Hacker News: ip26

New comment by ip26 in "“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers"

ip26 — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:39:40 +0000

It’s getting everyone to understand the problems, working together (etc)…

There are manuals for this too, and interestingly enough this has been studied since the Romans at least! Is it then really the hard part?

New comment by ip26 in "Anthropic CEO reportedly worried new hires only care about money"

ip26 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:52:17 +0000

There’s an ego element though. Being mission driven and choosing to work for Anthropic is implicitly validating of the “peril” and of the leadership team as the ones to steer through it, so they are indirectly asking for this validation.

New comment by ip26 in "The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder"

ip26 — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:01:25 +0000

Certainly room for such discussion. However if the parent waits to first save a large sum before moving there (instead of moving there straight out of high school), their revealed preferences suggest even they do not feel the tiny village is great for young people.

New comment by ip26 in "The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder"

ip26 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 23:00:54 +0000

If you have dependents that are children, I feel there is a moral consideration. If you have earned $1M and then take the family to live who-knows-where slowly drawing on that $1M.. will your children be able to replicate your success? Will they be able to earn their own $1M? Or will leading this new life significantly impair their prospects?

To me this is the most critical problem with the "move somewhere crazy cheap" plan. I feel a parent owes their children at least somewhat similar opportunities as they themselves had. If you got to work as "high flying white collar tech worker", but the only option your children have is "subsistence fisherman", you have wronged them.

New comment by ip26 in "The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder"

ip26 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:49:59 +0000

If it's just sitting there in your kitchen beckoning you, I think that's called beer pressure?

New comment by ip26 in "YC founder asks desperate job seekers to tattoo themselves for an interview"

ip26 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:43:53 +0000

There seems to be a line of thinking that past unicorn startups had bad risk-reward profiles, and therefore a good founder should be taking lots of bad risks. If they take good risks, they will never succeed and become a unicorn. Very "tres commas".

So, demonstrating there's no risk too outlandish for you becomes a form of social signaling to investors.

New comment by ip26 in "How to Exist"

ip26 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 05:00:41 +0000

I’m not sure where this idea came from that farming was idle and only industry required constant work. Every hundred-year old book I’ve ever read that features farming includes themes of how the farmer’s work never ends and runs from dawn to dusk.

New comment by ip26 in "How to Exist"

ip26 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 04:56:18 +0000

It’s rather “libertarians as cats”. The heroism of being content doing nothing but drink some coffee, stands upon the backs of hundreds of people seeking to better themselves who brought that coffee to your lips.

New comment by ip26 in "Why don't people use formal methods? (2019)"

ip26 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:27:06 +0000

I have also found that equivalent rewrites are one of the best applications for formal. Other examples can be things like vectorizing code while proving the vectorized version is formally identical, refactoring types or objects, or select classes of performance optimization that are not expected to change the output.

New comment by ip26 in "Why don't people use formal methods? (2019)"

ip26 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:15:20 +0000

It's a complementary tool that replaces certain difficult types of testing. Viewed this way, you can focus writing formal specification for things which are easy & clear to formally specify. "this returns sorted lists" is, for example, a simple property. Other examples might be the O(n) performance of your algorithm. Meanwhile, "every input can be found in the output" might feel too painful to write, so you might compromise on "the output has the same number of elements as the input". This leaves plenty of space for classical testing, while unburdening classical testing from worrying about select classes of bugs.

One other valuable part of formal methods is forcing the author to make claims about their program, and then poking holes in those claims. This process helps the author understand their own code better, and after a process of iteration developing the formal properties that are actually true, you now have a strictly-true external interface specification for the program. This is obviously most-valuable for only certain classes of code, such as libraries or services.

New comment by ip26 in "The End of an Era"

ip26 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:29:14 +0000

Discoverability starts to break for new authors when more new books are published each day than humans on the earth.

Established authors have the name recognition to compete as you say.

New comment by ip26 in "Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes"

ip26 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:51:11 +0000

Is public perception the greater problem, or delivery? My outsider read has been relatively few diseases can be targeted right now due to payload delivery obstacles

New comment by ip26 in "Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes"

ip26 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:46:06 +0000

Phase 3 seems closer to doing a soft production launch and finding customers completely reject it despite early focus groups liking it.

Prototypes, when they fail, are also often tweaked into something that works. A lot of phase 3 failures appear to have been complete dead-ends.

New comment by ip26 in "Claude Opus 5"

ip26 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:26:50 +0000

It wasn’t long ago at all that the chief problem was “can AI even help me with this” (cost be damned). Until a time when the answer is an unmitigated “yes, obviously”, the frontier labs have everything to lose and nothing to gain on routing, because if they screw it up you might incorrectly decide “nope, it can’t help yet” due to a poor routing decision.

New comment by ip26 in "My falling-out with the rationalist community"

ip26 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:28:42 +0000

The alternative to the rationalist one is “be suspicious of anyone who claims to know the unarguable truth”

New comment by ip26 in "My falling-out with the rationalist community"

ip26 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:01:19 +0000

It's like modeling a living cell in a computer building upon the basic maths of physics. Yes, it is a thing that is "possible". However it is not practicable to capture everything that matters and run that simulation.

New comment by ip26 in "Data centers have hiked electricity prices on the public by $23B"

ip26 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 02:10:34 +0000

The “affordable” housing thing seems like such a misdirection. I can’t help but daydream that some moneyed interest somewhere fans those flames, as it looks like a dead end that can absorb endless fervor.

You know what you do if you want an affordable car? You buy used. I think most people understand Ford is never going to build another a car that costs $10k brand new, and the last new car near that price barely sold because it was so stripped.

New comment by ip26 in "AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study"

ip26 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 21:00:49 +0000

If we’re just spitballing, it certainly could be that, but it’s also obvious that publishing papers can help communicate your existing work. AI can definitely help at that, and even great work needs to be communicated.

If this same article had said “adoption of word processors over typewriters increases publishing”, would we still be thinking of the babble hypothesis?

New comment by ip26 in "Modern decor may be straining people's brains"

ip26 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:21:21 +0000

You describe it like it’s some kind of a treadmill chasing new. But if you have kids at 35, they start school when you’re 40.. were you thinking about the quality of the neighborhood schools when you bought your house at 25?

Or suppose you meet your spouse when you are 30, after you bought a house.

There’s inherently much less moving-around if you get married at 18 and have kids straight away - the plan is settled from the start.

New comment by ip26 in "Write code like a human will maintain it"

ip26 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 22:09:27 +0000

My assumption is somewhere in the harness toolchain there's a prompt inject that says:

    - Always sign commit messages

In which case, Claude is being given conflicting instructions, which is a different class of problem than too many instructions.