Hacker News: hathawsh

New comment by hathawsh in "I have a theory that software drives people insane"

hathawsh — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:40:03 +0000

I try to remember to say something like this: "This is an interesting solution, but I'm not confident we have a shared understanding of the problem we're solving. I have a few guesses, but I don't want to bias the discussion, so please restate the problem without suggesting a solution. If it's too difficult to explain, I can suggest what problems I think you might be running into." I wish I always remembered to say that. :-)

New comment by hathawsh in "Norway should buy OpenAI"

hathawsh — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:48:52 +0000

Thanks for the correction. In my own words, to commit to memory: once "the cat is out of the bag", the point is not that it's difficult to put the cat back in, the point is that we now know it's a cat and putting it back is not relevant.

New comment by hathawsh in "Norway should buy OpenAI"

hathawsh — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:57:14 +0000

"The cat is out of the bag" doesn't mean the cat is gone, it means the cat has freedom. I read the GP as meaning "no single company can currently control the trajectory of AI." That's not unfortunate -- that's great!

New comment by hathawsh in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

hathawsh — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:30:39 +0000

Last time I joined a discussion about US health care on HN (years ago), the picture looked bleak: secret chargemasters in every hospital, no realistic way for patients to compare options because the options are too complicated, and lots of people still falling through the cracks.

I can't help but think the picture looks very different now. There is growing awareness that chargemasters can not be secret. LLMs offer a way to overcome the complexity of choosing options, opening doors for real competition. I sincerely hope we can take advantage of this changed landscape to provide better care. Universal health care remains an interesting possible direction, but I now have hope that we can do a lot better within the existing laws.

New comment by hathawsh in "Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb"

hathawsh — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:49:25 +0000

That's fantastic. I have long, winding trails near me also and one of these days I also want to start prompting a coding agent on my bike with a headset. Do you recommend any particular type of headset?

Edit: never mind, I see you already suggested the Shokz OpenComm2 in another comment. Thanks!

New comment by hathawsh in "How memory safety CVEs differ between Rust and C/C++"

hathawsh — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:21:55 +0000

Yes, but null pointers are so pervasive in C code that we really can't afford to put assertions everywhere. It's often better to let the app crash on violations.

New comment by hathawsh in "Iroh 1.0"

hathawsh — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:46:13 +0000

Iroh looks very interesting!

How current is the PyPI package? https://pypi.org/project/iroh/

New comment by hathawsh in "How memory safety CVEs differ between Rust and C/C++"

hathawsh — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:06:55 +0000

If I were doing a code review, I would probably accept the code either with or without the assertion. The context of curl_getenv() makes it clear that null is not acceptable. If the author of curl_getenv() had evidence that callers are frequently breaking the contract by passing null, then perhaps the assertion would help shed some light on violators. Otherwise, I would expect everyone to play by the rules, making the assertion unnecessary.

New comment by hathawsh in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

hathawsh — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:26:27 +0000

When I tell my coworkers to stop using AI to dress up their words, it's not because I care about human effort. The problem is that my coworkers often start with incorrect assumptions, and AI is good at amplifying bad assumptions and making them sound plausible. I have to spend extra time guessing at what the author originally wrote and then address the partly-hidden original points rather than what the AI generated. Give me your spelling errors, your grammar, your mumbles, your incoherent streams of thought, your doubt and uncertainty. Those things are extremely important, yet your robot obscures them.

Strangely, I've also observed that some customers respond very well to words dressed up by AI, even if the words oversimplify the truth. Now I'm working to understand why they want that. Are my customers not swimming in AI slop like the rest of us?

BTW, this doesn't mean I'm anti-AI. AI coding is an incredible superpower and I use it constantly, but it seems to me that AI coding works because code expresses the minutiae that is rightfully omitted from most other communication.

New comment by hathawsh in "Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux"

hathawsh — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 07:05:57 +0000

Sorry to break it to you, but on that timeline, the good things got poisoned. IBM enhanced Lisp with Enterprise Ready features like Spreadsheet Macro Builder, Microsoft took over development of Smalltalk and morphed it into BASIC 2.0, and the HURD community lost a bizarre copyright lawsuit. Fortunately for those folks, an intrepid hacker in the 90s saw some of the interesting ideas in MS-DOS and rebuilt it as LS-DOS. Today, most of their servers and mobile phones run LS-DOS or similar.

New comment by hathawsh in "Bun support is now limited and deprecated"

hathawsh — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:03:00 +0000

Your HN account is too new for me to be sure whether you're being sarcastic or not. Perhaps you know, or perhaps you don't, that all code is machine-translated, even assembly language. None of it is perfect, but it's not garbage. Today's AI merely provides a new level. It's a weird, non-deterministic level, but hiring an employee to write code for you is similarly non-deterministic.

New comment by hathawsh in "Medicare's new payment model is built for AI. Most of the tech world has no idea"

hathawsh — Wed, 13 May 2026 23:11:21 +0000

These are also the markers of human journalists who write daily. Journalism is the reason AI acquired these habits. Gemini says this article is probably not generated by AI, particularly because it has original quotes.

https://gemini.google.com/share/ba48849a15a9

New comment by hathawsh in "Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise"

hathawsh — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:59:53 +0000

I actually agree with this. Product designers and product managers are often essential and sometimes they do up to 99% of the work of figuring out how something should work. To accomplish that, they often do things well outside the role of a software developer. On the other hand, in my experience, only someone with a software development mindset seems to be able to complete the last 1% (or 10%, or whatever) that reveals and resolves certain kinds of logic issues.

New comment by hathawsh in "Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise"

hathawsh — Tue, 12 May 2026 23:03:35 +0000

Isn't that interesting? The job of exploring a theory or model to such an extent that it can be expressed in computer code always seems to fall on the shoulders of a software developer. Other people can write specifications and requirements all day long, but until a software developer has tackled the problem, the theory probably hasn't been explored well enough yet to express clearly in computer code. It feels like software developers are scientists who study their customers' knowledge domains.

New comment by hathawsh in ".de TLD offline due to DNSSEC?"

hathawsh — Tue, 05 May 2026 22:03:28 +0000

Is that actually true, though? Even though it's not really my job, I find myself debugging certificates and keys at least once a month, and that's after automating as much as possible with certbot and cloud certificates. PKI always seems to demand attention.

New comment by hathawsh in "Easyduino: Open Source PCB Devboards for KiCad"

hathawsh — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:23:50 +0000

This is an amazing resource. It was difficult to appreciate what this resource was for until I tried to create my own boards based on an ESP32. It's not really difficult to build around ESP32, it's just that I don't know what I don't know. With starting points like these, I can start with a lot more confidence. Thank you!

New comment by hathawsh in "Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary"

hathawsh — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:59:28 +0000

You hinted at an aspect I probably haven't considered enough: The code I'm working on already has many well-established, clean patterns and nearly all of Claude's work builds on those patterns. I would probably have a very different experience otherwise.

New comment by hathawsh in "Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary"

hathawsh — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:28:38 +0000

I love the IDE skins analogy. Very true.

New comment by hathawsh in "Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary"

hathawsh — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:07:42 +0000

I'm on the $200/month max plan.

New comment by hathawsh in "Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary"

hathawsh — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:02:05 +0000

Sorry, no, and they're highly project specific anyway. I just started with the "/init" skill a few weeks ago and gradually improved it from there.