Hacker News: mpalmer

New comment by mpalmer in "Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop"

mpalmer — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:43:44 +0000

I've not really enjoyed finding out lately just how few people seem to notice what ought to be unmissable.

New comment by mpalmer in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"

mpalmer — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:53:02 +0000

    it's one password to everything

You are entirely mistaken. Passkeys involve a third party storing a public key on their infrastructure, while you hold the private half of the key, somewhere.

Passkeys are never reused. Even for the same person, they are always unique across websites, and across devices.

New comment by mpalmer in "The Agentic Loop: Three loops in a trench coat"

mpalmer — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:45:16 +0000

You should just read more about this stuff and try using it.

The high-level questions you are asking suggest you don't yet have a great base-level understanding of the concepts.

New comment by mpalmer in "The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]"

mpalmer — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:45:09 +0000

Just like fully extending a ladder brings the moon closer.

New comment by mpalmer in "You're Not a Better Engineer Because You Type Git Commands by Hand"

mpalmer — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:33:23 +0000

I don't disagree with any of the points in the post. They're even framed better than the average "I love using AI because X" post.

Unfortunately, you won't become a better writer letting AI do it for you.

New comment by mpalmer in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

mpalmer — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:10:31 +0000

The second thing is not an ad hominem, it's talking about what he did or how he did it, not who he is.

New comment by mpalmer in "Apple to increase spend with Broadcom to produce billions more U.S. chips"

mpalmer — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:20:57 +0000

Marketing departments everywhere have been letting internal corpspeak just leak out lately. OAI's announcement shutting down Sora was similar:

> To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you

"built community"?

New comment by mpalmer in "PostgreSQL Benchmark: AWS RDS vs. Self-Hosted on Hetzner (2026)"

mpalmer — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:17:52 +0000

Low-effort, low-quality self-promoting slop, of the sort where you assume that significant errors are present, so obviously generated (and unedited!) is the text, but it's hardly worth your time to actually chase them down.

New comment by mpalmer in "60% Fable cost cut by converting code to images and having the model OCR it"

mpalmer — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 17:31:35 +0000

What, you don't like your caveats to be honest?

New comment by mpalmer in "Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech"

mpalmer — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:50:33 +0000

Freedom of expression is inseparable from the right to privacy.

Should journalists be forced to reveal their sources if the subject of a claim sues for defamation?

New comment by mpalmer in "Tell HN: OpenAI has started putting ads on paid programs"

mpalmer — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:10:20 +0000

How exactly do you suggest blocking ads that appear inline in your LLM chats

New comment by mpalmer in "Stealing Is a Skill"

mpalmer — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 22:41:28 +0000

These are solid conclusions/lessons to take away for people working in creative disciplines. Enforcing constraints on yourself can be rewarding and productive (the 3% rule), and forcing yourself to pay attention to other people's work is challenging but invaluable. Even less than stellar work has things to teach.

And can I just say, thank you for writing something you can read in five minutes. Incredibly grateful for someone who respects the reader by not dropping 3,000 words on them - easy though it may be.

New comment by mpalmer in "Show HN: Oak – Git alternative designed for agents"

mpalmer — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:32:47 +0000

    With AI, I can finally build what I've been dreaming about.

What was your dream before AI, exactly? Not to build a VCS for agents, presumably. But the entire value prop here is centered around agents.

This is not the first "agentic VCS" project which claims both N% VCS token savings, and "faster VCS operations". But how are either of these two things a bottleneck? No case is made for this.

    It dramatically improves the speed and context your agents need when working on serious projects: 50% fewer VCS-related tokens and 90% faster per operation.

So less context is an improvement? How much is 50% in practice? And how do my agents "need" a 90% speed increase (source, btw?) in VCS operations? What % of wall-clock time is spent in VCS commands vs actual inference?

"Agents locally and in the cloud no longer need a full copy of a repo to get working" - but was that ever a problem? And git supports shallow clones anyway.

    work on many tasks in parallel without needing to download everything or fight worktrees

Who is "fighting worktrees"? If you're concerned about all these downloads, why not use worktrees over a network share, as mentioned in the git manual?

New comment by mpalmer in "Companies rein in AI usage as costs strain budgets"

mpalmer — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:53:47 +0000

It's a useful term but humorously risks becoming auto-exemplary.

New comment by mpalmer in "Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good"

mpalmer — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:09:34 +0000

All the benefits you're describing apply to the present moment; people with knowledge, self-discipline and expertise can leverage LLMs to great effect.

How many people like this will exist in a decade? Two?

New comment by mpalmer in "Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good"

mpalmer — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:07:57 +0000

How do you measure the bundle of "skills" that comprises critical thinking? And if that's your analogy's distance running, what's the "riding a bike" analogue?

New comment by mpalmer in "The Competitive Moat That AI Can't Replicate"

mpalmer — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:06:36 +0000

I'm genuinely trying to cut down on complaining about slop writing, but how are you going to say:

    Ask yourself where you’re using technology to replace human moments rather than amplify them

...right after you've subjected me to four thousand(!) words of preachy BS about connecting with humans instead of taking shortcuts?

Let me say it again because I'm really getting sick of recent blog word count inflation: if you publish four thousand words on some topic, you better be an expert, a strong writer, whatever. Find a better reason than SEO to go over 1500 words.

New comment by mpalmer in "The Competitive Moat That AI Can't Replicate"

mpalmer — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:59:52 +0000

Well, sometimes there's flat-out nonsense that seems to have been written purely to back into the author's thesis:

    You cannot design an algorithm that eavesdrops on dinner conversation and dispatches someone to buy a street hot dog, because the person on the receiving end would immediately sense the machinery of it.

But usually there's also:

- Word count hovering between four and five thousand words - Dramatic/narrative section titles - "No X, no Y. Just Z"

Last but certainly not least, there's the Lists of Exactly Three Things. I counted literally thirty in this piece. Examples:

    - "...the ritual of a human voice, the small exchange about an anniversary or a first date, the warmth of being recognised."
    - "Who was celebrating a birthday? Who was on a first date? What had a regular not finished on their plate six months ago?"
    - "You can’t purchase it, automate it, or accelerate it with a clever marketing campaign."
    - "...forgive outages, laugh off a late delivery, stay through a price increase."
    - "...the food arrives hot, the bill is accurate, the room is clean."
    - "You notice, you adjust, you respond."

New comment by mpalmer in "Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them"

mpalmer — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:29:54 +0000

Good luck with your trade secrets I guess

New comment by mpalmer in "Pentagon boasts of using AI to write reports mandated by Congress (1.5mil users)"

mpalmer — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:06:54 +0000

Unless we're doing away with human accountability, the responsibility to accuracy (and whatever other statutory requirements) will remain the same, it will just be concentrated among significantly fewer federal employees.