Hacker News: grork

2036

grork — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:38:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.codevoid.net/ruminations/2026/08/09/2036.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237429

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by grork in "A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool"

grork — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 16:32:41 +0000

3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible

New comment by grork in "A Software Development Methodology for Disciplined LLM Collaboration"

grork — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 15:57:55 +0000

We’ve ultimately decided to treat the models with more respect, nurturing, and collaborative support than we ever did our follow human keyboard smashers. Writing all the documentation, detailed guidance, allowing them multiple attempts, to help the LLMs be successful. But Brenda, the early in career new grad? “please read this poorly written, 5 year-old, incomplete wiki, and don’t ask me questions”

I’ve been thinking about this for months, and still don’t know what to make of it.

New comment by grork in "An LLM does not need to understand MCP"

grork — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 15:01:50 +0000

How can an LLM “talk” to another LLM, except by emitting tokens in its output stream?

You can name the mechanism whatever you want, but the models don’t have hands. Tool calling conventions (as a concept, or as a spec) is what gives the model hands!

New comment by grork in "Microsoft employees recall their early years"

grork — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 15:04:06 +0000

Hard Drive, ostensibly about Bill Gates, was a great read when I was a kid. I recommend ‘Microserfs’ from Douglas Coupland as a fictional (but grounded) homage to the work in the 90s.

New comment by grork in "Microsoft employees recall their early years"

grork — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 15:02:15 +0000

This is a build or test lab, not the offices of developers. I visited multiple times in the period mentioned for the picture, and saw multiple of these. The one I saw most often was the NT build lab. When I started there in the mid-2000s, these labs were still used, although the build labs were a little less densely packed thanks to remote tools.

New comment by grork in "The First Hit Is Free"

grork — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 17:29:29 +0000

A post I wrote thinking about the 'addiction' that ads & subscription revenue can cause, and how it leads to a loss of identity in companies whose core products were not 'recurring revenue' originally. (e.g., contrast Google / Meta to Microsoft / Apple / Oracle).

It doesn't have to be this way.

The First Hit Is Free

grork — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 17:29:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.codevoid.net/ruminations/2025/02/23/the-first-hit-is-free.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43208150

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by grork in "Apple users are being locked out of their Apple IDs with no explanation"

grork — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 16:18:30 +0000

What’s the overlap between people who had their password reset, and people who used/signed up for Beeper iMessage verification?

New comment by grork in "Shields up: New ideas might make active shielding viable"

grork — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 15:40:04 +0000

Gonna save this post for some arbitrary point in the future to pull out as a point against ‘impossible’. Might have to gift it to my descendants to make sure it’s available for long enough… /s

New comment by grork in "Useful Uses of cat"

grork — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 20:29:48 +0000

Especially since the versatility of A Cat is unbounded.

New comment by grork in "Short history of all Windows UI frameworks and libraries"

grork — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 17:18:01 +0000

I expected this to be longer. I wish it was longer. Plus, if you want to be somewhat-complete, theres so many that are missing:

- Chromeffects

- DUI

- Splash (Media Center)

- Splash (Zune)

- Silverlight (Phone)

- Silverlight (C#)

- Silverlight (JavaScript)

If you want to stretch it a little:

- Visual Basic

- Blackbird

New comment by grork in "Irish State announce plan to build a porn preference register for most of the EU"

grork — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 18:01:33 +0000

IMHO, this is a misleading headline: They are not building a “porn preference register”, they just going full-dystopian nightmare collecting live biometric data that could be used to _infer_ your porn preferences.

We don’t need stupid headlines to make this idea sound dumber, and kinda distracts from the real issue of biometric verification for websites being a stupid idea.

New comment by grork in "Developer Productivity for Humans: Software Quality"

grork — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 18:54:26 +0000

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10109339 appears to be part 3, based on the authors (collin) LinkedIn publications list.

New comment by grork in "TextDiffuser-2: Unleashing the power of language models for text rendering"

grork — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 17:28:53 +0000

I’m assuming the type foundry legal departments are getting ready to come for the image generators when they find out their typefaces have been vacuumed up and are now generating new content without licensing the typeface for use?

New comment by grork in "New York restaurants fight back against reservations by bots"

grork — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 03:11:24 +0000

I did a two week trip in the UK recently, and over the ~8 restaurants we ate at, 7 required credit card to reserve, with a specific fee that would be applied if no-show

New comment by grork in "Principles for building and scaling feature flag systems"

grork — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 15:18:06 +0000

IME searching for the name of the flag name and getting 1 result is less helpful than 15 results that directly show point-of-use.

New comment by grork in "Launch HN: GitStart (YC S19) – Remote junior devs working on production PRs"

grork — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 15:13:41 +0000

I like the aspiration to grow engineers — it’s a laudable, and worthy, goal.

But I also feel there is a little bit of a pandora’s box here.

The model you’re creating here is more structured ‘gig economy’ path for software dev. Sure, you’ve got things like UpWork, and other freelance products, but the purchasers (e.g., business) are effectively taking a risky bet on the work which can tamper commitment to purchasing work that way.

But with ‘no merge, no fee’ could create a very strange dynamic where companies will opportunistically throw work over the wall and create bounty-like dynamics. I don’t know if this is particularly bad for the purchaser, but for the seller that could lead to some challenges overtime (race to the bottom etc)

New comment by grork in "Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?"

grork — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 14:58:38 +0000

As someone who was hardcore into Windows around that time, all my memory has is waiting desperately for windows to open & apps to load. I remember watching the left-side of explorer paint before the icons came in, and how the icons would paint in order; some days you’d see black squares paint, then the icon. This was running on some dual-socket, 192mb, 7200rpm spinning disk - it wasn’t a slouch.

I also struggle with the comparison between high-end hardware of yesteryear, and low end hardware of today and comparing.

Try running win2k in 16mb, 300mhz P2, and a 4800rpm drive.

The only times I remember experiencing things this fast in my computing career were (a) with a fair wind, and a fully warmed cache that didn’t hit the disk & was a trivial app (b) the first time I used my Apple M1 Max MBP.

New comment by grork in "Say Hi to SoFi. It’s Suing to Force You to Repay Student Loans Faster"

grork — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 16:04:41 +0000

What is a company supposed to do when a market is no longer available to it? Make new products. There is nothing — nothing — saying that SoFi must offer student loans. It’s just looking at that money, and saying ‘this is easy money’. They _could_ create new financial products in an area that isn’t impacted by the repayment pause, and seek to grow that.