Hacker News: oldsecondhand

New comment by oldsecondhand in "Learn Programming with OCaml"

oldsecondhand — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 11:00:52 +0000

For someone just starting to learn CS, it should not matter whether they're on PDP-11 or x64 or ARM. You can't start teaching with pipelining and speculative branch execution. So C is good choice because there is a simple CPU architecture that it maps to well.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "What designing computer science cards taught me about graphic design"

oldsecondhand — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:25:44 +0000

What designing cards taught me about B2B sales ...

New comment by oldsecondhand in "Documentation is still in your Mum's filing cabinet"

oldsecondhand — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 09:35:53 +0000

tl;dr: author "discovers" hypertext

New comment by oldsecondhand in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

oldsecondhand — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:50:49 +0000

Yep, putting a DRM free version in escrow should be a legal requirement.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership"

oldsecondhand — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:44:26 +0000

However in the EU end users have the right to resell that license.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "Fable created novel 4D splat format"

oldsecondhand — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 22:28:02 +0000

Me neither on Chrome on Win10. "WEBGPU initialization failed".

New comment by oldsecondhand in "Domain expertise has always been the real moat"

oldsecondhand — Sun, 31 May 2026 09:49:30 +0000

It's easy to make a chessbot that only makes valid moves. Making a chessbot that plays optimally is hard.

But OP wasn't talking about solving optimalization problems, but understanding the rules of a business domain.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "MCP is dead?"

oldsecondhand — Sat, 30 May 2026 10:00:55 +0000

That wouldn't solve the core issue: if Claude makes a mistake during the MCP generaration, it would poison further agentic use.

It's adding another failure point to the process for no gain.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "The dead economy theory"

oldsecondhand — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:18:18 +0000

"Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay"

I wouldn't take his word too seriously. According to him, corporate lawyers, administrative assistants and compliance officers shouldn't exist.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "The dead economy theory"

oldsecondhand — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:10:11 +0000

Helped or overworked?

New comment by oldsecondhand in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"

oldsecondhand — Sun, 17 May 2026 15:42:07 +0000

Or they're a prolog programmer.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

oldsecondhand — Sat, 16 May 2026 10:32:27 +0000

That's an American problem though. In most of Europe you need a masters degree to teach highschool and that involves at least an undergrad level of understanding the subjects you will teach.

E.g. in Hungary I had a university CS professor that originally wanted to be a highschool teacher and a highschool physics teacher that originally wanted to be researcher. Their choice of degree didn't determine which outcome they got. The researcher and teacher curriculum had an 80%+ overlap.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "LLMs corrupt your documents when you delegate"

oldsecondhand — Sat, 09 May 2026 18:01:39 +0000

> If you can come up with a way to do math without reasoning, that would be, in a sense, even more interesting than AI.

Logic is just syntactic manipulation of formulas. By the early 90s logical reasoning was pretty much solved with classical AI (the last building block being constraint logic programming).

New comment by oldsecondhand in "The Disappearance of the Public Bench"

oldsecondhand — Sat, 09 May 2026 12:11:34 +0000

Every public toilet eventually becomes and ad-hoc homeless shelter.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy"

oldsecondhand — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:18:49 +0000

Covid boosted the sale of canned food, but people avoid the sugary syrup of canned fruits in non emergency situations.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy"

oldsecondhand — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:06:22 +0000

Did they? How long have they been around?

New comment by oldsecondhand in "Germany Overtakes US in Ammunition Production Capacity"

oldsecondhand — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:18:07 +0000

Stockpiling uranium ore, or lowly enriched uranium is much simpler than stockpiling natural gas.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "The woes of sanitizing SVGs"

oldsecondhand — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:37:04 +0000

OG actionscript was very similar to Javascript. It only started to diverge when type hints were introduced.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "AI agents that argue with each other to improve decisions"

oldsecondhand — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:22:50 +0000

Sounds like a less efficient version of the mixture of experts approach.

New comment by oldsecondhand in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

oldsecondhand — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:04:32 +0000

Why are you doing meaningless microbenchmarks?