Hacker News: horizion2025

New comment by horizion2025 in "Don't be a meat proxy"

horizion2025 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:21:06 +0000

I agree but to be fair, often people could have asked an AI to get their answer. Especially seniors are prone to this (thinking the AI could not possibly know this or other biases). The responder wrote they asked Claude so as to not take credit for the answer and also to indicate they did not vet it. Then the person asking can decide if they want to read the answer or not (often a 1 sec glean can reveal if it is promising or completely off track.

New comment by horizion2025 in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

horizion2025 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:52:45 +0000

One honestly caveat:

New comment by horizion2025 in "Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors"

horizion2025 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:27:48 +0000

Hard to say exactly what went wrong from outside, but a frontier model not being able to implement a simple CRUD feature after 3x8 = 24 hours of work isn't "it can't do this". Let me hazard a guess from what you wrote. The 3-tier spec (design → specs → build details) may be the cause rather than the cure. A big upfront spec has two failure modes the model can't help you with: it can quietly contain contradictions, and it can be ambiguous in ways the model resolves by guessing instead of asking. "Adding clients" is a good example of the trap, even assuming your real spec was more detailed than the comment. "Client" is overloaded — a customer in the domain? An API client? A consumer of a service? And "A clear design requirement was essentially adding clients" is very imprecise: does the model add them, or build a UI so the end user can add them? I know this was just your comment and sorry to sound harsh but if the spec had sentences like that I can definitely see it going off the rails.

Your own conclusion, smaller, concrete units, is the right direction. Except by units I don't mean partitioing the program into smaller units (files, modules). In fact, you should stop thinking about implementation at all. I'm thinking more about the way of asking the LLM to build it. One feature at a time etc. so you can tighten the feedback loop. Then you can early on (in the first hour say): "I also need a way that the user can add/manage clients - basic CRUD" and that small sentence might be enough the model makes it all (UI, API, backend etc.) to enable that and put it in a proper place in the app. A big ambiguous spec defers that discovery to the worst possible moment.

New comment by horizion2025 in "Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly"

horizion2025 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:15:14 +0000

The article is not about generative AI at all.

New comment by horizion2025 in "Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors"

horizion2025 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:00:16 +0000

Predictably, now office workers and engineers (including here) will say "What I always knew - LLM's can't think, be creative, don't have nuance. My job is safe!". I predict the article will be quoted again and again at lunch tables and family gatherings. However, one should be especially careful when something confirms ones own biases.

Firstly, the "AI" discussed here is not LLM's. They are talking about visual quality inspection systems. There's been many other articles in the press: Ford's new quality automation is computer-vision defect inspection, built on IBM's visual-inspection tech, iPhones photographing parts on the line, running since 2020. By most reporting it works fine, pushing detection rates from ~70% manual to 99%+. This is classical CNN at work doing the job of quality inspectors... completely unrelated to desk-work by an engineer or what LLM's do... yet that's exactly the inference the headline invites (and many here in the comments seem to be making).

The timing only underlines it: rehiring is presented as the cleanup. Apparently the rehirings started 3 years ago, so whatever it's undoing is older still and therefore unlikely to be LLM driven. While ChatGPT did come out 3.5 years ago it seems doubtful someone would fire people left and right the moment they saw the first ChatGPT... only to then regret almost it immedaitely and rehire them - all within the span of 6 months.

This further supports that the article is about years-old automation bet being quietly unwound, and is completely unrelated to mainstream discussion about AI and jobs today.

Also, 350 rehires is just noise. Ford is shedding thousands right now: plant pauses, battery-plant retooling, projected restructuring in the 8–13k range.

Finally, as always with corporate announcements... ask why an internal staffing decision is even a press story. To me this feels like PR (a nice feel good story that ties into to a subject people discuss a lot now). It takes the sting out of all their announced layoffs. There's probably also internal company politics to it (someone suggested rehirings and now want to say 'see what a great idea this was' and maxx it out).

New comment by horizion2025 in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

horizion2025 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:40:01 +0000

Sometimes it makes up strawmans where it implies you wrote or implied something insanely stupid and then "corrects" this. My interpretation of it is that it has been taught to give nuanced answers and seeing things from every perspective and somehow this goes overboard where it starts nuancing something "just in case" the user held non-nuanced views. Some cases are OK (if it just adds information) but I hate it when it goes "it is not X, it is Y..." where X is some stupid view you never implied and Y is what you actually wrote!

New comment by horizion2025 in "European sunscreens are safer than American (2024)"

horizion2025 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:09:07 +0000

Titanium dioxide is now an IARC 2B suspected carcinogen.

New comment by horizion2025 in "European sunscreens are safer than American (2024)"

horizion2025 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:08:24 +0000

Btw titanium dioxide is now a suspected carcinogenic. It is illegal in food in the EU now.

New comment by horizion2025 in "European sunscreens are safer than American (2024)"

horizion2025 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:06:37 +0000

Wrong there are plenty of other ingredients. In fact one of those ingredients that is permitted in EU and not US is ecamsule. It is quite nice, it absorbs the UV photons by switching confirmation (different isomere) rather than being oxidised into ROS/free radicals as many other ingredients do.

New comment by horizion2025 in "Spinning around: Please don’t – Common problems with spin locks"

horizion2025 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 01:45:58 +0000

My concurrency knowledge is a bit rusty but aren't spinlocks only supposed to be used for very brief waits like in the hundreds of cycles (or situations where you can't block... like internal o/s scheduling structures in SMP setups)? If so how much does all this back off and starvation of higher priority threads even matter? If it is longer then you should use a locking primitive (except for in those low level os structures!) where most of the things discussed are not an issue. Would love to hear the use cases where spin locks are needed in eg user space, I dont doubt they occur.

New comment by horizion2025 in "Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster"

horizion2025 — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 07:18:46 +0000

But if that is so why this focus on the few clock cycles of dispatch?

New comment by horizion2025 in "Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster"

horizion2025 — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 18:29:38 +0000

I don't understand this focus on micro performance details... considering that all of this is about an interpretation approach which is always going to be slow relatively speaking. The big speed up would be to JIT it all, then you dont need to care about structuring of switch loops etc

New comment by horizion2025 in "I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone"

horizion2025 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 21:47:35 +0000

The worst is when the only 'dismiss'-option is "I will do it later"... even if you have no intention of ever doing it... essentially forcing you to lie. It has been a while since I've seen it though, so that's progress!

New comment by horizion2025 in "I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone"

horizion2025 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 21:39:18 +0000

Well it also means it could be a good time to buy so you won't have to pay even more overprice for the same performance years down the line. I just bought one a good month ago. My old one was over 10 years old, not worn out, but not upgradeable to Win 11. I had been thinking waiting one more year before the security updates to Win10 are out... But I bought in when the first stories hit of the DDR5 price rises - at that time there had 'only' been a doubling, now the price is a further 3x of what I paid a good month ago. I thought it might be a good time to buy given the machine was so old and component prices were going up, and might for a long time. But yeah, performance improvements aren't what they used to. Part of the reason is that normal things were already felt so fast on the old one ;-) But I did get a much better gfx cards allowing some games that were unplayable before, and I think the CPU upgrade was needed for that as well, and then you might as well overhaul the machine. I also went from 16 to 64 GB, and the 16 GB had been a bit too little for some things.

New comment by horizion2025 in "Indoor tanning makes youthful skin much older on a genetic level"

horizion2025 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 21:32:52 +0000

Yes I agree, I was just responding the article's "“We cannot reverse a mutation once it occurs, ..." I don't think that is entirely accurate. Also, I think it is a dynamic process, so even cells the immune system hasn't killed yet could be found later. Or the mutation could cause other deviancies that will make the cell uncompetitive with healthy cells. But it is a slow process - it takes years for former smokers' lung cancer risk to return to near that of never smokers. And it probably never gets there - some mutated cells may never be detectable and there's clearly also a threshold beyond which the cancer is irreversible, at least without intervention.

New comment by horizion2025 in "Indoor tanning makes youthful skin much older on a genetic level"

horizion2025 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:40:48 +0000

"The young tanning bed users had more skin mutations than people twice their age, especially in their lower backs, an area that does not get much damage from sunlight but has a great deal of exposure from tanning beds."

So in other areas than the lower back, everyone - tan bed users or not - have these supposed seeds of melanoma as well? And that is for a much larger area of the skin than the one mentioned.

Also I wonder about the quote that a mutated cell can never go back. The immune system could kill the mutated cells and thereby promote the unmutated ones. Though nothing is perfect of course. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/jan/analysis-protective-lung...

New comment by horizion2025 in "I program on the subway"

horizion2025 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:30:47 +0000

I have always enjoyed it. I have even gotten comments "can you really do anything in such a short period of time" but i have found that even 20 min sessions on a commute can be effective. For a major project I did the final push on such a commute just hoping the push could complete before the train reached the tunnel without coverage, and it did

New comment by horizion2025 in "Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)"

horizion2025 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 04:54:13 +0000

> . As for writing, well, I have been working on this little blog post, on and off, no joke, for six years.

But the screenshot says the md file was created in 2009, so that would be 16 years?

New comment by horizion2025 in "Vacuum Is a Lie: About Your Indexes"

horizion2025 — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 17:19:13 +0000

"When VACUUM runs, it removes those dead tuples and compacts the remaining rows within each page. If an entire page becomes empty, PostgreSQL can reclaim it entirely."

Is this true? I was of the belief that standard vacuum doesnt move any data even within a page... It merely enables dead tuples to be reused in the future. But I could be mistaken

New comment by horizion2025 in "Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners"

horizion2025 — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 20:55:47 +0000

It is often not just about the difficulty of estimation the time for specific tasks but also what the assumptions put in were. Sometimes these assumptions werent written out explicitly or other times they were (deliberately?) removed. Just one example of a broken example: a project can be run in many ways. You can have an estimate done based on A-team resources and high priority but the moment the contract or whatever is done, it is decided to outside the whole work to a new team who never worked on the code before and sit thousands of miles away. To compensate 2-3x as many people are assigned. Add in a non technical project manager and scrum master and all kinds of resources that were never envisaged but who will report time in on the project etc. You get the idea. And this was just done type of assumption that could broken!