Hacker News: jeffrallen

New comment by jeffrallen in "No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner"

jeffrallen — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:11:27 +0000

It probably takes nine months to get one ready to pop off...

New comment by jeffrallen in "No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner"

jeffrallen — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:08:02 +0000

Smoking and AI maximalists are uncool.

New comment by jeffrallen in "eMudhra intermediate CA compromise"

jeffrallen — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:52:57 +0000

Thanks Wayne.

New comment by jeffrallen in "OpenBSD 8.0"

jeffrallen — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 05:29:26 +0000

It's like a pelican on a bicycle, but with social commentary.

New comment by jeffrallen in "Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?"

jeffrallen — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 22:14:15 +0000

Yes. The dashboard that grabs some data out of other systems is vibe coded. The design was mine, to make it safe to let the AI go wild on the rest. Places where authentication, durable state, un-reversible actions are concerned: the AI can sketch it, then you gotta own it, with perhaps help from the AI to improve tests or refactor.

New comment by jeffrallen in "OpenAI discloses four more rogue incidents"

jeffrallen — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 21:16:00 +0000

...maybe stop doing crimes?

New comment by jeffrallen in "OpenAI discloses four more rogue incidents"

jeffrallen — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 21:12:34 +0000

Service providers are still responsible to police what happens on their network. KYC already makes it very difficult to get service completely anonymously with only crypto changing "hands".

New comment by jeffrallen in "OpenAI discloses four more rogue incidents"

jeffrallen — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 21:09:28 +0000

Well, the COVID story seems to indicate we don't actually take lab leaks seriously, so... yeah.

New comment by jeffrallen in "OpenAI discloses four more rogue incidents"

jeffrallen — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 17:49:58 +0000

Too big to behave.

New comment by jeffrallen in "Catch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity"

jeffrallen — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 08:09:11 +0000

This made me smile and made my wife reply with "kissie eyes", which I'm assured, is better than "hugging face".

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

jeffrallen — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:53:18 +0000

More like in a world of round things that can bear loads, they decided to... (checks notes) reinvent the wheel?

New comment by jeffrallen in "Hiking the world in search of rare cheeses"

jeffrallen — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 05:41:06 +0000

I took my Swiss wife to the Tillamook factory in Oregon and she was laughing at how industrial it is. Later she took me to a Swiss mountain cheese maker, accessible only by hiking, making cheese over a wood-fired kettle.

New comment by jeffrallen in "Gemini 4 Argon"

jeffrallen — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:31:06 +0000

I use Gemini all day at work via the chat interface. It's rock solid. I find it hard to understand which model it's using though. Am I already using Argon, or does it switch models according to the subject?

New comment by jeffrallen in "Google told to halt work on datacentres in Finland over environmental concerns"

jeffrallen — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:09:13 +0000

I like this thinking. But also: it's clear this is a monoculture wood crop, not a "forest".

So in fact, this IS brownfield development: changing one industrial land use (forest products) into another one.

Doesn't mean they can't do the paperwork correctly tho.

New comment by jeffrallen in "Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours"

jeffrallen — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:27:04 +0000

Offering redundancy across zones is one thing (and I'm pleased to offer it to my customers). Getting them to use it is quite another thing.

Even if it was "only" 2x or 3x the expense to have a completely multizone setup, the ongoing operational burden is too high to justify over the 2, 10, or 100 year timeframe when no outages happen which could have been avoided.

Companies dependent on a single Amazon zone just give up and wait during a zone outage, blame it on Amazon, then get back to making money the next day.

New comment by jeffrallen in "Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours"

jeffrallen — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:23:20 +0000

ATT was paid by the government to do that. I doubt the commercial market can support those costs.

New comment by jeffrallen in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

jeffrallen — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:25:20 +0000

Also, it is willing to do legitimate work I need done which other models flag as dangerous and refuse to do. (Software testing of a DHCP server to survive bad inputs.)

New comment by jeffrallen in "Calling a function in C without naming it"

jeffrallen — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:40:53 +0000

If you are using the attackers mindset as a teacher, you've lost the plot.

Leave room for your students to surprise you, even of they are hacking you.

New comment by jeffrallen in "Wood Tape (2004)"

jeffrallen — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:35:46 +0000

Improv class made me a better dad. Whatever a kid proposes, the answer is "yes", if you can possibly make it that.

New comment by jeffrallen in "Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2018) [pdf]"

jeffrallen — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:48:16 +0000

I care about delivering results to my colleagues, and so my ideas plus an LLM lets me do what I care about.

You and the author care about software craftsmanship, which is wonderful. But might need to remain a hobby...