Hacker News: insensible

New comment by insensible in "Sem: New primitive for code understanding – not LSPs, but entities on top of Git"

insensible — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:33:51 +0000

You think it’s funny but it taint.

New comment by insensible in "Ruby for Good"

insensible — Sun, 24 May 2026 21:16:32 +0000

Ruby is a great utility language target for LLM-generated tools.

New comment by insensible in "A few words on DS4"

insensible — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:07:25 +0000

Trekkies are experiencing a major regression from Deep Space Nine.

New comment by insensible in "Maladaptive Frugality"

insensible — Fri, 01 May 2026 09:03:45 +0000

Going on your Slavic username: as an American who moved to a country without forced-air HVAC, it’s been quite a revelation to discover how backwards forced air really is.

New comment by insensible in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

insensible — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 18:17:23 +0000

I fully agree that this was a big miss on the human operators’ part. But it’s a small business and I have repeatedly seen so much worse than this. Vendors charging money to allow customers to connect AI to systems must have a robust story for protecting them from disaster. Everyone involved needs to be working hard to limit the impact of mistakes and surprises.

New comment by insensible in "The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood"

insensible — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 04:53:45 +0000

That “but..” is a big key to the difference between Russia and the US in this conversation. The US has a severe cultural propensity for rule-following and reporting things, but in Russia there’s an interesting mix of people seeing society as a commons, seeing personal responsibility as foremost, seeing laws as guidelines that may or may not correspond to reality, and seeing reporting something as fairly extreme behavior. And this includes people at all levels.

New comment by insensible in "The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood"

insensible — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 04:40:57 +0000

1) Russia is generally very safe, and 2) I agree that the violence amongst children is crazy. It’s a great place to homeschool and free-range and I have not found a way to send children to school in a way that’s acceptable to us.

New comment by insensible in "The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood"

insensible — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 04:35:44 +0000

Good morning from Russia, where I moved my large free-range family (from the US) with the topic of free-ranging children very high on the list of reasons why.

My children cross town by themselves to attend classes, it’s normal to see children walking or riding public transport by themselves once they turn about age 7.

There’s crime and bullying — we have always homeschooled successfully and have had negative experiences with classrooms here — but in my opinion it’s not as bad as the places I’ve lived in the US.

And the streets are definitely safer. There are some risks like gopniki enjoying causing random trouble like pepper spraying strangers, but I believe that type of danger is a threat mostly to young adult men and almost certainly not children. Our daughters can safely do what they need to do with appropriate precautions (that do not include staying within single-digit meters of a vigilant adult at all times else CPS!!!).

New comment by insensible in "The Gregorio project – GPL tools for typesetting Gregorian chant"

insensible — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:23:49 +0000

I’m interested in what may exist for Byzantine notation.

New comment by insensible in "Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?"

insensible — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:40:20 +0000

So test it separately.

New comment by insensible in "We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year"

insensible — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:30:56 +0000

Yes, the factors to consider include:

- cost of the effort

- probability of success

- trade-offs in the case of success or of failure

- the possibility of only partial success creating an even messier situation than the existing one

Having a way to do the whole thing on a much smaller timescale and budget lets decision makers focus more on those externalities, and also can simplify them. This kind of bit rot is somewhere (often everywhere) in many fast-moving businesses, as a natural consequence of the value tradeoffs we have had up to now. Now there are machines that can speedrun the grunt work of clearing them.

New comment by insensible in "I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978"

insensible — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:43:12 +0000

She should have sent it! The first person to disrespect a child is the loser, and shouldn’t be the child’s parent.

New comment by insensible in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

insensible — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 20:43:07 +0000

I understand your point and have a long list of bitter grievances against Apple, but OS X triggered a large influx of geeks to the Mac world. It was a Unix that just worked, and there were all kinds of important ways that appealed to key tech people.

New comment by insensible in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

insensible — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:54:28 +0000

Why not? I kinda like the idea of PGP signing parties among humans.

New comment by insensible in "QR-style codes could replace barcodes 'within two years'"

insensible — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 19:20:24 +0000

For a very long time now, homeopathic remedies have been regulated by specific US law, called HPUS, and are labeled accordingly. They’re actually required to include examples of what they treat even though many in the homeopathic community would rather it be labeled more generally.

If you are of the opinion that there’s something that needs to be changed about this arrangement, your lawmaker is the one to contact.

New comment by insensible in "After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code"

insensible — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 06:59:30 +0000

What we don’t understand yet is what that means. We have never had such a thing before and it’s not clear what the patterns are that will make the best use of its known attributes with the least exposure to downsides — whether those be related to the tools, the end users, or the business stakeholders, or any other parties. Volumes more nuance to understand, and we’re just getting started.

New comment by insensible in "In the US, regenerative farming practices require unlearning past advice"

insensible — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 18:06:37 +0000

The idea is that the crops are more profitable per unit of time spent. The pasture operations are very low labor.

New comment by insensible in "In the US, regenerative farming practices require unlearning past advice"

insensible — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 18:05:29 +0000

I have never seen a permaculture designer, or anyone, make such a claim. We aim to reduce maintenance by design, using methods that overlap with Lean Manufacturing and other process study, but it would be absurd to claim that it’s possible to reduce gardening to zero maintenance. Fukuoka was more extreme than many permaculture specialists by quite a large factor but he put his maintenance right in the title of his signature work: “one-straw revolution”.

New comment by insensible in "In the US, regenerative farming practices require unlearning past advice"

insensible — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 05:48:23 +0000

Permaculture designer here. That’s a pretty good take. Biggest aspect missing is that once you abandon the “parking lot” approach to farming, you get many niches where you can profit from multiple crops on the same land. The farmer in the article is grazing under productive trees, for one example. Another opportunity is to stack a bunch of berry bushes of graduated height next to rows of trees. And to graze chickens after a larger animal, yet another enterprise on the same land. And with all the added fertility from the grazing, now you can sell a cutting of hay you didn’t have before.

The profit per unit area can become very high.

New comment by insensible in "Build systems, not heroes"

insensible — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 07:05:28 +0000

I’m a permaculture designer and have run a small vegetable farm. I have visited Polyface twice and spoken personally with Joel Salatin both times. I’ve read several of his books. I think that Polyface shows up in this discussion very much on the side of the systemic safeguards the article recommends. His farm is full of systems and safeguards a great many things by design. He plans for every risk he can think of and adapts his system in response. He got the farm from his father and has largely transferred it to his son, and they have built a business training both interns and the interested public in their methods.

Safety measures ≠ world-dominating industrial scale.