<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: ghoul2</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ghoul2</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:18:19 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=ghoul2" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Exactly.<p>I am now looking at 9 to 10x the app code, for non trivial stuff. And this is not just the usual unit/integration/e2e suites too. Extensive deadcode, field use, code shape tests (ast walking) - god objects, 15-param helpers, wrapper-piled-upon-wrapper, badly named (a skill) functions/methods/objects, path-dependent artifacts, etc. There is no way I could have written all this manually.<p>It doesn't guarentee high quality OR reliability or readability or maintainability, but does reduce churn and makes me feel a bit more confident about deploying route A work product in prod.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 11:02:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49476913</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49476913</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49476913</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Lint rules, type errors, commit lint, anything<p>These are basic: they work for human coders and are typically quick to setup. But gates at this level are far from enough for agentic coding. You need an extensive test suite/e2e suite/benchmark suite. Typically much larger than the code base itself: This is what enables those "i ported bun to rust in a weekend" headlines. Where ever such extensive 'gates', high quality ones, already exist, the agent can do a good job of making things work, cause it can automatically iterate.<p>But: every hole, every gap in coverage, will be eventually found by the coding agent and 'exploited'. So you need full, extensive coverage.<p>This suite itself is a LOT of work, much more than what it would be if you only had to worry about human coders. So if YOU are writing the gates yourself, you are going to fall between A and B: you still have a convoluted, unreliable, impossible-to-reason-about prod app, AND it still took you eons to build it cause you spent that time writing the gates. This is no win at all, on either front.<p>Where gates, extensive ones, help in route A is they can significantly reduce the churn/spinning, fix-x-break-y, to just the parts that are gaps in coverage (which the agent will keep finding at a ridiculous rate). And your work would be to have it ALSO keep filing in those gaps with more tests/etc.<p>One of the reasons go coding with agents works better than other langs is cause I even include AST based enforcements in my governance suite. Its still route A, but with somewhat more confidence, somewhat less frustration.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 05:57:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474855</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474855</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474855</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The problem, in my experience is:<p>1. It writes SO MUCH code, in minutes, that theres no way I as a human can review it.<p>2. I am not very motivated to read/review this code anyway: it was cheaply written, by some _thing_ that is not going to improve from my feedback.<p>3. If you DO review it conscientiously , it becomes a never ending thing: you keep finding issue upon issue.<p>4. If you report the issues for fixes, the fixes normally fix that immediate issue, and typically add another parallel path/another option/another 100-odd lines of code, instead of a structural fix.<p>5. If the code base is large, and if you let AI write a meaningful amount of code in it, its no longer _your_ code. You lose the depth+width of understanding needed to reason thru things mentally, cause you no longer KNOW enough about the code.<p>6. If you do review seriously, and either fix things yourself, or have the ai/harness fix the issues for you, the rounds of fixes take so long, if you look back you realize it would have been better to just do it yourself in the first place.<p>My personal opinion there are really only two choices:<p>A. If you want to build FAST,  using an agent, just let the agent write tests, validations, extensively, have it keep running them (it likes to call them gates), and just let it loose. Give up on the idea that its your code, and that you understand it. The bottom line becomes: does it work, and WHEN it breaks in weird ways, just use the agent to find and fix the issue (probably breaking something else in the process).<p>B. limit AI use for non trivial, prod-quality projects to limited research, very tiny targeted changes, write most of the code yourself still, and review every line. You won't get much speedup, maybe 20-30%, but it will still be YOUR code, and you will still be able to reason about it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:10:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49463450</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49463450</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49463450</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "Civic Hygiene – avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state (2013)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't it an age old maxim: democratic governments should remember to not build tools/give them selves powers that they won't want the opposition to be able to use WHEN they come to power.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:46:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373316</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373316</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373316</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "Show HN: Live Claude Usage HUD for a $38 Thermalright Trofeo Vision LCD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I just had claude write me a statusline:<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/abgoyal/bde7af4ba0ba4d19094361667dac7007" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/abgoyal/bde7af4ba0ba4d19094361667dac...</a><p>Shows the 5h and weekly usage %, when it resets, current model, estimated spend in the session, context used, cwd and project.<p>Save it in .claude/
and then add a snippet to settings.json:<p><pre><code>  "statusLine": {
      "type": "command",
      "command": "bash $HOME/.claude/statusline-command.sh"
    }</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 10:28:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49318716</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49318716</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49318716</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>India really has very deep penetration of 5g, and at very low cost. There might be a rare place that starlink might be needed but really I cannot image starlink having much consumer/retail uptake in india. Not needed, and too expensive. There might be  commercial users - offshore rigs etc, but india is too densely populated for there to be many  'truly remote' locations.<p>India has still not permitted starlink to start ops.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2026 18:35:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863540</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863540</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863540</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "Suspicious Discontinuities (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is a hilarious one in the Indian direct tax (Income tax) code right now:<p>If your (taxable) income is less than 7L (inr), no tax is assessed.
If your income is greater than 7L, but upto 12L, tax is assessed, but a tax _rebate_ (a discount on payable tax) is granted for the exact amount of tax owed. This means net tax paid till 12L is zero.
But if your income is 12L + 1, this rebate no longer applies, so the entire tax assessed (on the 7L+ income) is now due. This means that a person who earns 12L+1 INR makes ~70K inr less, post-tax, than the person who earns 12L INR.<p>After complaints, to correct this, they added another layer: If your taxable income is >12L but less than 12L+~70K (the tax thats due), then the maximum tax due is just the amount your income exceeds 12L bye. So you stagnate at the same post-tax salary from 12L to 12L+70K.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:18:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705715</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705715</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705715</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[How to Think About AI in Your Product]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://abgoyal.com/posts/how-to-think-about-ai-in-your-product/">https://abgoyal.com/posts/how-to-think-about-ai-in-your-product/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48344541">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48344541</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 31 May 2026 10:28:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://abgoyal.com/posts/how-to-think-about-ai-in-your-product/</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48344541</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48344541</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send spam links"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Recently, banks where also asked to put their official websites/netbanking on *.bank.in domains. I have wanted that for SO long.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 May 2026 11:00:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256266</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256266</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256266</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[How to Think About AI in Your Product]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://abgoyal.com/posts/how-to-think-about-ai-in-your-product/">https://abgoyal.com/posts/how-to-think-about-ai-in-your-product/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176331">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176331</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 06:59:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://abgoyal.com/posts/how-to-think-about-ai-in-your-product/</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176331</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176331</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "Rewriting Every Syscall in a Linux Binary at Load Time"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't that exactly what gvisor does?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:15:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47814961</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47814961</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47814961</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "Go on Embedded Systems and WebAssembly"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Its a fantastic project, but seems almost inactive now. I have a tiny PR pending for weeks, even reviewed, but not merged. I have another patch I have not submitted as I want to first navigate the earlier PR to completion. Both were bugs that bit me, and I ended up wasting quite a lot of time trying to find it:<p>1. go:embed supports "all:<pattern" while tinygo silently ignore it. I ripped my hair out trying to figure out why my files were not showing up in embedfs. PR pending.<p>2. go allows setting some global vars at the build cli (think build version/tag etc). In the code, one can define a default, and then the value provided (if any) on the cli can override it at build time. Tinygo fails to override the value at build-time, silently,  if a default value is provided for the var in code. This PR I have not submitted yet, as its more intrusive.<p>I hope it picks up steam again soon. I love using go for embedded and CF worker use and tinygo makes both of these use cases much more viable than regular go. Honestly, I hope tinygo can be rolled over into the main go toolchain as "target arch".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Apr 2026 11:46:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638187</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638187</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638187</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "Can you reverse engineer our neural network?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Honestly, I am vastly more interested in how they built the model: its not backprop-trained, it was done manually. And how did that bug find its way it?<p>I hope they next blog about that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:37:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193432</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193432</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193432</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "India's female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I long time ago, I was operating a "social network" which allowed image uploads. (India local, didn't amount to much as was shutdown.).<p>Immediately at launch, we started having a huge amount of (image) pron being uploaded into the pages. We put in some rate limits etc, but did not want to put  any major restrictions of user signups etc as that would hurt signup figures (important to the ceo!).<p>We already had some content review people thru a temp agency on site, so we checked with them and they were fine doing this manual filtering of these images for us. All young (early 20s) women. While my team built a quick "dashboard" for them to be able to do this image filtering quickly and conveniently, I had a detailed conversation with them as I was very concerned about having them review this kinda stuff for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Truly nasty stuff.<p>They were _perfectly_ clear that they had no issues with it, and they told me in so many words to not give it a second thought and to let them get back to work.<p>It was a surprise, but it was a point of realization: there are much worse things they could be doing. And looking a porn has shock value only the first time. I was under-estimating these women and assuming they were some "snowflakes" who could not deal with something this silly and non-threatening.<p>Just my own person anec-data.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 12:06:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911842</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911842</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911842</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "Millions of Americans mess up their taxes, but a new law will help"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As a RA-ship student in the US, I still had taxed withheld on my meager grad student "salary", and was required to file a 1040NR-EZ. I obviously did not want to spent 50$ at H&R block, to claim like 200$ back. Fortunately the local library had sessions where you could grab a blank form (the library had boxes full of them), and someone walked a bunch of us (i think there were like 40 in the room), to filling it out. The session mailer had already listed the stuff we were supposed to bring with us at the session. Even if someone forgot, they could leave a place holder and take care of it later.<p>The session was an hour long, and I was done with my return by the end of the hour. I dropped it off in the mail on my way back from the library and that was the end of it. From the subsequent year onwards, a pre-printed form arrived in the mail with like 90% of the stuff prefilled, and it took like 5 minutes to fill out the rest and drop it in the post box.<p>I honestly didn't think it could have been any easier - of course, not having taxes withheld from a far-below-minimum wage salary would have been nicer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2025 09:29:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203021</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203021</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203021</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "Direct File won't happen in 2026, IRS tells states"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I lived in the US(5 yrs), early 2000s, from my second year onwards, I used to receive a pre-filled 1040NR-EZ with my W2 info already printed/filled-in on it. Typically, I would just add a deduction, and mailed it back. Does that program not exist? Or was it only for NR?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2025 08:59:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833020</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833020</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833020</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "987654321 / 123456789"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have always counted to 20 on one hand. even as a kid. base, lower joint, upper joint, top. times 5 - including the thumb: my motor memory is trained so that i switch seamlessly from keeping the curse on top of the finger using my thumb, and then, once i cross 16, switch to using the index finger to "cursor" the thumb.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2025 10:58:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45770633</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45770633</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45770633</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "Glyph: Scaling Context Windows via Visual-Text Compression"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I asked this question on another post and was downvoted, trying again: don't we lose the "contextualization" that LLM embeddings do (embedding on Token X contains not just information about X, but also of all tokens that came before X in the context, causing different embedding for "flies" in "time flies like an arrow" vs "fruit flies like a banana")?<p>The image embeddings, as I currently understand, are just pixel values of a block of pixels.<p>What am I missing?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Oct 2025 10:40:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45758433</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45758433</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45758433</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "Should LLMs just treat text content as an image?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But does this not miss the "context" that the embeddings of the text tokens carry? An LLM embedding of a text token has a compressed version of the entire preceding set of tokens that came before it in the context. While the image embeddings are just representations of pixel values.<p>Sort of at the level of word2vec, where the representation of "flies" in "fruit flies like a banana" vs "time flies like an arrow" would be the same.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2025 11:40:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45719835</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45719835</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45719835</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by ghoul2 in "US Government Uptime Monitor"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't this "as intended" in the westminster-style system? The govt is formed by MPs from the majority party (or alliance). By definition they MUST be able to pass ALL money bills, which only require a simple majority. Any failure to pass a money bill is equivalent to the govt no longer holding a majority support in parliament. And that means either the king/president/govgen invites someone else from the current parliament who they have good reason to believe DOES (potentially) have support of majority of the parliament, or dissolve the parliament and call fresh elections if there is no such majority.<p>I am not quite sure why an action with such a clear established precedent be considered foreign interference? or was it the case that there WAS a suitable candidate with a possible majority but they were NOT invited by the govgen to try and win a trust vote in parliament?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2025 09:20:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45641750</link><dc:creator>ghoul2</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45641750</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45641750</guid></item></channel></rss>