<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: mattmanser</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattmanser</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 18 Sep 2026 11:54:16 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=mattmanser" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Tao's point is that we have a method already.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 09:36:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738372</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738372</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49738372</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have no idea what they use, but Stockholm is already using the waste heat from data centres:<p><a href="https://eu-mayors.ec.europa.eu/en/news/stockholm-sweden-heat-recovery-data-centres" rel="nofollow">https://eu-mayors.ec.europa.eu/en/news/stockholm-sweden-heat...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:28:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728543</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728543</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728543</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "ChatGPT outage – Resolved"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a joke, Steve Yegge was also the creator of GasTown.<p>He's now (famously) said that the only thing he ever actually used GasTown for was to code on GasTown.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:13:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552430</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552430</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552430</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Is AI slowing you down?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I hit a problem like that, I do most myself and just get the AI to do the bits where I'd normally get stuck because of boredom. Bits that I can't be bothered to write as they're easy but laborious.<p>And then get it to review the code, where it'll pickup a few edge cases.<p>But I don't really get the attitude that we shouldn't write code anymore, for me it's often quicker to write the code than to explain to the AI how to write it.<p>Sometimes when I'm.sitting there watching it chug away for 5 minutes over what should be a three line change, I'll just stop it and do it myself, and then at that point I'll often take over completely for a while.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 19:45:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49439579</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49439579</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49439579</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Fable and the end of the free lunch"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Are you genuinely asking?<p>As 80% of enterprise software is CRUD with a bit of sprinkling of user authorization and tenant customisation. But subtly different for every business domain. It's mainly what properties the models and validations have that are different.<p>When you add a new module or whatever most of the code you have to write is rote code.<p>And sonnet can handle that crap just fine, you just point it at a similar example in the code, it picks up your userContext convention, how you're doing i18n, etc. and you're done.<p>I like saying that enterprise code is often shallow but wide. I must have written at least 4 purchase order systems in my career that are all completely different but almost exactly the same.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 23 Aug 2026 21:13:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49412715</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49412715</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49412715</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "The Lost Treasure of Sid Meier's Pirates"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I played the remake, which was pretty good, though now 20 years old itself.<p>tbh if you want to scratch the pirate-y itch, Assassin's Creed Black Flag is excellent, if just for the sea shanties.<p>Which has itself just had a remake released for it I see! I don't keep up with games these days.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 10:56:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386309</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386309</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386309</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Software Engineering fundamentals matter more"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This seems delusional to me, being older and more experienced with how long IKEA stuff actually lasts.<p>8 years is long for IKEA furniture, usually something has irreplaceablely broken by then.<p>IKEA also refuse to sell you spare parts.<p>Give me real furniture anyday.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 11:22:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49318981</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49318981</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49318981</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's a post training.step where they get humans to interact with it.<p>As I understand it, there is (or was) a step where they ask people what's the 'better' response.<p>These linguistic forms sound good the first time you hear themz even if they are rare in real speech, so rapidly got trained in.<p>Now they distill off previous models, I imagine these weird linguistic forms are quite hard to get rid of.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:38:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232999</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232999</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232999</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But we caused that.<p>If you look at the 90s + 00s, everything was moving towards unified systems, things like small talk, winforms, spring, asp.net, etc. were moving everything into the IDE, you used one language, one framework, one build system. Then people started adding javascript, but even that was getting semi-unified as people coalesced on jQuery, jQueryUI, etc.<p>Then something happened in the late 00s/10s, and suddenly we had SPAs and noSQL, then microservices, then k8s and now we're here, in what is a mish-mash of 10/20 different systems with 10/20 different attack surfaces.<p>As my own off-the-cuff guess of what happened, I think perhaps people tried to apply the Unix philosophy, but without a central committee keeping everything aligned it's really not worked.<p>Serving an interactive page that stores data over sessions should be a trivial solved problem at this point, and instead we've somehow made it where often the scaffold is vastly more complicated than the actual business logic.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:38:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49221281</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49221281</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49221281</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in ""Clean" Code, Horrible Performance (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>50-60 lines? You must have tiny text size, on mine, with VS Code, I can see 40 lines. As you get past 30 and your eyesight starts changing, you need to up it. By 45 you need it quite a bit bigger than you used to have it. In the mid-2000s there used to be a lot of articles reminding the mainly young developers that 11-12px font size was unreadable to anyone past 40.<p>On top of that, the default place for a console in VS Code is at the bottom, now I'm down to 25-30 lines if I have that open.<p>And then there's heavier IDEs like IntelliJ, Visual studio, etc.<p>They might have two or three tab lines at the top, a row used for class navigation (that I've just realized I've never, ever used), an extra row or two of quick action bars, a row of extra tabs at the bottom for navigating between consoles/call stacks/locals/error lists, 2 info bar rows at the bottom, and sometimes two or even three scroll bars stacked on top of each other.<p>All of a sudden you're down from 30 lines visible to 17, which is my actual visible lines of code when I have debugging running.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:55:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180272</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180272</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49180272</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Web Security is Too Hard"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Things like this change fast, it has a skill it can use now to find out. I'm not sure when they added it, I only noticed it last week.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:03:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175853</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175853</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175853</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Karpathy’s Pelican"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Humans are drawing pelicans riding bicycles now. Just google it and you will find 5 or 10 of them in the first few results. Including a t-shirt design.<p>So it's a pretty much pointless test now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:36:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148597</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148597</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148597</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "The Economic Benefit of Refactoring"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have often done huge refactors over the last 20 years on systems where there are none. It's very satisfying turning a 1,000 line class file into 100 lines.<p>But all my refactors have been in statically typed languages.<p>To speculate on the reason why, which the GP asked, I think perhaps it is two things. It's the same satisfaction from tidying a room or your workbench. But it's also slightly narcissistic unfortunately. I think you've shown you're better than the other programmers. Much, much, better when you end up with massive reductions in TLOC.<p>And with tests, the irony is that the resulting code is often so much easier to reason about, you start spotting really obvious bad assumptions in the original implementation.<p>It's one of the reasons I've always been fairly skeptical about the true value of unit tests (integration, I get). That and the fact that projects I've worked on that did have unit tests catch like 1 bug a year. Maybe it's just the size of systems I traditionally work on (smaller teams, or even 1 person teams, so man-years worth of effort rather than decades or centuries).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:55:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49120271</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49120271</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49120271</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Ask HN: How to rewrite `Claude.md` and install the skill for Opus5 and Fable5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You might be looking for this article:<p><a href="https://claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-context-engineering-for-claude-5-generation-models" rel="nofollow">https://claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-context-engineering...</a><p>Discussion:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49051361">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49051361</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:29:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49087982</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49087982</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49087982</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Or shared across colleagues.<p>It's an insane way of managing what is essentially configuration in this day and age, literally throwing away all our hard-earned lessons of the last 3 decades.<p>Worse still, it'll just use it randomly, and you have to notice it's done it.<p>"The user never wants to use ORDER BY Timestamp, I'll add this as a memory"<p>"For this object, JUST FOR THIS OBJECT! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Jul 2026 10:29:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056600</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056600</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056600</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Claude Opus 5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's a ton more you missed.<p>Like "It's not x, it's y". It actually has 4 or 5 of those counter-factual, linguistic pause, factual patterns it uses.<p>"The [goal/ambition/etc.] is larger: statement", is another oft repeated phrase.<p>And then generally, it loves dramatic pauses in statements like "x exists in y; in practice z". It's the weird punctuation it uses. A massive overuse of colons and semi-colons instead of words like and, but, because, althoughy etc. that humans normally use.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:06:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045206</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045206</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045206</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Flux 3"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Open-weight plans are near the bottom (Launch section):<p><pre><code>    - Video and audio generation and editing through APIs and private weight access. (“FLUX 3 Video”)
    - Action prediction through selected research and commercial partners, beginning with mimic robotics (“FLUX-mimic and FLUX 3 Action”)
    - Image synthesis and editing through APIs and private weight access. (“FLUX 3 Image”)
    - Open-weight access to a multimodal backbone, for content creation (video, audio and image) and action prediction. (“FLUX 3 Dev”)</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 07:05:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49032119</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49032119</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49032119</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not my thoughts, it's simple facts.<p>All the studies show it's not an over-reaction, you're 400% more likely to have an accident. It is extremely dangerous and it's not an over-reaction, the more people do this, the more people die. It's simple maths. If you're doing extended programming sessions, you're not paying attention to the road like you should be.<p>And no, talking to a passenger is not as dangerous as it's a different cognitive load.<p>It'll take you 20 seconds to google this, please do and stop putting everyone else in jeopardy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:47:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969661</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969661</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969661</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Qwen 3.8"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Comments like this boggle my mind.<p>The model which everyone else raves about and is wildly successful with legions of programmers virtually demanding access while abandoning ChatGPT and Copilot in droves, is rather dumb?<p>Have you considered that it's more likely that you're doing something wrong?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:01:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48967351</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48967351</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48967351</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mattmanser in "Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is extremely dangerous and you should stop doing it.<p><a href="https://etsc.eu/tiny-proportion-of-drivers-understand-dangers-of-talking-on-the-phone-handsfree-while-driving/" rel="nofollow">https://etsc.eu/tiny-proportion-of-drivers-understand-danger...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:23:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965998</link><dc:creator>mattmanser</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965998</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965998</guid></item></channel></rss>