Hacker News: ironman1478

New comment by ironman1478 in "European civil servants are being forced off WhatsApp"

ironman1478 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:15:22 +0000

Maybe that's a good thing. I want people running my country to actually know how to do things.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588"

ironman1478 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:46:05 +0000

Unfortunately no. It's all proprietary and locked up. However, I can say that the optimizations are not always about IQ (though that is a major factor). It's also about making things run fast enough in a low latency environment. Those two requirements lead to strange hardware designs that lead to strange register interfaces.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588"

ironman1478 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:34:17 +0000

I work in this field and this is 100 percent true. It's really hard to learn about too. A lot of textbooks go over the algorithms in the chips in an idealized form. The actual versions are so messy and different that the textbooks aren't even useful sometimes, especially if you work on custom ISPs. It's cursed, but it's fun.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

ironman1478 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:26:31 +0000

There are stories about insurance companies using AI when determining if a claim should be let through or denied.

https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/healthcare/2026/03/...

New comment by ironman1478 in "Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code"

ironman1478 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:18:50 +0000

Verification has always been hard and always ignored, in software more than other industries. This is not specific to AI generated code.

I currently work in a software field that has a large numerical component and verifying that the system is implemented correctly and stable takes much longer than actually implementing it. It should have been like that when I used to work in a more software-y role, but people were much more cavalier then and it bit that company in the butt often. This isn't new, but it is being amplified.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Google co-founder reveals that "many" of the new hires do not have a degree"

ironman1478 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:51:48 +0000

So you basically have a CS degree. I learned C in 7th grade and was completely self taught. I then got a CS degree because I just wanted to learn more about it and be around people who were also enthusiastic about CS.

There is something disingenuous about the parent post. Highly motivated people will always be good at what they want to do. I'm good at guitar, but never went to music school. Highly motivated individuals though are the exception, not the rule. If you take two random individuals, one with a lit degree and one with a CS degree, the CS degree person will know more in the domain of CS and be more likely to write useful software.

The parent post is conflating being highly selective about personality type and attributing it to the degree.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Google co-founder reveals that "many" of the new hires do not have a degree"

ironman1478 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:39:46 +0000

I just don't understand how this is true unless you're doing something extremely basic. So much context is missing in this post.

Having a CS degree doesn't mean much, but I don't see how a lit major is going to learn how to be productive in an embedded environment for example. There is just too much domain specific knowledge that isn't based purely on intelligence and can't be inferred from first principles.

New comment by ironman1478 in "A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT's drug advice. He died from an overdose"

ironman1478 — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 06:40:36 +0000

It's a valid concern, but with a doctor giving bad advice there is accountability and there are legal consequences for malpractice. These LLM companies want to be able to act authoritatively without any of the responsibility. They can't have it both ways.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

ironman1478 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 17:03:27 +0000

I'm not sure what to make of these technologies. I read about people doing all these things with them and it sounds impressive. Then when I use it, it feels like the tool produces junior level code unless I babysit it, then it really can produce what I want.

If I have to do all this babysitting, is it really saving me anything other than typing the code? It hasn't felt like it yet and if anything it's scary because I need to always read the code to make sure it's valid, and reading code is harder than writing it.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team"

ironman1478 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:17:02 +0000

The life of people on earth doesn't seem better than people now. For connected people it seems great, but for the average joe it seemed awful.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

ironman1478 — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 20:13:46 +0000

At least the contribution back can happen. You're right though, it's not perfect.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

ironman1478 — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 15:08:09 +0000

Open source has been good, but I think the expanded use of highly permissive licences has completely left the door open for one sided transactions.

All the FAANGs have the ability to build all the open source tools they consume internally. Why give it to them for free and not have the expectation that they'll contribute something back?

New comment by ironman1478 in "What Killed Perl?"

ironman1478 — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 20:14:48 +0000

Something I haven't seen mentioned is that python is very commonly taught at universities. I learned it in the 2010s at my school, whereas I never got exposed to Perl. The languages people learn in school definitely stick with you and I wonder if that plays a non-zero factor in this.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem"

ironman1478 — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:34:40 +0000

I'm not a fan of rust, but I don't think that is the only takeaway. All systems have assumptions about their input and if the assumption is violated, it has to be caught somewhere. It seems like it was caught too deep in the system.

Maybe the validation code should've handled the larger size, but also the db query produced something invalid. That shouldn't have ever happened in the first place.

New comment by ironman1478 in "FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs"

ironman1478 — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 01:29:07 +0000

Corporations extract a ton of value from projects like ffmpeg. They can either pay an employee to fix the issues or setup some sort of contract with members of the community to fix bugs or make feature enhancements.

There is precedent for this: https://sqlite.org/consortium.html

New comment by ironman1478 in "FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs"

ironman1478 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 20:00:10 +0000

Never work for free. It's a complete market distortion and leads to bad actors taking advantage of you and your work.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Another European agency shifts off US Tech as digital sovereignty gains steam"

ironman1478 — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:48:29 +0000

LibreOffice Calc can do this already.

The main issue is the collaboration aspect of LibreOffice. I imagine though with funding LibreOffice can be upgraded to do this. If countries are already trying to migrate away from US tech, they could invest in this.

New comment by ironman1478 in "The decline of deviance"

ironman1478 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 02:23:05 +0000

The world has become very expensive and everything is way more competitive than it was in the past.

To me, it feels like there is little room to make mistakes. If you get detailed it's hard to get back on track. That I think is the primary reason people are taking less risks (or being deviant).

New comment by ironman1478 in "Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division"

ironman1478 — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 20:35:16 +0000

Having worked at Meta, I wish they did this when I was there. Way too many people not agreeing on anything and having wildly different visions for the same thing. As an IC below L6 it became really impossible to know what to do in the org I was in. I had to leave.

New comment by ironman1478 in "Apple M5 chip"

ironman1478 — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 15:31:01 +0000

It's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-like in that there isn't very much variation in hardware, as opposed to traditional PC gaming. I would think that it's easier to develop a game for a MacBook than a Windows machine where you never know what hardware setup the user will have.