Hacker News: irvingprime

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?"

irvingprime — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:02:47 +0000

Well, I'm writing a science fiction novel. There are references in it to AI but just as a tool people use. It's not about that.

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

irvingprime — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:03:11 +0000

All kinds of things! I work with AI every day to do various kinds of work. Coding. Research. Brainstorming. I write up notes nearly every day and then I post a summary of each week on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/cw/aiconfessions

One of the projects that features in these notes is the attempt to build a programming language using AI. https://github.com/xvandervort/graphoid

Since I left my last job, I do a lot of writing. I also have a couple substacks. One is a humorous weekly look at science and tech (https://technoscreed.substack.com/ ) and the other is a monthly exploration of history (https://historyroad.substack.com/)

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)"

irvingprime — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 19:46:11 +0000

Developing a graph-based programming language called Graphoid. The original concept was to target AI-related programming. Probably not ready for that yet!

Repo: https://github.com/xvandervort/graphoid

Claude Code is doing the majority of the coding, with close supervision from me. I write notes while I'm working on it. Notes are here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/aiconfessions

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (Jan 2026)"

irvingprime — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 17:31:38 +0000

I'm using Claude AI to build an experimental programming language I call Graphoid. (Built for dealing with graphs). It's early days and I don't know how worthwhile it is but I'm having fun.

repo: https://github.com/xvandervort/graphoid lab notes: https://www.patreon.com/cw/aiconfessions

New comment by irvingprime in "Tell HN: AI coding is sexy, but accounting is the real low-hanging target"

irvingprime — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 04:22:49 +0000

Bingo! You found the prize! Putting tech that is prone to hallucination in charge of anything that has serious consequences when it's wrong is a terrible idea. You do not want hallucinated payments or receipts, or legal citations. You want these things to be both true and correct, EVERY TIME.

New comment by irvingprime in "Poll HN: What operating system do you primarily develop on?"

irvingprime — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 17:04:09 +0000

For many years I've developed on a Linux VM running on a Windows host. At a couple of jobs I ran a Linux VM on a MacOS host.

This way, my development environment remains stable and portable and the thing I use to read email and surf the web is whatever. It works for me.

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: How to deal with long vibe-coded PRs?"

irvingprime — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 18:29:44 +0000

Reject. Period. No compromise. No friendly comments about how it can be improved. Just reject it as unreviewable.

Then ban the idiot who submitted it.

New comment by irvingprime in "Tell HN: OpenAI now requires ID verification and won't refund API credits"

irvingprime — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 14:38:45 +0000

Customer service? In the age of AI? What have you been smoking?

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: Why is software quality collapsing?"

irvingprime — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 17:24:17 +0000

You are in a completely normal dev shop. What's happened is that the start up mentality of "ship something - anything, and ship it NOW" has infected everything. Maybe over time you can make it better. But educating management can be a slow and frustrating process. Good luck!

New comment by irvingprime in "Typed languages are better suited for vibecoding"

irvingprime — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 17:58:59 +0000

Vibecoding is bad coding. Always. Even if I take the headline as correct, so what? It's still crap code that will collapse into an unmaintainable mess sooner rather than later.

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: Is your company forcing use of AI?"

irvingprime — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 16:56:44 +0000

I'm no longer at the company but yesterday was my last day so my information is still current.

The division I worked in was demanding that developers use AI at least once a week and they were tracking people's usage. The boss nagged about it every day.

I had no problem meeting the requirement but did find it's contributions to be very hit or miss as to usefulness.

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: Have you not accepted or left a job because it was immoral?"

irvingprime — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 04:02:41 +0000

I once cut off an interview as soon as the interviewer told me the job was building and maintaining a porn site. Never made it to an actual job offer.

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: Are there "story-based" and "fact-based" people?"

irvingprime — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 22:04:10 +0000

It's an interesting model but in practice I don't think anyone is really all one way or all the other. A better way to approach it might be to find out which narratives are most important to someone and how far they'll go to protect them.

In the end, being a fact-based person might just be a narrative you hold about yourself.

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?"

irvingprime — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 20:06:28 +0000

The longest period of unemployment I've ever experienced ended about 6 months ago. I was unemployed for 11 months. The company that finally hired me was intentionally targeting people with lots of experience. I have that. They also pay less than I used to make but I took it because I needed a job.

Previous to that period of unemployment, my resume tended to get noticed. I got interviews from 3 applications out of 5. But this time, it was 3 out of 150.

Read that last paragraph again. My resume has not gotten worse. I still have decades of experience, a master's degree and a bunch of patents. That used to count for something.

My conclusion is that the market has gotten much worse for people with experience who don't hide being white and male.

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: Can anyone from Crowdstrike explain the back story?"

irvingprime — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 18:25:11 +0000

Decent guesses. I won't be surprised if someday (maybe in court testimony) we find out that you are very close to correct.

New comment by irvingprime in "Tell HN: Copilot For Business forcibly terminates Copilot Personal subscriptions"

irvingprime — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 00:09:19 +0000

That is truly awful customer service.

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?"

irvingprime — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 11:08:06 +0000

You can't back up lies on the fly. You're contradicting yourself now.

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?"

irvingprime — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 11:07:00 +0000

Your complaint that jobs are for the specific tech stack is spot on. Employers are currently treating every job as a specialization. It's a combination of a filtering technique (because there are too many candidates for every job right now) and complete stupidity (Because there are too many options for tech stacks so that, sometimes, your pool is very shallow indeed).

I'm older than you are and have been out of work for longer than ever before in my life. BUT I finally got a decent offer and will be starting a new job soon. There is hope.

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2024)"

irvingprime — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 03:20:33 +0000

Location: New York State (up by Lake Ontario)

Remote: Only

Willing to Relocate: No

Technologies: Ruby, Python, Redis, Mysql, Postgres, Mongo, and many more.

Resume: See linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidvandervort

Email: drvandervort@gmail.com

I've been a team lead, a manager, a project leader, a researcher and an architect. Also a poet but there isn't much call for that.

New comment by irvingprime in "Ask HN: Why is OpenAI and ChatGPT design so bad?"

irvingprime — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 20:32:54 +0000

Horrid? It looks fine to me. More importantly, it does what I want (more or less). What do you think is so bad and how would you fix it?