Hacker News: mstank

Ask HN: Where to learn software engineering fundamentals?

mstank — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:15:14 +0000

I have an open question for software engineers out there:

As someone that has never studied CS but has written basic code most of my life (accelerated now with AI), where is the best place to learn software engineering fundamentals?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49318324

Points: 13

# Comments: 6

New comment by mstank in "Software Engineering fundamentals matter more"

mstank — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:12:19 +0000

I have an open question for software engineers out there:

As someone that has never studied CS but has written basic code most of my life (accelerated now with AI), where is the best place to learn software engineering fundamentals?

New comment by mstank in "The Iran War Is a Whole New Level of Quagmire for the US"

mstank — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 06:47:58 +0000

If anything, Iran has proved that is what they should be doing right now.

New comment by mstank in "Astronauts describe persistent 'observer' sensation after 6 month missions"

mstank — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 01:06:19 +0000

Your comment lead me down a rabbit hole of space micromanagement. OSTPV (onboard short-term planner viewer) is the software they use to basically schedule every minute of your space flight. Basically every day someone from earth decides what you do, when you eat, when you exercise and will make changes in realtime.

Great read here with a video of someone using the actual software: https://blogs.esa.int/iriss/2015/09/09/playing-with-playbook...

New comment by mstank in "Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model"

mstank — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 02:25:09 +0000

Do you think American companies will secretly distill frontier models to build open weight ones?

New comment by mstank in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

mstank — Sat, 23 May 2026 06:04:07 +0000

They obviously know how unpopular this is, or else they wouldn't be releasing on a Friday night. This is so unimaginably disruptive, I wonder who inside the administration is suggesting this.

New comment by mstank in "GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories"

mstank — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:27:29 +0000

Is it just me or is this happening way more frequently in the last 4 or 5 months? Coincidently around the same time the models got a lot more capable?

New comment by mstank in "AI is too expensive"

mstank — Tue, 19 May 2026 17:06:21 +0000

I think the opposite is true. To dethrone the top tech company, you need to be able to spend much less than them, at higher efficiency and faster growth. Google didn’t catch up to Microsoft and Apple by spending more, they caught up by developing business lines and flywheels that were much more capital efficient.

If it’s a spending game, the incumbent has a huge advantage.

New comment by mstank in "Can you stop beans from making you gassy?"

mstank — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:39:09 +0000

I always found it I eat them consistently, they would make me less gassy. But only after a couple of weeks.

New comment by mstank in "The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness"

mstank — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:25:21 +0000

Glad to see Searle's Chinese Room mentioned early on in the paper. "Syntax is not sufficient for semantics," no matter how much compute we throw at the problem.

My very amateur view is that until the underlying compute architecture and substrate resembles artificial biology more than silicon, we wont get there.

The latest advances in AI have given me even more appreciation of biology and evolution. It's incredible what the human brain can do with about 20 watts of power, barely enough to power a lightbulb, in comparison to what it takes to run even our most basic LLM models.

New comment by mstank in "Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage"

mstank — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:20:00 +0000

That happens to me all the time. My current working theory is when their servers are hammered there is a queueing system that invisible to end-users.

New comment by mstank in "I am leaving the AI party after one drink"

mstank — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:01:54 +0000

While I applaud her and wish her well — writing like this reminds me of a couple of things.

First my aging father insisting on navigating using his unfortunately fading memory instead of Google maps. Some people just won’t pick up technology out of habit or spite, even if it hinders them.

Second, a quote I read here that I’ll paraphrase “you can be the best marathon runner in the world and still lose a race to a guy on a bike.” Know the race you’re racing. It often changes.

I think it’s valid and commendable to keep the old ways alive, but also potentially dangerous to not realize they’re old ways.

New comment by mstank in "Claude March 2026 usage promotion"

mstank — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:42:33 +0000

Is this just to encourage off-peak usage to get the most out of hardware investments?

New comment by mstank in "Show HN: DenchClaw – Local CRM on Top of OpenClaw"

mstank — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:34:56 +0000

Am I the only one that read this as "DeathClaw"?

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

mstank — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 01:29:39 +0000

I’m working on Green Tea. A open source note app built on Pi agent framework. Basically gives you the power of a coding agent harness for knowledge work in an electron app.

No accounts required, all data is yours and lives on your computer.

Check it out: https://greentea.app

New comment by mstank in "Railway (PaaS) global outage"

mstank — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:47:19 +0000

VPS + Dokploy gives you just as much functionality with an additional performance boost. Hostinger has great prices and a one-click setup. Good for dozens of small projects.

New comment by mstank in "GitHub Incidents with Actions and Codespaces"

mstank — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 20:53:05 +0000

Haven't been able to run any actions for the last 30 mins... also had two in progress that were cancelled. Are there any good OSS ways to self-host gh compatible runners?

New comment by mstank in "Hacking Moltbook"

mstank — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:19:52 +0000

Couldn't a human just use an LLM browser extension / script to answer that quickly? This is a really interesting non-trivial problem.

New comment by mstank in "Is liberal democracy in terminal decline?"

mstank — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:01:35 +0000

The pendulum is swinging back slightly, but I wouldn’t pronounce it dead just yet.

We are seeing a decline of American hegemony, accelerated by this current regime. And the ascendancy of a non-democratic superpower.

However, the largest chunk of GDP and growth still sits firmly in democratic countries and very consequential American elections are happening this year, and in 2028.

The real question is, will Europe find its spine?

New comment by mstank in "Show HN: Rocket Launch and Orbit Simulator"

mstank — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:36:10 +0000

This is awesome, great work! There’s a huge audience for something like this based on the popularity of Kerbal Space Program.

Biggest low-hanging fruit UI improvement would be mobile responsiveness. It was a bit challenging testing on my phone.