Hacker News: michaelbarton

New comment by michaelbarton in "Claude Opus 4.8"

michaelbarton — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:04:50 +0000

Very good point. There’s clearly two different boxes in the public discourse when it comes to AI versus how we discuss animals. Willing to bet that 90% of the people who loudly make the argument about we should start considering if AI is sentient couldn’t care less about how other sentient animals are treated when they can provably shown to suffer pain and long lasting trauma.

Also I would say that we go much further than just enslavement - specifically looking at how male chickens and pigs are treated.

New comment by michaelbarton in "Who will buy your services if you fire us all?"

michaelbarton — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:24:50 +0000

There’s an alternative not mentioned: company scrips. Historically Such as in coal mines, workers were “paid” in tokens they could only use at the company store.

New comment by michaelbarton in "PM Carney declares U.S. ties now a 'weakness' in address to Canadians"

michaelbarton — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:47:21 +0000

I agree. I think it’s fair to say that while many people might agree Bush II is someone you could have a beer with compared to the current prest his foreign policy decisions lead to excess mortality in the range of half a million.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article%3Fid%3D10.137...

New comment by michaelbarton in "Ask HN: How did you land your first projects as a solo engineer/consultant?"

michaelbarton — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 17:40:19 +0000

This is great, and importantly actionable advice. Thank you for sharing specific ideas.

New comment by michaelbarton in "Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0"

michaelbarton — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:14:35 +0000

I think there’s other HN threads reporting multiple issues with it. Can’t remember which thread I read it but someone said it’s very hard to uninstall because agents will keep reinstalling it once it’s part of a project.

YMMV but this seems like a simpler port: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_rust

New comment by michaelbarton in "'Seeking connection': video game where players stopped shooting, started talking"

michaelbarton — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:01:09 +0000

There’s also the recent release of Marathon where I think some ARC players might be attracted if they want more of the sweaty gameplay. Definitely a different vibe with appealing aspects to both

New comment by michaelbarton in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

michaelbarton — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:25:43 +0000

This looks fun!

You mention at the top analysis shouldn’t be linear - I assume this a comparison to Jupyter notebooks?

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!