Hacker News: ordersofmag

New comment by ordersofmag in "U.S. science is in chaos"

ordersofmag — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:46:10 +0000

You have misunderstood what structural racism is. It is not about the majority of people being racist. Is about the systems being constructed in ways that lead to racist outcomes. You can have a society with zero racist individuals and if they continue to enact the racist systems (perhaps created by racist folks long dead) you'll have structural racism. I don't disagree with the idea that the mis-understanding you have is widespread though, and would certainly be a cause for folks not being comfortable with the idea (as they have mis-understood it).

New comment by ordersofmag in "Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system"

ordersofmag — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:01:15 +0000

It's like you're making the best you can of the current situation you find yourself in as an individual while also working toward changing the overall situation.

New comment by ordersofmag in "Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs"

ordersofmag — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:20:17 +0000

Or you point your Claude code at a different LLM provider. It's not complicated and there are lots of vendors (and in the open-weights space multiple vendors serving the same models competing on price). Sure DeepSeek 4 isn't quite Opus at the moment. But it's plenty good to do the work. We've got different competing front-end tools and different competing back-end providers. No one 'owns' your company. Maybe that will change as the market evolves and one of the frontier tools become so much better than one vendor will own the market. But that's not where we are now.

New comment by ordersofmag in "Gemini 3.5 Flash"

ordersofmag — Tue, 19 May 2026 22:37:46 +0000

I just put the terribly generic query "what tools would you recommend to integrate fraud prevention or account takeover protection into my product" into both Claude (Sonnet) and Gemini (3.1 Pro) via the standard web interface and both took the first step of searching the web. That's consistent with my past experience -- the usual harnesses typically will search the web in cases where I might expect/want them to. Now whether you product has good web visibility or not in those searches and how the LLM's weigh the relative merits of open-source tools versus commercial offerings in deciding what to highlight in their responses is a different issue. As is the change in what constitutes effective SEO in an era where bots, rather then human eyes are the proximal important target. But I don't think the core issue with folks finding your products is the move away from user-driven search toward using models with out-of-date training cutoffs.

FWIW while neither model included your product in it's initial response, when I followed up with "what about open-source" both did another search and Claude's response included your tool....

New comment by ordersofmag in ""Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage"

ordersofmag — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:11:44 +0000

In the US around 26 million people have no form of health insurance. These same people are unlikely to be able to afford a 'simple' gall bladder ablation out of pocket. Which implies an effectively infinite wait time. What's crazy is that some people think this is normal.

New comment by ordersofmag in "Walking slower? Your ears, not your knees, might be the problem"

ordersofmag — Sun, 10 May 2026 17:33:48 +0000

Strength training can be done carefully with correct motions. Team sports with unpredictable dynamic movement not so much. Not to say you shouldn't engage in these, at any age, and that they have positive health benefits. They just aren't as safe as strength training for folks at the age where this is all relevant.

New comment by ordersofmag in "In the UK, EVs are cheaper than petrol cars, thanks to Chinese competition"

ordersofmag — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:14:11 +0000

Tell me more about this scheme. If there's someone who imagines they can tax EV's more than ICE vehicles what exactly is keeping them from just making the same increase (now) on ICE vehicles? If their secret goal is to raise transportation taxes how does switching their target from ICE vehicles to EV's make that any easier? And who exactly is doing the scheming? Is it construction firms who build roads (which is my neck of the woods is where most of the gax tax ends up going). Are they the ones hatching this scheme? You'd think they'd be lobbying harder for more trucks (heavily vehicles -> more wear on the roads ->profit!). But the more big trucks people seem mostly to be the opposite of the EV people. How confusing.

New comment by ordersofmag in "The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment"

ordersofmag — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 02:39:23 +0000

I think we have lots of evidence that the single binary question "is this something people like 'us' support or not" is the only deciding factor in a lot of political decisions people make. They don't consider the facts of the particular issue and how it might impact them. They abdicate that role to whomever they believe defines what 'people like us' believe.

New comment by ordersofmag in "Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block"

ordersofmag — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:25:05 +0000

Right. The number is the result of Claude adding up the public information about the aggregate value of all those clubs plus the association. So it would mean buying all the clubs; or at least enough to have a controlling interest in the association. Clearly there are big challenges to that (e.g. clubs not being for sale for one). But I thought it was an interesting thought experiment. Of course if you're just trying to play the money = power card then it'd probably be cheaper to purchase the influence of some government officials.

New comment by ordersofmag in "Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block"

ordersofmag — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 17:40:46 +0000

Interesting alternative. Cloudflare (market cap $58B) buys La liga (market value $5 billion), drops suit.

New comment by ordersofmag in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

ordersofmag — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:27:37 +0000

Not to be pendantic (but to be pendantic) 80psi is the correct pressure for 28mm tires ridden briskly on good roads. At least according to ye olde Silca tire pressure calculator. Back in the day when folks ran 23mm tires they would typically run above 100psi (though that may not have been optimal...).

New comment by ordersofmag in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

ordersofmag — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:31:12 +0000

I'm pretty sure there are folks involved in doing drug testing for many sports so saying are doing nothing seems hyperbolic. Are there specific things you think the bodies in charge of drug testing should be doing but aren't? Genuinely curious.

New comment by ordersofmag in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

ordersofmag — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:28:31 +0000

Not sure how this helps. Olympic events already have relative rating systems that ranks all the participant: pretty complicated and sport dependent systems that determine qualification for the games and competition amongst all the competitors at the games. The problem how to have separate competitions for different groups of participants when there isn't a universally shared agreement on who should be in which group.

New comment by ordersofmag in "Please do not A/B test my workflow"

ordersofmag — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:14:44 +0000

Any tool that auto-updates carries the implication that behavior will change over time. And one criteria for being a skilled professional is having expert understanding of ones tools. That includes understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the tools (including variability of output) and making appropriate choices as a result. If you don't feel you can produce professional code with LLM's then certainly you shouldn't use them. That doesn't mean others can't leverage LLM's as part of their process and produce professional results. Blindly accepting LLM output and vibe coding clearly doesn't consistently product professional results. But that's different than saying professionals can't use LLM in ways that are productive.

New comment by ordersofmag in "Are LLM merge rates not getting better?"

ordersofmag — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:47:43 +0000

Even if one-shot LLM performance has plateaued (which I'm not convinced this data shows given omission of recent models that are widely claimed to be better) that missing the point that I see in my own work. The improved tooling and agent-based approaches that I'm using now make the LLM one-shot performance only a small part of the puzzle in terms of how AI tools have accelerated the time from idea to decent code. For instance the planning dialogs I now have with Claude are an important part of what's speeding things up for me. Also, the iterative use of AI to identify, track, and take care of small coding tasks (none of which are particularly challenging in terms of benchmarks) is simply more effective. Could this all have been done with the LLM engines of late 2024. Perhaps, but I think the fine-tuning (and conceivably the system prompts) that make the current LLM's more effective at agent-centered workflows (including tool-use) are a big part of it. One-shot task performance at challenging tasks is an interesting, certainly foundational, metric. But I don't think it captures the important advances I see in how LLM's have gotten better over the last year in ways that actually matter to me. I rarely have a well-defined programming challenge and the obligation to solve it in a single-shot.

New comment by ordersofmag in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

ordersofmag — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:14:20 +0000

Seems like the ability to distinguish LLM versus 'good human' writing depends on the size of the writing sample you have to look at (assuming you think it can be done). And that HN-scale posts are unlikely to be a long enough for useful discernment.

New comment by ordersofmag in "IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on COBOL"

ordersofmag — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:16:07 +0000

Please expand more on the idea that LLM's are not trained on English to begin with. Not sure what you mean by this as clearly many LLM's are trained on data that contains a lot of English. For instance GPT-1 seems to have been trained on a purely English corpus.

New comment by ordersofmag in "Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015"

ordersofmag — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 03:18:02 +0000

And there's 'nothing wrong' with just writing code with variables named 'a1, a2, a3'. But when some poor sod has to dig through your mess to figure out what you had in mind it turns out that having an easier to discern logical structure to your code (or html) makes it better. I've dug through a lot of html. And there's a ton of ugly code smell out there. Layers and layers of "I don't really know what I'm doing but I guess it looks okay and I'll make it make sense later". I'm sure it pays the bills for someone. But it makes me sad.

New comment by ordersofmag in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened"

ordersofmag — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:09:39 +0000

Isn't arstechnica that new site that replaced slashdot?

New comment by ordersofmag in "I'm not worried about AI job loss"

ordersofmag — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:52:30 +0000

Seems like if evolution managed to create intelligence from slime I wouldn't bet on there being some fundamental limit that prevents us from making something smarter than us.