Hacker News: kmac_

New comment by kmac_ in "Claude Fable 5"

kmac_ — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:15:05 +0000

Models are getting better, but there's a negative change in terms of "productivity" per dollar. Yeah, I can throw 5 sub-agents at the problem, but the cost is getting significantly higher. And yes, I can crank out the solution much faster, but again, at some point that cost will be hard to justify. And it doesn't matter if the cost is subsidized by a provider, if it's paid by your company, or from your pocket. We are slowly reaching a point where the cost will be too high to justify the gains.

New comment by kmac_ in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

kmac_ — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:35:37 +0000

Windows is dying a death by a thousand small, user-unfriendly decisions. This is genuinely sad because the technology underlying Windows is actually very robust and flexible.

So, the partnership is maybe natural, but not prospective. Also, note how Linux is getting popular among gamers. Of course, it's way behind Windows, but the direction of the change is clear.

I'm convinced that Nvidia is not primarily targeting the consumer market and that the ultimate goal for its CPUs is the server space. The company invests effort where the money is, and consumer products account for only a fraction of its total revenue. Maintaining a presence in the consumer market seems more like a way to avoid a complete pivot than a strategic priority.

New comment by kmac_ in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

kmac_ — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:24:01 +0000

This idea sounds good at first, but if you look closer, it would just make workers, not experts who really understand. What we could do, and already do, is tweak the learned abstractions. In our field, it's easy to see: most of us first learned about computing abstractions, not how processors actually work, or started with Java, not assembler. Plus, you can't teach math from top to bottom.

New comment by kmac_ in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

kmac_ — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:53:31 +0000

Producing a thing has always been cheap since personal computers existed. From mail-order software companies' times to SaaS times, producing a sellable MVP was an initial cost that is relatively small compared to the later cost of expansion and maintenance. Marketing and selling was and still is the hardest part.

New comment by kmac_ in "We are Poles, so, of course, we print in Latin"

kmac_ — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:25:07 +0000

Or Esperanto. But Spanish or Italian would also be great as they sound so nice.

New comment by kmac_ in "Gemini 3.5 Flash"

kmac_ — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:31:39 +0000

Well, the first impression is that Gemini still goes off the instruction rails easier than other models, but I noticed that it tends to go back to the initial goal without holding a hand, which is a real improvement. It's really interesting that these models behave so differently.

New comment by kmac_ in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

kmac_ — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:42:24 +0000

BTC's price isn't the point. Crypto businesses are a shrinking niche (not counting cases like Binance, but those are exceptions), and VC money has moved on. Crypto had its shot but couldn't go mainstream. AI is a better bet now.

New comment by kmac_ in "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI"

kmac_ — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:30:24 +0000

I would love to be able to filter out AI-generated music entirely. I stopped using Spotify's Discovery function as I can't bear this glitchy, really bad slop. It's like those "bad kitty" animations, but in music form. It's really insulting, both for the audience and artists, that they are promoting such lousy content. I hope that Spotify won't take the route of enshittification, quite literally.

New comment by kmac_ in "Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?"

kmac_ — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:01:31 +0000

I'm sitting right now in Central/Eastern Europe, and unfortunately, I don't see those 10k jobs. Quite the opposite, a lot of senior, really capable devs have an "open to work" badge on LinkedIn. Salaries went down, and including inflation, it's even harsher. Also, sentiment towards CS careers changed dramatically ("sprint monkeys," etc.) and they are considered as non-prospective and boring.

New comment by kmac_ in "iPhone 17e"

kmac_ — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:54:46 +0000

A 60Hz display in 2026 is quite surprising.

New comment by kmac_ in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

kmac_ — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:09:54 +0000

Lol, this is so good. And quite interesting, as it might mean that there's no "world model" in LLM models, or they have such gaps.

New comment by kmac_ in "Software factories and the agentic moment"

kmac_ — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 21:47:18 +0000

Code is always the final spec. Maybe the "no engineers/coders/programmers" dream will come true, but in the end, the soft, wish-like, very undetailed business "spec" has to be transformed into hard implementation that covers all (well, most of) corners. Maybe when context size reaches 1G tokens and memory won't be wiped every new session? Maybe after two or three breakthrough papers? For now, the frontier isn't reached.

New comment by kmac_ in "Coding agents have replaced every framework I used"

kmac_ — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:16:16 +0000

That's why they bring a lot of value. Plus, new models and methods enable solutions that weren't available a decade ago.

New comment by kmac_ in "Coding agents have replaced every framework I used"

kmac_ — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:51:16 +0000

Current models won't write anything new, they are "just" great at matching, qualifying, and copying patterns. They bring a lot of value right now, but there is no creativity.

New comment by kmac_ in "European Alternatives"

kmac_ — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:52:49 +0000

It's not just about salaries, but also the lack of a culture for seeding and financing. The fear of failed investments really dominates. Government and EU-backed financing is a joke, and I'm not even talking about the terms or amounts, but who actually gets them. It's pure waste of taxpayer money and should be abandoned.

New comment by kmac_ in "Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU"

kmac_ — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:28:07 +0000

No idea what this number actually is. If it includes pension funds' investments in the US stock market and US bonds, then it is underestimated.

New comment by kmac_ in "Vibe coding is a hobby. Let me explain"

kmac_ — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 15:00:34 +0000

Nah. I'm using it daily for work and producing clean, fully controlled PRs. I don't get this denial, as the value is there, development is visibly faster, and without impact on quality (I'm controlling the agent, not vice versa).

New comment by kmac_ in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

kmac_ — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 14:50:04 +0000

I mean mouse (Magic Mouse, precisely) and trackpad lag. The Magic Mouse also had random stuttering, a really horrible experience on brand new hardware. There were also other pain points. Returning to "standard" PC hardware and Linux was a real bliss.

New comment by kmac_ in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

kmac_ — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 10:37:15 +0000

There's plenty of good hardware outside the Apple world. Heck, whenever I get convinced to try Apple hardware or software, its quirks and obvious glitches put me off. Input lag is the topmost issue. It immediately washes off the "quality" impression. But I understand that Apple users are used to that and don't notice such issues.

New comment by kmac_ in "Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC"

kmac_ — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 10:59:45 +0000

LG Gram user here with Debian as a daily driver. Can confirm, maybe not 15h, but I don't think about charging. Plus, it's super stable, not a single crash or hang-up over years. It just works. I hope LG will keep this up and not mess up next iterations of the hardware.