Hacker News: jnmandal

New comment by jnmandal in "LLM Voice"

jnmandal — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 22:25:05 +0000

Extremely relevant for about half or more of blog posts submitted here. Honestly has become a sad state of affairs

New comment by jnmandal in "Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World"

jnmandal — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 13:26:37 +0000

Incredible write up. The visuals are amazing

New comment by jnmandal in "The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI"

jnmandal — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 15:45:29 +0000

Pretty much the whole thing. Also I checked just now and the AI detection services say its from 60-90% AI written lol

New comment by jnmandal in "The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI"

jnmandal — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 08:26:38 +0000

Is it just me or is this article itself AI? Or is everyone just adopting the AI tone and writing style now?

New comment by jnmandal in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

jnmandal — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 03:02:02 +0000

Certainly not declining consumer spending. Couldn't be that

New comment by jnmandal in "Israel Keeps Expanding into Gaza Despite Cease-Fire, Satellite Images Show"

jnmandal — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:44:58 +0000

Pretty wild that the international community tolerates this. Realistically this should catalyze a UN intervention.

New comment by jnmandal in "What About Rails?"

jnmandal — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 11:24:06 +0000

Not trying to be a jerk but at this point SRE is my main use case for heavy LLM stuff. It's pretty awesome at that. Deployments and CI pipelines have become a breeze. I used to have to ask DevOps for that and wait days. I have even let agents run deployments for side projects and they seem to do better work than most humans I've worked with. It's wild they will actually read all the logs and debug problems so fast. Not something we could ever keep up with.

The actual code and architecture is where it still lacking IMHO. Especially in rails... Like it will just build the least scalable features if you let it do it's thing. Ten queries for what could be one. No separation of concerns. Huge files, lots of duplicated code and then tens of thousands of units tests that just grow like a fatberg.

If your app does anything serious, if you have serious traffic... you are going to need to review each session finely (and your DB schema with each deploy). It could be that this is maybe an indictment of rails more than LLMs, I guess maybe time will tell.

New comment by jnmandal in "I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases"

jnmandal — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 10:42:49 +0000

Its hip again on some parts of the fediverse.

New comment by jnmandal in "Launch HN: Rise Reforming (YC S26) – Turning Waste Gases into Valuable Chemicals"

jnmandal — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:37:30 +0000

We really need solutions like this if we are going to reverse atmospheric carbon the necessary amount to mitigate planetary catastrophe. Thanks for working on this. Good luck.

New comment by jnmandal in "Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds"

jnmandal — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 02:56:44 +0000

I can't imagine a worse use case for AI. Literally thought the title was a clown

New comment by jnmandal in "4K years ago, Mohenjo-daro grew more equal over time"

jnmandal — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:36:02 +0000

A David Graeber inspired study!?

In case you haven't heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything

New comment by jnmandal in "All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes"

jnmandal — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:41:28 +0000

Title is pretty clickbaity. Cool data set though

New comment by jnmandal in "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success"

jnmandal — Fri, 22 May 2026 11:20:49 +0000

It is extremely early days for these offerings. Synthetic ferts are a relatively mature technique and the related product offerings (which are now effectively commoditized) had state-subsidized R&D for several decades. Mycorrhizal inputs have had a hundredth of the R&D and only been used commercially for a few years at best.

Its not really a fair comparison. This is like comparing PDAs to desktop computers in 1991, and surmising that mobile devices are just marketing hype.

New comment by jnmandal in "California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy"

jnmandal — Sat, 16 May 2026 15:15:33 +0000

They just leave it in place mostly. Sometimes in big mounds that become berms over a few years. Discarding wood chips is actually very expensive.

New comment by jnmandal in "Greek Alphabet Cards"

jnmandal — Sat, 16 May 2026 15:12:52 +0000

Μπράβο ρε. Πόσο όμορφο

New comment by jnmandal in "California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy"

jnmandal — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:58:14 +0000

Placing it at the root of the trees makes a ton of sense as it increases yields and lowers need for inputs. Also helps with the compaction from all the mechanization in the orchards.

Selling it as fuel is maybe some added revenue in the short term but really just doesn't make sense. Now if you were getting a premium (lumber, specialty hardwood, etc), then processing and selling could make sense

New comment by jnmandal in "0 A.D. Release 28: Boiorix"

jnmandal — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 07:00:25 +0000

Incredible work folks. Can't wait to try it out. The Germans look cool!

New comment by jnmandal in "AI coding assistants are getting worse?"

jnmandal — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:35:41 +0000

Yep. Not just stack overflow -- pretty much everywhere. If only someone could have foreseen this problem!!!

Anyways, no issue. We'll just get claude to start answer stack overflow questions!

New comment by jnmandal in "Thomas Piketty: 'The reality is the US is losing control of the world'"

jnmandal — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 15:34:59 +0000

Compared to itself. Same phenomenon as in Japan. Rising powers almost never have this issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_tsunami

New comment by jnmandal in "Thomas Piketty: 'The reality is the US is losing control of the world'"

jnmandal — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 12:55:09 +0000

Without entering (and winning) some kind of major conflict, this was always going to happen.

Two things are important to think about.

1. Power should be measured in relative terms not absolute. (For a good treatise on this, read Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers). The US would have to be keeping up with China, India, and rest of world to maintain its previous pole position.

2. Great nations/empires generally become so at least partially through population growth. This can be organic or engineered (ie: continuously conquering more and more territory) but rising dominance almost never coincides with demographic stagnation, which the US is experiencing. This population plateau has been accurately predicted by the US Census for my entire lifetime.

Also nothing about this decline is unusual or unexpected. This is the course of empire, which is not a new concept.