Hacker News: michaelbarton

New comment by michaelbarton in "Claude Code is locking people out for hours"

michaelbarton — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:00:09 +0000

Sounds like the most blatant case of false advertising since the movie The Neverending Story

New comment by michaelbarton in "What category theory teaches us about dataframes"

michaelbarton — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:21:47 +0000

Exactly. It’s not that getting rid of duplicates is bad, is that they may be a symptom of something worse. E.g. incorrect aggregation logic

New comment by michaelbarton in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

michaelbarton — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:53:19 +0000

Malware might be a bit of stretch but could refer to this issue?

https://github.com/steveyegge/beads/issues/1857

New comment by michaelbarton in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

michaelbarton — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:51:53 +0000

I’m worried we end up with an AIG moment, and we all end up on the hook.

New comment by michaelbarton in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

michaelbarton — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:48:15 +0000

There used to be a saying along the lines of “while you’re designing your application to scale to 1m requests/min, someone out there is making $1m ARR with php and duct tape”

It feels like this takes on a whole new meaning now we have agents - which I think is the same point you were making

New comment by michaelbarton in "Bayesian statistics for confused data scientists"

michaelbarton — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:51:42 +0000

Curious what you might consider “adequate shrinking”?

Horshoe priors, partial pooling, something more?

I realize that might be highly subject

New comment by michaelbarton in "Day in the Life of Enshitificator [video]"

michaelbarton — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:46:09 +0000

What’s interesting to me is that is funded by the Norwegian government

Day in the Life of Enshitificator [video]

michaelbarton — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:46:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47400551

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by michaelbarton in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

michaelbarton — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:07:02 +0000

I wonder if anyone can say if there’s much risk of sub prime private credit? Not sure if that’s the right term. My understanding is that synthetic CDOs are the rise again, this backed by private credit - which the article is discussing

New comment by michaelbarton in "Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude"

michaelbarton — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:22:52 +0000

Ah good to know. It’s interesting (to me) how similar they look to each other but you and other commentators below mention how they’re more like distant cousins

I suppose the proof is in the parsing

New comment by michaelbarton in "A case for Go as the best language for AI agents"

michaelbarton — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:19:59 +0000

I wonder if then Idris would be even better than that since it has even more typing

New comment by michaelbarton in "Why XML tags are so fundamental to Claude"

michaelbarton — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:42:04 +0000

Without being facetious, isn’t HTML a dialect of XML and very widely used?

New comment by michaelbarton in "Yes, It's Fascism"

michaelbarton — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:59:36 +0000

Sounds doubleplus good! Will try to find it streaming somewhere!

New comment by michaelbarton in "I set all 376 Vim options and I'm still a fool"

michaelbarton — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:56:04 +0000

Nice! Thats what I was thinking of. Thanks!

New comment by michaelbarton in "Yes, It's Fascism"

michaelbarton — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 21:34:11 +0000

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

I remember reading 1984 when I was a kid and enjoying it, at no point did I think it was more than sci-fi though. I suppose it goes to show how much we took for granted the last 80+ years.

It also makes me respect Orwell so much more. Which was already very high based on how he makes tea. How was he able to see you presciently?

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

New comment by michaelbarton in "I set all 376 Vim options and I'm still a fool"

michaelbarton — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 20:06:29 +0000

Does anyone have a motion jump plugin they use with neovim they can recommend? I used to use a plugin where you could just to a given character in a given buffer, but I can’t remember the name or if it even works with neovim.

New comment by michaelbarton in "Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons"

michaelbarton — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 14:05:04 +0000

I really enjoyed your article. In regard to the parent comment: it’s also enough to say “I enjoy this and this is how I want to spend my time”. So what if it’s reinventing the wheel - the act of learning and crafting itself can be immensely satisfying regardless of the end result.

I came at your article from a slightly different perspective. Rubio monocoat is quite expensive, especially if you’re trying to run a business selling products coated in it. You’re probably already aware, but I think base Rubio is essentially oil + carnauba + a small amount of paraffin. I make large pieces of furniture, and finishing with Rubio can go through multiple cans! So making my own finish has become a priority. That’s not even accounting for Blacktail Studio coating too.

New comment by michaelbarton in "Doge 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter"

michaelbarton — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:55:56 +0000

I think this article is correct in spirit but a little disingenuous in parts. Would it not be more fair to blame Russia as the primary cause for the deaths in Ukraine due to the collapsing health care system rather than USAID subsequently intervening to stop easily preventable deaths.

I say this not to defend DOGE but rather to emphasize that we should always make abundantly clear the humanitarian disaster in Ukraine lies solely with Putin

New comment by michaelbarton in "Why Sam Altman Won't Be on the Hook for OpenAI's Spending Spree"

michaelbarton — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 20:23:50 +0000

Speaking from experience I was recently in a tiny fountain pen shop in Sendai[0] where the owner doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Japanese but we were able to talk for an hour or more about fountain pens and tomoe river paper alternatives using Google translate’s dialogue feature.

Maybe not massive commercial potential but it was pretty amazing and reminded me a bit of the Babel fish which use to seem like impossible sci-fi

[0]: https://share.google/64xTBRThXcFR72r3G

New comment by michaelbarton in "Why Sam Altman Won't Be on the Hook for OpenAI's Spending Spree"

michaelbarton — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 19:20:46 +0000

Aren’t LLMs being used by business successfully in many “unsexy” domains like translation, sentiment analysis, and image recognition?

Though I do agree that many of the breathless claims that you can stop hiring or even layoff developers because of LLMs seem unsubstantiated