Hacker News: oldmanhorton

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Performance Improvements in .NET 11"

oldmanhorton — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 07:23:09 +0000

The dotnet team provides some agent plugins which solve some of these issues. I expect unions in dotnet 11 will need some skill updates too.

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI""

oldmanhorton — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:26:52 +0000

The change with this justification absolutely exists and has existed for a long time, but this justification only works for small changes (in the past and still today). Don’t come to me with a huge refactor or new feature and this explanation, which is happening more and more recently (it’s an easy strawman to make and hard to prove, but I certainly see it in practice).

New comment by oldmanhorton in "OpenAI restores 5-hour Codex and Work limits for ChatGPT Plus users"

oldmanhorton — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:14:09 +0000

Some of us don’t use an adblocker because we are aware that ads are how most websites get paid for on the internet. I pay for sites I care to support, but for something like LinkedIn, I’d rather have their monetization scheme push me away from any usage than block the ads and make the site slightly more palatable.

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Don't paste the AI, please"

oldmanhorton — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:22:05 +0000

I think this is a pretty unfair takeaway when AI generated text is often so wordy, flowery, and full of jargon and abstract nouns. People are never going to read East of Eden or academic dissertations as quickly as direct, simple language either

New comment by oldmanhorton in "DeepSeek reasonix, DeepSeek native coding agent with high caching and low cost"

oldmanhorton — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:55:17 +0000

You’re not a novice, there are a lot of us who know exactly what we are doing and see this as a huge downside. We are just being told to go faster, faster, faster lest we miss out on… something?

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Mojo 1.0 Beta"

oldmanhorton — Fri, 08 May 2026 23:47:12 +0000

Both ahead of time compilers and JIT compilers often perform autovectorization of tight loops. The problem is that lots of hot loops are not necessarily simple loops, and in particular a lot of source code is written in a way which uses sequential dependencies that can’t be modeled in SIMD code. Aside from undefined behavior in C/C++, most compilers will fail to autovectorize because doing so would very slightly change the behavior of your code in a very hard to understand way.

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to"

oldmanhorton — Tue, 05 May 2026 03:17:11 +0000

A year and a half later? Does that really count?

New comment by oldmanhorton in "The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it"

oldmanhorton — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:37:29 +0000

I feel like this can be explained in part by “I like using it for myself, but I hate when others use it.”

When you use ChatGPT for yourself, you may have a sense that what you see is made up; when someone else that you trust uses it and pronounces the output in a way that suggests it is their own, you are left doing much more complex social math to figure out if your trust in this person or entity can hold. It gets exhausting, personally.

New comment by oldmanhorton in "The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it"

oldmanhorton — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:30:10 +0000

“Think of the children!”

When AI produces those meaningful advances in those fields, great, we can start having meaningful discussions about them. The greatest medical advancement of the 21st century is likely mRNA, or maybe GLP-1 for some. Neither were LLM assisted in any meaningful way as far as I know (they predate ChatGPT, perhaps more primitive models were involved in ways I’m not familiar with). Until those advances come, this argument is fanfic.

Plus, in the most morbid way possible: who gives a shit about living longer if they are stripped of their career, are inundated with slop at every angle, and can’t trust any information. These are real problems that AI has already created, unlike the fanfic of ridding cancer.

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Do I belong in tech anymore?"

oldmanhorton — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 05:17:11 +0000

I have no advice to offer, I only wish you good luck. I am still lucky enough to be employed, but when this whole parade ends, I have no idea what comes next - my only skill is programming and related knowledge work. I think the only path forward is to try to jump ship to another white or blue collar industry…

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th"

oldmanhorton — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:44:30 +0000

Have you considered just… writing code? Like we used to in the good old days? If the tool drives you to that point of frustration, maybe it’s time to give the tool a break.

New comment by oldmanhorton in "JSIR: A High-Level IR for JavaScript"

oldmanhorton — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 06:23:15 +0000

> when the author is an AI and the consumer is a compiler, and no human needs to read the output at all.

This seems like a big bet on the assumption that fully autonomous codegen without humans in the loop is imminent if not already present - frankly, I hope you are wrong.

Even if that comes to pass in some cases, I also find it hard to believe that an LLM will ever be able to generate code in any new language at the same level with which it can generate stack overflow-shaped JavaScript and python, because it’ll never have as robust of a training set for new languages.

New comment by oldmanhorton in "RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs"

oldmanhorton — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:30:25 +0000

That seems correct, but it also doesn’t account for managed languages with runtimes like JavaScript or Java or .NET, which probably have a lot of interesting runtime info they could use to influence caching behavior. There’s an amount of “who caches the cacher” if you go down this path (who manages cache lines for the V8 native code that is in turn managing cache lines for jitted JavaScript code), but it still seems like there is opportunity there?

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell"

oldmanhorton — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 01:48:44 +0000

Sure, but this is based on a fundamental trust in governments ability to spend money effectively. The ineffective spending has been in the news way more than the effective spending, so some people take this to mean all of the spending is ineffective.

I don’t know how to square this skepticism of government against very vocal “patriotism” coming from the trump camp, but humans can contain multitudes, I guess?

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Banned C++ features in Chromium"

oldmanhorton — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 01:31:15 +0000

In C#, you would normally implement rules like this with a custom Roslyn Analyzer or with https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/src/RoslynAnalyze.... It’s fair to say C# projects tend to have smaller denylists than mature C++ projects, but banned APIs definitely exist in mature C# projects.

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Show HN: OpenWorkers – Self-hosted Cloudflare workers in Rust"

oldmanhorton — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:52:32 +0000

I didn’t know this, but there are also security downsides to being ahead of chrome — namely, all chrome releases take dependencies on “known good” v8 release versions which have at least passed normal tests and minimal fuzzing, but also v8 releases go through much more public review and fuzzing by the time they reach chrome stable channel. I expect if you want to be as secure as possible, you’d want to stay aligned with “whatever v8 is in chrome stable.”

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office"

oldmanhorton — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 22:57:22 +0000

If people aren't getting their work done, then they should be having discussions with their manager that eventually lead to pip or firing if not resolved. If they are getting their work done... Who cares if I do a "non work thing" at a "work time"?

New comment by oldmanhorton in "U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds"

oldmanhorton — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:06:41 +0000

And also, a decent chunk of alcohol consumption must be solo? I'd bet alcohol is broadly more social, but I would also wonder if that would change if more public gathering places served weed in some form.

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Chromium Switching from Ninja to Siso"

oldmanhorton — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 14:16:05 +0000

There is a ton of tools and custom logic used by/with/for the GN ecosystem in chromium that I imagine would be difficult to port.

This tool is substantially less complex than Bazel, nor is it a reimplementation of Bazel. Ninja's whole goal in life is to be a very fast local executor of the command DAG described by a ninja file, and siso's only goal is to be a remote executor of that DAG.

This is overall less complex than their first stabs at remote execution, which involved standing up a proxy server locally and wrapping all ninja commands in a "run a command locally which forwards it to the proxy server which forwards it to the remote backend" script.

New comment by oldmanhorton in "Chromium Switching from Ninja to Siso"

oldmanhorton — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 14:07:44 +0000

A handful of other areas are configured using Starlark in chromium. This particular use is in a very different capacity than Bazel - the Bazel equivalent in chromium is GN, and I have not seen any signs that GN will be replaced any time soon.