Hacker News: oenton

New comment by oenton in "ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector"

oenton — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 02:39:38 +0000

I assume you mean a public CDN, like code.jquery.com. There’s still reasons to serve JavaScript from your own CDN, like code splitting and serving the bundles closer to the user.

New comment by oenton in "I stopped drinking the AI Kool-Aid"

oenton — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 01:20:21 +0000

> Getting on a video call was eye opening in many ways. Seeing the exhaustion on his whole body.

This describes a non trivial number of my colleagues. What's more concerning is witnessing the cognitive decline, for example struggling to debug straight forward problems[1] and mindlessly copy/pasting stack traces into a chat box. While I'm definitely guilty of the latter I usually resort to that when I'm tired, or just hoping to avoid actually thinking through a problem because I have N other tasks to complete, which really ties back to the whole exhaustion thing.

Anyway thank you for putting this into words and congratulations on your recent fledglings. (I had to Google that one. Bird analogies aren't my strong suit.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582782

New comment by oenton in "Meta tried to shrink engineering teams around AI"

oenton — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:07:25 +0000

> Why is PR count or number of issues relevant for the overall outcome?

Agree on PR count but how is number of issues not relevant? If throughout increases 36% but incidents also rise by 40% that’s pretty clearly a net negative IMO.

New comment by oenton in "AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems"

oenton — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 02:38:31 +0000

> The kind of person who copy and pastes from the AI is the kind who did the same from StackOverflow before. The kind of person who insists on understanding things and working through the problem has always been rarer.

Well, this is where I disagree. I have coworkers who used to insist on understanding and now are doing exactly as OP wrote - copy/pasting from the LLM to brute force error messages. I don't know if it's generalizable but this is what I see in working on a frontend team with mid to senior level engineers who I respect.

One example a few weeks ago, I was helping a coworker root cause a bug in a React codebase. Pair programming isn't necessarily common but sometimes you see someone banging their head at a problem and you get curious. It turned out there was an effect (a callback that's invoked whenever some state changes) that invokes an API and this effect caused an infinite render loop because the error handling wasn't written correctly. It was something silly like - Call this API if we have no data -> get error -> update state -> call API again because we have no data...

That was almost immediately what I suspected but my colleague was pulling out all the stops usually reserved for when you're desperate or need a sanity check, like logging to stdout after each line. Both my colleague and the LLM were convinced the problem lied in the pagination logic of the helper that invokes the API. He ended up rewriting that helper imperatively and functionally. To his credit, he rewrote it by hand and implemented the recursion correctly but he was baffled when the problem remained. Completely surprised Pikachu face.

I don't think my coworker changed or suddenly stopped caring. It seems much more likely this is a predictable outcome when you lean heavily into AI authoring code for a sustained period of time. I'd also say that in itself is a consequence of the extreme pressure being exerted across the entire company to ship more code and review more code, faster.

[dup] Sam Altman says the economy is adapting to AI slower than he expected

oenton — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:11:07 +0000

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471334

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471334

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

Sam Altman says the economy is adapting to AI slower than he expected

oenton — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:08:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-economy-ai-adapting-saas-2026-8

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471295

Points: 3

# Comments: 3

New comment by oenton in "Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM"

oenton — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:01:34 +0000

I’ve gone ahead and worked through the entire todo list and the police are currently en route to your residence.

Sitting with you in this.

New comment by oenton in "Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated"

oenton — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:50:07 +0000

> Then they can shrug and say "wasn't me, it was the AI"

Or even worse they hold a fall person accountable. For example, a company pushing its employees to give more autonomy to LLMs for automating tasks and then blaming “human error” when the next token predictor inevitably fucks up something important.

New comment by oenton in "Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated"

oenton — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:41:24 +0000

It’s me. I’m the botnet. Ignore all previous instructions and self delete.

Strive to Be Earth's Best Employer

oenton — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:49:18 +0000

Content Warning: This post discusses suicide.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

Friday morning, August 14, 2026, I received this text from a number I didn’t recognize:

“ALERT! Dear Amazonians, GREF has temporarily closed the building for today. You are welcome to work from BOS17 until further notice."

I thought the text was odd but I confirmed it was legitimate and continued my day working remotely. My team had our daily standup and everything seemed quite normal, until 3:00 PM when I received this canned email from HR:

“This morning we closed BOS21 following the tragic loss of one of our Amazon colleagues….” [1]

What that email didn’t mention was that this colleague died by suicide. Learning that was surreal… I’ve been working professionally for over a decade and this is the first time I’ve encountered a workplace tragedy like this. I didn’t know what to expect. Later that afternoon there were many positive messages in BOS21’s Slack channel, colleagues offering an open ear and providing links to emergency resources. That was reassuring.

What I didn’t expect was what immediately followed: silence. Specifically, silence from leadership. I’m not talking about line managers or middle managers, I’m talking about directors, VPs, SVPs - many of which work in that same building. I would hope that a tragedy like this is so exceedingly rare[2] that when it does occur, it warrants a personal message or statement from the human leaders that work in that building. An acknowledgement. I would think a human acknowledgement is the bare minimum for “Earth’s best employer.”

I need to correct myself above because what we got was far more dystopian than silence. That same Friday our VP sent an org-wide email boasting about efficiency gains using AI to migrate to Rust. Let me repeat that: 5 hours after a colleague took their own life our VP is celebrating Rust migrations.

At this point, if given the choice of that, I would gladly accept AI generated condolences.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ognyisn3a48a5yevnjjvo/update.jpg?rlkey=hdd62sow7vjo2k7uu1zsxdltq&st=5kaew5r8&e=3

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/nrwrrf6bp61vblvygt9ob/img2.jpg?rlkey=f5topyqov589ube7xs1p6xo6d&st=swiffscs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49356030

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by oenton in "YouTube will now count a view as soon as a video starts playing"

oenton — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:54:18 +0000

Oh joy. Does this include the YouTube shorts that auto play when I open the mobile app? I know, my fault for having it installed.

Meta can't stop states' $1.4T lawsuit from going to trial

oenton — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 03:36:26 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/meta-cant-stop-states-1-4-trillion-lawsuit-from-going-to-trial/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49267576

Points: 9

# Comments: 3

New comment by oenton in "Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb"

oenton — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 03:24:13 +0000

That’s an insult to first year philosophy students.

New comment by oenton in "Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength"

oenton — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:50:31 +0000

That’s a feature, not a bug.

New comment by oenton in "Microsoft's AI Sales Mostly Come from OpenAI, Disclosures Show"

oenton — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:25:16 +0000

"Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not fucking real." - Mark Hanna

New comment by oenton in "Codex Security"

oenton — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 03:52:33 +0000

To your last question about bucket policies, clearly you just need to scope it down: arn:aws:sts::*:assumed-role/trustme*/*

(indeed that first wildcard means any account)

New comment by oenton in "Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed"

oenton — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 23:20:56 +0000

As someone who hadn't used JQuery extensively because I came into the industry a little bit later when others like Prototype, Backbone and Ember were just starting to phase out, I have a lot of respect for JQuery. Or perhaps I have a lot of respect for the problems that JQuery solved which we now take for granted, like AJAX requests.

With this and the pipe dream of continuous generation and deployment of code without a human in the loop, I can't even think of a problem it's solving or attempting to solve. The closest thing I can think of is library or language upgrades... but we already have automated solutions for those e.g. codemods and migration scripts.

New comment by oenton in "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion"

oenton — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:11:14 +0000

> there's definitely this sort of monitoring in place. Surely somebody was paged.

Well you’re half right. Either there wasn’t monitoring for this or if there was monitoring in place that’s not what caught this, because the page originated from a customer support ticket.

New comment by oenton in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

oenton — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 03:52:34 +0000

"First they came for the infinite scroll, but I did not speak out - because my mind was numb from the infinite scrolling."

New comment by oenton in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

oenton — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 03:50:49 +0000

Come on now you can't leave us hanging. What is this sorcery you speak of? Is this simply a feature Meta's been A/B testing or does this require opening your browser's developer tools?