Hacker News: kerblang

New comment by kerblang in "I Am Not a Reverse Centaur"

kerblang — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:14:25 +0000

It doesn't even matter and isn't worth arguing about what emotional state the submitter obtains. I don't care if they even achieve nirvana and ascend to permanent buddhahood.

What matters is that they are wasting the time & patience of someone who is doing good work that others benefit from.

Any happiness gained from doing that to someone is parasitic.

New comment by kerblang in "Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration"

kerblang — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:56:36 +0000

It's not a lack of respect for you; it's a lack of respect for the work itself. That lack is being rewarded and encouraged.

Managers will be sure to tell you how much they respect you. Ask them if they respect the work and you'll get a blank stare.

New comment by kerblang in "I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys"

kerblang — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:08:56 +0000

Important keyboard design note the author would agree with but didn't point out: Function keys are supposed to be divided into groups of four with a distinct gap between each group. This makes it much easier for the wayward touch-typist to find things.

BTW I've gone back to wired keyboard because most companies assume people who prefer wireless prefer as many unnecessary bells and whistles as possible to the point of compromising the design. There is no concept of some features being better than others, just a black/white everything/nothing.

Also refer to automobiles, tv's, all modern design...

New comment by kerblang in "The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun"

kerblang — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:22:33 +0000

There is very clearly an angry backlash, even if it is a backlash against phantoms, even if people are only demanding a better liar than the previous. There are no psychological black holes; the stress builds and eventually explodes.

New comment by kerblang in "Every Byte Matters"

kerblang — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:55:02 +0000

... IF that's your main performance problem.

I already know I'm dealing with huge perf issues caused by ORM & lazy-load semantics. I/O abuse is usually going to be so, so much worse than memory/cache issues. Java is mainly used for business information systems, where I/O is king. Plain vanilla memory abuse is also a big one.

But my main problem is a mgmt convinced the magic wand of AI will make all sorts of problems dissapear, and it's going to take 5 years for them to realize nope.

It's still fun to learn about cache optimization though, esp. when someone makes it reasonably digestible like this. And maybe it also helps people to recognize that OOP is not some great over-arching zen truth of truths.

New comment by kerblang in "Show HN: Eyeball"

kerblang — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:10:53 +0000

Oh that version actually made sense.

Going back to our newer game, I realized that I am supposed to figure out where the number given should fall on the line.

A case study in modern useability - looks a lot cooler, can't figure it out.

New comment by kerblang in "The Permanent Upper Crow"

kerblang — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:55:17 +0000

I feel stupid but I could not bring myself to click the "sign" button and continue gameplay.

A lot of electronic contracts are done like that and... nope, not clicking it... Mmmmm.... nope.

New comment by kerblang in "Bullshit Machines"

kerblang — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:10:58 +0000

> One computer scientist speculated that his LLM had attained sentience.

> How did he reach that conclusion? Basically, he asked “Are you conscious?”, the machine responded “Yes”, and that was that.

Oh, come on now. This is referring to Blake Lemoine, and while I doubt his conclusions, he wasn't being as simplistic as all that. He's not completely stupid.

New comment by kerblang in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

kerblang — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:25:20 +0000

There's no need to be snide

New comment by kerblang in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

kerblang — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:42:13 +0000

Adjusted for inflation?

edit - sorry, it is in fact adjusted, text is kinda hard to see

New comment by kerblang in "Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages"

kerblang — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:56:19 +0000

This is not a writeup of "Ada is better than everything else". The author is explaining how Ada achieved safety/reliability goals that your favorite language independently evolved much later on. That is why they kept bringing up year-of-arrival for comparison.

Examples would be a nice bonus but I think the author eschewed such because they weren't interested in writing a tutorial. They had a very specific point to make and stuck to it, resulting in a very informative but concise article that reads well because of its highly disciplined authorship.

New comment by kerblang in "There's yet another study about how bad AI is for our brains"

kerblang — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:24:31 +0000

How about "Working with AI just feels like having a team of junior employees who are completely unscrupulous, sychophantic and sometimes profoundly stupid psychopathic liars"?

Caveman – why use many token when few do trick

kerblang — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:15:49 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman/blob/main/README.md

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47794436

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by kerblang in "Why I'm Building a Database Engine in C#"

kerblang — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 22:31:41 +0000

oh. sorry, had a decent excuse for its horribility, now i have less of one.

New comment by kerblang in "The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Worse Than You Thought"

kerblang — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:31:02 +0000

Am a middle-aged man, don't have kids, don't see it as a trifling problem, and I don't agree with the libertarian free-speech-at-all-costs angle.

Instead I think a) kids shouldn't be on the internet and b) the public school system is a barely supervised dumpster fire.

New comment by kerblang in "Why I'm Building a Database Engine in C#"

kerblang — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:28:56 +0000

Am amused that someone feels compelled to justify writing a db in C#. Such conscientiousness!

I'm not sure authors of Cassandra, ElasticSearch, MongoDB (and more...?) ever had the slightest twinge of uncertainty about whether a managed memory env would cause far more problems than it fixed, even with less native tooling than in C#. Java bros DGAF

New comment by kerblang in "Supply chain nightmare: How Rust will be attacked and what we can do to mitigate"

kerblang — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:35:03 +0000

I really like the idea of implementing the std lib separate from the language. I think that would be a huge blessing for Java, Go and others, ideally allowing faster iteration on most things given that we usually don't need a reinvention of the compiler/runtime just to make a better library.

New comment by kerblang in "Code is run more than read (2023)"

kerblang — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:26:21 +0000

Try replacing the battery. Seems accessible enough at first, but ingenious engineering has made batteries the modern rubik's cube of auto maintenance.

New comment by kerblang in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

kerblang — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:37:34 +0000

> This meant I could start the computer, log in, potentially start and use several applications and only then turn on the screen.

I mean... well... responsiveness matters to me too, and I am impressed by such inspired productivity, but... I'm also confused. Why not turn on the screen - the monitor, right?

Now thinking about how gui lag might impact the sight-impaired, tangential as that is...

New comment by kerblang in "The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s"

kerblang — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:27:13 +0000

They are trumpist, because Trump is highly narcissistic and disgusted by _weakness_ in others. They are elitist Nietzschean social darwinists at heart and believe IQ should determine social status.

The populism stuff doesn't mean "We're protecting the little guy from elites who conspire against him." It means "We're protecting ourselves from other elites who conspire against us - but the little guy will still be better off with us as the authoritarian elite."