Hacker News: mattgreenrocks

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

mattgreenrocks — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:43:23 +0000

I am super curious how you went about the port using LLMs. At $WORK we are looking to port code, preferably with LLMs, and it seems daunting, even with a test suite. Do you have an approach that works well for you?

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

mattgreenrocks — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:49:28 +0000

The question I'm left with: in the past, the uproar over these types of changes seemed to make companies change their mind when considering very anti-consumer decisions. Now, they just go ahead anyway.

What's different? How do we get back to how it was before? I know the current political climate is one that enables this sort of thing. There are parallels with the current movement also WRT to the employer/employee relationship.

Beyond that, there's still more at play. In tech, and specifically on this site, I see a lot more complicity and fatigue when discussing these issues. I can't help but think that also contributes. I'm not saying everyone should always be mad at everything. But it does seem like there's a generational component to this where we haven't passed down an essential feature of a hacker, namely the anti-establishment bent.

I suppose that's collateral damage of a culture tolerating lots of people rushing in to grab their bag of cash and then get out.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Maybe you should learn something"

mattgreenrocks — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:44:26 +0000

I'd argue all of those are often issues of how we perceive circumstances vs what actually is going on. There are real situations that crowd out this sort of thing, but they don't apply to everyone (having people that need care comes to mind or crunches at work).

Jung has a great quote to the effect of, "we don't solve our problems, but rather outgrow them." Life is going to feel like mostly-imperfect circumstances for any venture, and your brain can be too good at rationalizing any [lack of] behavior.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "David Beazley – Programming Courses"

mattgreenrocks — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:09:30 +0000

Took the compilers class in 2012 and it was amazing. Loved the immersive format and the fact all the students wanted to be there.

Hope he finds something fulfilling in the days ahead.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI"

mattgreenrocks — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 18:44:05 +0000

You're not. This site was also bullish on using LLMs as therapists, which defeats the very point of them, and reflects a lack of knowledge on what exactly therapists do for people.

More on topic: if the article's author arrived at a definitively negative result would this have shown up on HN?

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test"

mattgreenrocks — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 16:03:41 +0000

Thanks for writing this up. How did you figure out it was toxic white mold, or rather, what tests helped you get there?

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "I found 10k GitHub repositories distributing Trojan malware"

mattgreenrocks — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 02:12:50 +0000

They're also gaming the heuristic that if an OSS repo hasn't had any pushes in ~6mos many users consider it defunct.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't"

mattgreenrocks — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:33:25 +0000

Yep. There's also been a relentless push for the past two decades or so to standardize many aspects of software development:

* programming languages (JS)

* frameworks (React)

* open source libraries

* platforms (Web, mostly)

* design systems (shadcn for newer apps)

Guess what makes it easier for automation to come in?

Our need for it to be easy and standard contributed to the success of LLM use in software engineering. I suspect it would have done well without some of those factors, but it may have taken longer.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II"

mattgreenrocks — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:46:09 +0000

I read this paper as trying to be as serious as l the folk wisdom around the anthropomorphization of LLMs. Which is to say: not at all. :)

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

mattgreenrocks — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:53:54 +0000

Just a small reminder that we aren't wanted ;)

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

mattgreenrocks — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:52:17 +0000

Makes it much easier to use the Internet less. They're poisoning the ground water of the well, effectively.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

mattgreenrocks — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:47:07 +0000

I love how passive aggressive the page becomes: "You turned off recommendations...we won't show you anything else on here either!"

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?"

mattgreenrocks — Sat, 16 May 2026 23:38:41 +0000

How I feel about programming is often a reflection of how I feel about my own internal world because it continues to be a part of my identity. Once I found a job that valued my desire to actually build things, things started to sort themselves out rather quickly.

Not saying that's what is going on here, but maybe it is helpful.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

mattgreenrocks — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:25:02 +0000

The only way many people learn that the stove is hot is by burning their hands on it.

Let them.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Just Use Go"

mattgreenrocks — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:44:36 +0000

I am so over the presumptive blog post tone personally.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "AI didn't delete your database, you did"

mattgreenrocks — Tue, 05 May 2026 22:44:43 +0000

That clarifies it...thanks!

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "AI didn't delete your database, you did"

mattgreenrocks — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:20:17 +0000

Maybe we can just not give it access to production databases ever?

Not picking on you, but AI maximalism has infected tech to the point where we talk about how to stop AI from deleting prod instead of seeing that giving AI access to prod is a foolish idea to begin with.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "AI didn't delete your database, you did"

mattgreenrocks — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:00:26 +0000

The most exasperating thing about the incident is how much of the media either tried to pin it on AI and/or Railway. The whole thing only took place because the guy FAFO’d by having AI work with prod directly.

Yet the narrative was mostly not about accountability for him. If I was a dumbass and deleted prod and wrote a post about it, nobody would care. Put an AI in there and all of the sudden it’s newsworthy. Ridiculous.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

mattgreenrocks — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 23:04:37 +0000

The takeaway here is to make this sort of scenario impossible in the future. It’s not hard to make that happen, but it might mean you need to manually interact with prod.

Anything else is just gambling.

New comment by mattgreenrocks in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

mattgreenrocks — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:56:32 +0000

Funny thing about internal work is that it cannot happen via changing one’s external circumstances. And it’s super tempting to numb it out with status symbols.

The evidence for this is rather plain to see at this point in history. ;)