

AI search has none of these issues. Google from 15 years ago was wildly superior to today.

New comment by geraldwhen in "iOS 26.3 brings AirPods-like pairing to third-party devices in EU under DMA"

geraldwhen — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:51:16 +0000

I was unaware that my headphone experience as impaired in some way.

I exclusively use non Apple headphones and I have no issues. I had AirPods for a while and I don’t remember them being better.

New comment by geraldwhen in "Weight loss jabs: What happens when you stop taking them"

geraldwhen — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 20:35:49 +0000

Diet is the food you eat. If you change the food you eat, you’ve changed your diet.

Any attempt at a temporary food change is already a failure for long term health.

New comment by geraldwhen in "Coursera to combine with Udemy"

geraldwhen — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 10:23:43 +0000

I suspect that CVE inflation has poisoned the minds of many developers.

A db driver may have an issue with unsanitized user input when run against SQLite, but you only use it with oracle and sanitize input anyway, but that shows up as a 9.1 critical deployment blocker for corporate employees.

Unexploitable CVEs with inflated ratings make using any open source software a pain in the butt at BigCo.