Hacker News: ndriscoll

New comment by ndriscoll in "Binary obfuscation that doesn't kill LTO"

ndriscoll — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:13:53 +0000

The full faith and credit clause does not apply if the court lacks jurisdiction, which California clearly would. There's a reason "California compliant" already exists as a phrase; you can buy and sell things that break California law outside of California. If you bring it in that's on you.

New comment by ndriscoll in "Binary obfuscation that doesn't kill LTO"

ndriscoll — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:07:03 +0000

With software it's trivial to have a switch for "California compliant" mode, but in any case, that makes it clear that such criticisms should be directed at California. Other (generally "red") states already had a more reasonable solution: make the sites offering the restricted service liable for their actions just like other businesses.

New comment by ndriscoll in "Binary obfuscation that doesn't kill LTO"

ndriscoll — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:54:31 +0000

The laws in my locality place requirements on the service provider (e.g. the adult website operator), not on random computer owners or manufacturers or software vendors.

New comment by ndriscoll in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

ndriscoll — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:02:39 +0000

Then perhaps Bob should have it use functional Scala, where my experience is that if it compiles and looks like what you expect, it's almost certainly correct.

New comment by ndriscoll in "I Quit. The Clankers Won"

ndriscoll — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:54:48 +0000

Inefficient credentialism is a different problem from lack of opportunity to grow your skills though, which was the original contention I replied to. IME companies are perfectly happy for their employees to spend deliberate time learning how to be better at their job, and this is actually usually even formalized as a written expectation.

New comment by ndriscoll in "I Quit. The Clankers Won"

ndriscoll — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:47:39 +0000

Is that not what every company does? At least any company big enough to have HR/some formalized ladder/promotion process? And any company large enough to have teams probably has a leads where a decent chunk of their work is doing that mentoring and figuring out who's ready for what work, or how to break it down into something their team is ready for if needed?

e.g. my current company's ladder explicitly mentions that the first two levels are receiving active mentoring and supervision. Third (~5 yrs xp) is still receiving mentoring but also providing it. Fourth and up you're generally expected to be the one doing the mentoring.

What that actually means on the ground is that I try to make sure my teammates are asking good questions/paying attention to the right things/thinking from the right perspectives. I can also let them know about some solution or basic approach for what they're doing, but then they need to go read more and think more deeply about what I'm talking about. So to me, "skills" are just something people need to pick up themselves.

New comment by ndriscoll in "I quit. The clankers won"

ndriscoll — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:36:06 +0000

I don't disagree that code quality is currently more important than it's ever been (to get the most out of the tools). I expect that quality will increase though as people refine either training or instructions. I was able to get much better (well factored, aligned to business logic) output that I'm generally happy-ish with a couple months ago with some coding guidelines I wrote. It's possible that newer models don't even need that, but they work well enough with it that I haven't touched those instructions since.

New comment by ndriscoll in "I quit. The clankers won"

ndriscoll — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:27:09 +0000

Actually I found that if you have a pretty good understanding of the core parts of the C standard (e.g. the idea of the abstract machine, storage durations, unspecified vs undefined behavior, etc.) and working experience with the language, Rust is then quite natural. To first approximation, Rust basically makes lifetime management/ownership semantics that would be "good practice" in C into mandatory parts of the type system.

New comment by ndriscoll in "I Quit. The Clankers Won"

ndriscoll — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:16:04 +0000

For foundational knowledge, there's been high quality information for free from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc. out there for years. Just look there first. If you're beyond that, you're beyond the canon that you can "learn" and closer to needing to follow/participate in SOTA R&D. And if you need a more structured environment, that's why people go to school. Engineering jobs expect you're at the level of someone who's completed undergrad, minimum. Part of an undergrad degree is getting used to seeking out resources yourself and learning from them instead of having a teacher spoon-feed it.

Again I just don't have any idea of what training people expect. The entire job is basically "we might have some idea of what we want to do, but no one here knows the details. Go figure it out."

What kind of guided learning would you want? How to solve problems? That's what 16 years of school was for!

New comment by ndriscoll in "I quit. The clankers won"

ndriscoll — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:36:43 +0000

You could e.g. write specs and only review high level types plus have deterministic validation that no type escapes/"unsafe" hatches were used, or instruct another agent to create adversarial blackbox attempts to break functionality of the primary artifact (which is really just to say "perform QA").

As a simple use-case, I've found LLMs to be much better than me at macro programming, and I don't really need to care about what it does because ultimately the constraint is just that it bends the syntax I have into the syntax I want, and things compile. The details are basically irrelevant.

New comment by ndriscoll in "I quit. The clankers won"

ndriscoll — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:32:41 +0000

What exactly do you have in mind? The large companies I've worked at had book subscriptions, internal training courses, and would pay for school. Personally I don't see the point of any of it. For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. You can go download e.g. graduate level CS courses on youtube. MIT OCW has been around for almost a quarter century now. IME no one's going to stop you from spending a couple hours a week of work time watching lectures (at least if you're fulltime). Now at least at my company, we have unlimited use of codex, which you can ask for help explaining things to you. I also don't really see how attending conferences relates to skill improvement. Meanwhile, I've been explicitly told by managers that spending half my time mentoring people sounds reasonable.

I can't understand what people are looking for when they talk about lack of investment into training for engineers. It's not the kind of job where someone can train you. It's like an executive complaining they aren't trained. You're the one who's supposed to be coming up with answers and making decisions. You need to spend time on self-motivated learning/discovering how to better do your work. Every company I've been at big or small assumes that's part of the job.

New comment by ndriscoll in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

ndriscoll — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:51:03 +0000

My tools just don't add such comments. I don't know why I would care to add that information. I want my commits to be what and why, not what editor someone used. It seems like cruft to me. Why would I add noise to my data to cater to someone's neuroticism?

At least at my workplace though, it's just assumed now that you are using the tools.

New comment by ndriscoll in "In math, rigor is vital, but are digitized proofs taking it too far?"

ndriscoll — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:32:50 +0000

Right, in the same way that programs are not opcodes. They're written to be read and understood by people. Language models can deal with this.

I'm not sure what your threshold for "trivial" is (e.g. would inventing groups from nothing be trivial? Would figuring out what various definitions in condensed mathematics "must be" to establish a correspondence with existing theory be trivial?), but I see LLMs come up with their own reasonable abstractions/interfaces just fine.

New comment by ndriscoll in "A Love Letter to 'Girl Games'"

ndriscoll — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:46:19 +0000

They have one. It's just that "modern" for "AAA" games means it's a microtransaction mall and advertising delivery vehicle. Though admittedly as far as I know it doesn't have gambling mechanics yet, so could be further modernized.

New comment by ndriscoll in "In math, rigor is vital, but are digitized proofs taking it too far?"

ndriscoll — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:13:28 +0000

Very far in the future when AI runs everything, of course math will be a hobby (and it will be great! As a professional programmer I'm happy that I now have a research-level tutor/mentor for my math/physics hobby). In the nearer term, it seems apparent to me that people with stronger mental models of the world are able (without even trying!) to formulate better prompts and get better output from models. i.e. as long as people are asking the questions, they'll do better to have some idea of the nuance within the problem/solution spaces. Math can provide vocabulary to express such nuance.

New comment by ndriscoll in "In math, rigor is vital, but are digitized proofs taking it too far?"

ndriscoll — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:05:35 +0000

This is literally the same thing as having the model write well factored, readable code. You can tell it to do things like avoid mixing abstraction levels within a function/proof, create interfaces (definitions/axioms) for useful ideas, etc. You can also work with it interactively (this is how I work with programming), so you can ask it to factor things in the way you prefer on the fly.

New comment by ndriscoll in "Building a Mostly IPv6 Only Home Network"

ndriscoll — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:36:05 +0000

2^64 is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. That's 18 quintillion. 10^19. There are ~10^10 people on the planet. Each person could have a 10^9 networks (not even devices) before we ran out of /64s.

New comment by ndriscoll in "Building a Mostly IPv6 Only Home Network"

ndriscoll — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:14:31 +0000

/48s are "small" enough that we could give ~8 billion people each 35,000 of them and we'd still have ~1.5 trillion (over 300x the size of the ipv4 space) left over. Addresses are basically infinite, but routing table entries (which fragmentation necessitates) have a cost.

New comment by ndriscoll in "Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music"

ndriscoll — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:46:38 +0000

They faced multiple lawsuits and had to do product recalls, so clearly they lost something. What exactly did they gain? IIRC you could avoid it by just turning off autoplay in Windows (which any sane person already did, or you could hold shift I think), and they were otherwise valid audio CDs (otherwise they wouldn't work in players), so it did exactly nothing to stop the CDs from being ripped and shared. And back then everyone knew about p2p so it really only took one person ripping it for it to spread. So even ignoring the lawsuits, even one person boycotting them probably makes it a net loss. Actually the development costs probably made it a loss.

New comment by ndriscoll in "Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music"

ndriscoll — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:08:50 +0000

I'd expect most people in this forum have made something "worth protecting" or even make a living doing so. Certainly it's been my career. I still think we should drastically shorten copyrights and expect more to grant it. e.g. for software, require source escrow to the copyright office and probably require source availability to purchasers, and ban things like hardware that only runs signed software. Basically the law should be GPL without redistribution, but where you could hire a programmer to fix things for you and maybe share your diff. Or just straight GPL (i.e. software should not be eligible for copyright as it's a functional thing, not a creative thing, and consumer protection law should make it mandatory to provide source and a way to load your own version for any device that has it). For other works, registration fees should cover storage of a master copy until expiration + N years so it can be released to the public. Maybe "source material" there as well wherever it makes sense. I understand that might make my career less lucrative. That's fine.