Hacker News: huijzer

New comment by huijzer in "Lean now ships with verified kernels"

huijzer — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 04:49:24 +0000

> A coworker recently remarked that lean seems like a new foundational language family that every programmer should be able to read

Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.

Why? I’ve worked a bit with proving systems in my studies, but it seems to me that it is very hard to turn precise mathematical statements into useful programs. Perhaps for the core logic, but GUIs or any other state with the outside world is going to be difficult it seems to me

New comment by huijzer in "DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017"

huijzer — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 20:37:36 +0000

> haven't fully realized/felt the cost implications of trainwreck software yet

As long as the API is private or not dependent on by automated systems and you have good test coverage, you can get away with bad code IMO since you can always refactor. If it looks stupid but it works (and can be refactored/fixed/improved later if needed) it aint stupid.

New comment by huijzer in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

huijzer — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:02:57 +0000

From my few months of work, that seems likely yes. I'm way stronger in core and legs now.

New comment by huijzer in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

huijzer — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 04:46:04 +0000

I don’t know where you live but here in the Netherlands we always turn the power off first. (Another thing I like about the trades so far are jokes like this.)

New comment by huijzer in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

huijzer — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:05:08 +0000

Thanks! That's kind of you

New comment by huijzer in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

huijzer — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:09:03 +0000

I'm in ship construction (industrial)

New comment by huijzer in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

huijzer — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:08:02 +0000

I have done multiple studies and they were always technical, so the company took a shot and hired me and would train me on the job. So far it's going well. They say I'm picking up stuff quickly and I occasionally help the head engineers with problems on their computers. This would probably be the same for most programmers. Reading drawings, connecting electrical circuits, and doing troubleshooting is surprisingly similar to programming.

New comment by huijzer in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

huijzer — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 18:22:02 +0000

> No, programming and math is basically what AI research is.

Most importantly, in these fields results can be easily verified which means that if you have enough compute, that you can generate correct training data. OpenAI had an early story - which could be a lie of course - about how they tried to train a robot but the actuators would be toast before the robot would have learned. Math and programming doesn't have such problems.

New comment by huijzer in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

huijzer — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 18:18:57 +0000

> We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!

As someone who recently switched from data scientist to electrician, starting the day can be pretty tough because you have to get physically moving and uncomfortable, but I feel way better at the end of the workday than after an office job. Most of the time, the work is pretty uncomfortable, but somehow it's a lot of fun.

New comment by huijzer in "Tiny Little Office"

huijzer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:51:18 +0000

> AI is trying to imitate that very thing that a specific design used to tell you

Now I see your point. Fair enough

New comment by huijzer in "Tiny Little Office"

huijzer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:45:54 +0000

> Landing pages are always a proxy for quality.

Always is a very strong claim.

Counterexample: highly skilled low level engineers would end up with a crappy front page most of the time, but still the compiler/system/kernel whatever could be high quality.

New comment by huijzer in "An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust"

huijzer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:01:58 +0000

Agreed. Especially given that I downloaded one app and got a generic launcher instead that then allowed me to download a specific app.

New comment by huijzer in "An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Microsoft Word in pure Rust"

huijzer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 10:20:21 +0000

> and providing cloud features

I prefer to not have those in my text editor

New comment by huijzer in "Redesigning source control at Anthropic"

huijzer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 04:22:34 +0000

I don’t care much about both. Just like to be doing something useful for a change (I did a PhD before this).

New comment by huijzer in "I Deleted 168,000 Lines of Comments. My AI Agent Didn't Notice"

huijzer — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:54:41 +0000

Makes sense if the comments were AI generated as the author writes since AI during reading the code has roughly the same context as with which it produces the comments. I would be more curious for a test with human written comments.

New comment by huijzer in "Redesigning source control at Anthropic"

huijzer — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:17:23 +0000

In a few days, I created a few apps with AI. One saves multiple mechanics 5-15 minutes per day and another can save multiple hours of mistakes during the project, and one saves a lead engineer 15 minutes per day. These savings should add up over multiple years assuming all keeps running as it does now. I’m having good hopes because there have been few bugs so far. Mostly just tweaking.

New comment by huijzer in "Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy"

huijzer — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:17:39 +0000

Disney. You mean the company that hid an image of topless woman in The Rescuers (1977) movie and from which many child stars have gone off the rails in later life, main actor kissing a 11 old in Blank Check (1994), and the 2026 lawsuit by Raquel Lee Bolleau among other scandals that anyone as a parent would hope not to be there

New comment by huijzer in "A Modern Web App in C"

huijzer — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:31:31 +0000

SQLite is a database. The main idea of a database is to support concurrent reads/writes although databases differ in how much concurrency they allow

New comment by huijzer in "A Modern Web App in C"

huijzer — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:29:30 +0000

But the real question is, does Caddy support it?

The answer is: it does but via community plugins.

New comment by huijzer in "Grieving the Loss of Details"

huijzer — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 18:59:54 +0000

> “I didn’t care about practicality, building useful programs, or writing code per se: all I wanted is to understand how the machine works.”

Over the years, I’ve transitioned from building “beautiful” stuff to nowadays building stuff that works. I still want it to be perfect but now not for me but for the user. If I think it’s ugly, but the user wants it that way, then who am I to decide against it? They will have to use the software, not me. Seeing a user be happy with the software is super nice. Way more enjoyable than me just making stuff for myself.