Hacker News: mpalmer

New comment by mpalmer in "Hex Raises $100M"

mpalmer — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 22:24:39 +0000

Downvote me if you want, I'm flaunting the guidelines in service of the discourse.

If I may posthumously discipline the horse - when did the suffixes "-native" and "-first" merge in unholy matrimony?

Was it when B2B marketing realized that engineers equated "native" with "best/fastest/simplest solution available"? Or is it even more stupid than that?

New comment by mpalmer in "US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans"

mpalmer — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 21:10:37 +0000

    You can't say this. We have no idea. There is nothing about (s/the law of physics/US history) that pushes (s/cancer cure/the right to privacy) a long time away.

Don't mind me, just repurposing one of your old comments to save time.

New comment by mpalmer in "Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale"

mpalmer — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 13:23:20 +0000

Me personally? I'd feel shame for not spending the half hour it would have taken to put even the flimsiest human stamp on the thing I asked an LLM to make for me.

New comment by mpalmer in "JetBrains Thinkrail"

mpalmer — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 19:43:30 +0000

The latest version of jj supports colocated git worktrees as part of its workspaces feature.

New comment by mpalmer in "We should be more ambitious with the software we build"

mpalmer — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 15:41:33 +0000

I don't think you can say that making wildly successful games one after the other is "feasible" for anyone who's interested in making games.

New comment by mpalmer in "Challenge Is Gone"

mpalmer — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 13:59:18 +0000

Challenge is never gone.

Here's a challenge: see yourself from the outside.

Realize that however effective you are as a programmer now, you were once a hopeless beginner.

Then you must acknowledge that you are still a hopeless beginner, relative to the you that doesn't exist yet.

In the spirit of fellowship, I tell you:

    git gud

---

And as you continue to learn, you'll see this for yourself, but I guarantee to you now that AI opened paths to writing novel software which no one has noticed yet. Software that was possible before but perhaps annoying to build, etc. Software which perhaps will only ever be imagined by someone who learned exactly the things you have, in exactly the order you did.

Never make the mistake that AI knows how to do everything just because it knows how to do everything we've done so far.

And don't think of your work as "mining" engineering problems! Forget engineering problems. Find a human problem and think about it for an entire month.

New comment by mpalmer in "We should be more ambitious with the software we build"

mpalmer — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 13:11:41 +0000

He had previously built and sold two games, each of which made him millions, funding the next effort. Not infeasible, but building on repeat success.

New comment by mpalmer in "The Decoherence Trap"

mpalmer — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 18:05:33 +0000

    My observation is that right now AI coding agents lean towards re-implementing everything from the ground up. This of course will not scale. It will scale beyond what humans writing code would scale to, but we will ask the AI for more, so it will even things out.

Those who cannot do, preach.

There's a funny trick where if you are an experienced software developer, and take time to think about your design and describe what you want in clear terms, it will actually do things your way. Weirdly, this still saves massive amounts of time.

People who don't understand how to build good software LOVE to expound on the things we'll have to design in order to make AI tools "lean toward" building better software.

It seems that these folks are not willing or able to conceive of, you know, actually getting good at this stuff.

For this reason, it never occurs to them that human beings are STILL the source of the best ideas and designs.

New comment by mpalmer in "LayerFS: A filesystem for AI coding agents"

mpalmer — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:33:44 +0000

The evergreen observation; The most self-promote-y among us are mostly using AI to reinvent solutions and disguise them as new designs. These address solved problems, which are themselves disguised as new agentic problems.

Celebrating and promoting this stuff does not help us get better at discovering and building actually new things; change my mind.

New comment by mpalmer in "A team of Gemini 4 Argon agents beats Minecraft"

mpalmer — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 12:32:21 +0000

I'm confused. Is this a paper or a blog post? It's basically a play by play of "something we asked an LLM to do". Is this what constitutes research at DeepMind these days?

New comment by mpalmer in "Show HN: Qwen3-4B with the AI writing tics trained out"

mpalmer — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 01:50:52 +0000

You should play around more, it's flawed but more than any other tech it rewards exploration.

    But asking for something more nuanced, in the range of regular speech, requires the correct lingo

I like asking models to write things using only the N most common words in a language. It's probably never perfect, but it understands the assignment well enough. from there I notice things I prefer about that constraint, and things I don't.

New comment by mpalmer in "NY announces game ownership bill requiring ownership rather than licensing"

mpalmer — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 01:33:15 +0000

Note the meaning of the original headline is distorted. this is not an NY state law, but an NY member of Congress putting forward federal legislation.

New comment by mpalmer in "Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke"

mpalmer — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:24:30 +0000

Sure. But neither should we be impressed with Anthropic for making a big deal out of (let's be perfectly honest) generating an SCM architecture on the backs of other people's ideas.

New comment by mpalmer in "Neural networks are clean"

mpalmer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:35:46 +0000

> My point is simply that if I don't understand these things, many other people also wouldn't.

The implication made explicit! Not to mention you yourself say that only above average people come here.

New comment by mpalmer in "Jev meets the Trolley Problem"

mpalmer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:45:33 +0000

After the neat animations I was disappointed not to see that leftmost person die because the server fell on them in the last example.

New comment by mpalmer in "Neural networks are clean"

mpalmer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:29:35 +0000

Your subtle implication that you are among the smartest of laypeople somewhats hurts your claim of fellowship with them.

New comment by mpalmer in "Neural networks are clean"

mpalmer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:46:37 +0000

For the layperson who doesn't want to read 20,000 words, many of which are quite redundant due to the way the article was built, this is a version which adds a glossary, preserves the original language (except the added intro and conclusion which I felt was lacking) but removes all repeated material and claims, of which there was a massive amount.

https://pastebin.com/raw/p11vzFnB

New comment by mpalmer in "ICE Planning $100M 'Nightmare' Domestic Spy Program"

mpalmer — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 23:21:46 +0000

Play your scenario out further, not just to the extent it serves your point. What do you think 200 million furious Americans looks like? Even assuming a willing military (besides ICE), how does the US occupy itself? It's a massive territory.

New comment by mpalmer in "ICE Planning $100M 'Nightmare' Domestic Spy Program"

mpalmer — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 19:01:04 +0000

18 U.S.C. § 242: Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law

A DOJ with its ducks in a row would be charging this left and right.

New comment by mpalmer in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

mpalmer — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 02:53:06 +0000

    And it's not just me; that is most people's experience with LLMs

Got a source better than vibes on that one?