Hacker News: mattdeboard

New comment by mattdeboard in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

mattdeboard — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:12:24 +0000

I wrote out a variety of replies but I just emphatically agree with your "lack of imagination" statement. I have been constantly surprised over the last 15 years at the general inability to correctly foresee how things can do wrong across a whole host of domains.

The replies here just adds AI to the list of domains.

New comment by mattdeboard in "De-Brainrot Vacations"

mattdeboard — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 13:20:29 +0000

The intro paragraphs talking about the mental disengagement or decline or whatever we want to call it really resonated with me. It's something I've also taken measures to counter. In fact I'm on vacation right now to Basque Country. I read "A Basque History of the World" to prepare for the trip and that act reassured me I'm not getting less capable of engaging intellectually, I just have different intellectual interests now than the most intimate details of making websites for and serving them to customers at varying scales.

New comment by mattdeboard in "Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board"

mattdeboard — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 23:42:46 +0000

That is a distinction without a practical difference.

New comment by mattdeboard in "Show HN: How to mentally calculate the day of the week for any date"

mattdeboard — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 01:21:31 +0000

This is amazing! What a cool website.

New comment by mattdeboard in "Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI"

mattdeboard — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:18:30 +0000

Very insightful. The idea of using pseudocode is clever, and the persistence+correlation layer idea is great.

New comment by mattdeboard in "Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk"

mattdeboard — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:10:11 +0000

You seem to be arguing that people shouldn't be skeptical, by default, of studies of products that are funded by the companies that make the products.

They funded this study as a prospective way of increasing the adoption and market share of their trademarked medication. It deserves skepticism.

New comment by mattdeboard in "I've yet to see any"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union"

mattdeboard — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:55:21 +0000

I reckon they used "pathologically" as a synonym for "compulsively" and/or "extreme"

New comment by mattdeboard in "I've yet to see any"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union"

mattdeboard — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:52:51 +0000

I get where you're coming from (having also watched that video), but I'm skeptical mainstream commercial chatbots would be built without constraints in regard to sandbox-jumping measures to help a customer. All the economic incentives go the other way.

But, maybe that's just a failure of imagination on my part!

New comment by mattdeboard in "Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling"

mattdeboard — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:32:37 +0000

Your last two sentences remind me of the olden days of people building applications on top of FB and Twitter APIs (and later, Reddit), only to to have the rug pulled out from under them in one way or another

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

mattdeboard — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:22:19 +0000

I'm working on https://xingolak.pages.dev/

I've been learning Basque and wanted to see a visualization of how the semantics move into different grammatical structures when translating between Basque and English/Spanish.

Under the hood it's using Stanford NLP to analyze the input then that analysis is given to Claude to generate the data structure needed to visualize the translation. It's really cool and maybe my favorite of the itch-scratchers I've built for myself over the years.

(Xingolak is Basque for "ribbons," a nod to the visualizing metaphor used in the UI.)

New comment by mattdeboard in "Emacs appearances in pop culture"

mattdeboard — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:45:44 +0000

I traded emacs for vscode several years ago now but this post made me wonder if I'd be insane for dusting off my herd of finely shorn yaks to try typescript dev again with it.

At the time I left for vscode, emacs had a REALLY bad Typescript story and it felt like a revelation doing TS in vscode.

Surely emacs has gotten a definitive TS solution since, idk, 2018? 2019? Right?

New comment by mattdeboard in "pg_durable: Microsoft open sources in-database durable execution"

mattdeboard — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:28:19 +0000

The road to eternal burning hell is paved with stored procedures. My experiences (!!) make it so i will never be convinced on the risk:reward being worth it.

New comment by mattdeboard in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

mattdeboard — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:16:31 +0000

The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag.

It simultaneously and conveniently: 1. takes the heat off AI blowback 2. synergizes perfectly with "RTO" mandates (to the extent this needed synergy to become A Widespread Thing)

On that basis alone, I'll wait for further analysis.

Edit: to be clear I'm no anti-AI holdout, and I actually don't mind working from the office (which i do 4x a week). Just observing.

New comment by mattdeboard in "I have officially retired from Emacs"

mattdeboard — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 22:58:13 +0000

It's not that i don't like it. It's that I've got 10-15 years (i think) of muscle memory with magit

New comment by mattdeboard in "I have officially retired from Emacs"

mattdeboard — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:16:56 +0000

I've been retired from emacs for several years now but I'm still looking for a magit replacement that is independent of my editor. Vscode's magit extension is really good but i split my time between IntelliJ and vscode.

Anyone know of something like this?

New comment by mattdeboard in "Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI"

mattdeboard — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:10:22 +0000

"don't be evil"

New comment by mattdeboard in "I decompiled the White House's new app"

mattdeboard — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:45:23 +0000

You would be lying if you wrote that because you do not know if that is true.

New comment by mattdeboard in "I decompiled the White House's new app"

mattdeboard — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:43:59 +0000

Uh, yeah, dude, when Whitehouse.gov announces its new app, the app is a government program. Hope this helps but something tells me it won't.

New comment by mattdeboard in "I decompiled the White House's new app"

mattdeboard — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:32:03 +0000

Are you upset people are being critical of a shabbily run government program?

New comment by mattdeboard in "I decompiled the White House's new app"

mattdeboard — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:27:22 +0000

He explicitly says he can't determine it, but that the location tracking as configured will turn on once the user grants consent. All true statements.

How would you have written it differently