Hacker News: p1necone

New comment by p1necone in "Binary obfuscation used in AAA Games"

p1necone — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:47:44 +0000

Echoing the other comments here - why? What is the threat model here and how does this protect you from it?

New comment by p1necone in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

p1necone — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:01:55 +0000

> Which... I mean, steelman analysis has its place. But really no, this was just dumb.

I rarely hear people use the term "steelman" while arguing in good faith. It's basically a tacit admission that you are either advancing a position that you don't actually hold (why...?), or more likely you know it's an unpopular position and you want to argue it while having plausible deniability that you may not actually hold it (which is just cowardly).

Stepping through other peoples logic to understand why they may have a position that you do not understand/agree with is sensible for sure. But if you do that in conversation with others so often that you need to preface it with a special term I'm going to be suspicious that you're just trying to obfuscate your actual opinions.

(see also: "just playing devil's advocate here, but...")

New comment by p1necone in "What happens when a destructor throws"

p1necone — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:21:27 +0000

This feels like an overly negative comment. language specific minutiae is interesting to a lot of developers, and this kind of stuff is exactly what you'd ask if someone claimed to be an experienced C++ developer. You're not going to decide not to hire them based on them not knowing this specific thing, but if you ask them 5 different questions about specific behaviour/edge cases/whatever and they don't know any of them it's probably a bad sign.

(Although "this is bad practice, I've never done it, I didn't care to look up details" would be a perfectly fine answer to me if I was the interviewer)

New comment by p1necone in "Sky – an Elm-inspired language that compiles to Go"

p1necone — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:06:17 +0000

If you wrote the C89 outputting transpiler in your own language it would still be just as portable.

New comment by p1necone in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

p1necone — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:00:40 +0000

The "this test failure is preexisting so I'm going to ignore it" thing has been happening a lot for me lately, it's so annoying. Unless it makes a change and then immediately runs tests and it's obvious from the name/contents that the failing test is directly related to the change that was made it will ignore it and not try to fix.

New comment by p1necone in "StepFun 3.5 Flash is #1 cost-effective model for OpenClaw tasks (300 battles)"

p1necone — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:37:13 +0000

Is Minimax M2.7 better than Qwen3.5 27B, or is it just bigger?

New comment by p1necone in "Fast and Gorgeous Erosion Filter"

p1necone — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:33:12 +0000

Being able to process separate chunks in parallel is the killer feature for any procgen algorithm - nice.

New comment by p1necone in "Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'"

p1necone — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:07:01 +0000

I burn through the entire 5 hour limit in one or two "implement the feature outlined in this doc" requests with claude pro in a not even huge codebase (low tens of thousands of loc). If there were any reasonable alternatives I wouldn't even consider using it, but sonnet 4.6 (and presumably opus 4.6 - I don't use it as sonnet is faster and more than good enough) is the only model I've used that actually makes good decisions in complex codebases - anything else just gets stuck in the weeds and produces either non working code or tech debt (after churning for a long time).

I have seen more than one comment on this thread mentioning kimi though - I'll have to test it out.

qwen3-coder-next has been surprisingly capable as a local model too - needs to be used to make small changes where you know exactly what the final code should look like rather than implementing whole features, but it is free (except for the power bill).

New comment by p1necone in "Ball Pit"

p1necone — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:39:57 +0000

This runs pretty smoothly on my middling laptop CPU while looking like a typical raytracing demo. I assume there's some smoke and mirrors involved?

New comment by p1necone in "Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem"

p1necone — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:38:13 +0000

A lot of math problems/proofs are like minesweeper or sudoku in a way though. They're a long series of individually kinda simple logical deductions that eventually result in a solution. Some really hard problems are only really hard because each one of those "simple" deductions requires you to have expert knowledge in some disparate area to make that leap.

New comment by p1necone in "Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains"

p1necone — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:52:48 +0000

Yeah but Windows is a more stable api to develop against than Linux (at least when it comes to stuff that games need to do) - it doesn't feel "pure", but pragmatically it's much better as a game developer to just make sure the Windows version works with proton than it is to develop a native Linux version that's liable to break the second you stop maintaining it.

New comment by p1necone in "No, Windows Start does not use React"

p1necone — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:30:03 +0000

Go build it.

New comment by p1necone in "No, Windows Start does not use React"

p1necone — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:18:54 +0000

Sure, slightly inaccurate title, but the point they're making is valid, this comment isn't really a substantive critique.

I could be wrong but I feel like when most HN commenters say that something "uses React" and also imply that that's a bad thing, what they really mean is "it loads a full web rendering engine and consumes ~200mb of unnecessary ram". Neither of those things are true here.

New comment by p1necone in "Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase"

p1necone — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:29:16 +0000

I haven't really extensively evaluated this, but my instinct is to really aggressively trim any 'instructions' files. I try to keep mine at a mid-double-digit linecount and leave out anything that's not critically important. You should also be skeptical of any instructions that basically boil down to "please follow this guideline that's generally accepted to be best practice" - most current models are probably already aware - stick to things that are unique to your project, or value decisions that aren't universally agreed upon.

New comment by p1necone in "Honda is killing its EVs"

p1necone — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:40:19 +0000

> The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with.

I feel like this is only an opinion that people who have never actually used an EV have. Plugging in my car overnight at home every few days is infinitely more convenient than needing to drive somewhere to plug it in somewhere else. The actual charge time is irrelevant as long as it's not more than ~12 hrs.

New comment by p1necone in "Comparing Python Type Checkers: Typing Spec Conformance"

p1necone — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:04:48 +0000

Say what you will about Microsoft, but their programming language people consistently seem to make very solid decisions.

New comment by p1necone in "On The Need For Understanding"

p1necone — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:54:41 +0000

Idk, as someone who has done LLM driven development of fairly complex things (type systems, memory allocation gymnastics etc) I don't think the need to understand what's going on from first principles has really gone away. If I just want some isolated thing to work I can vibe code with no understanding, but there's no way to get coherence between behaviour, performance characteristics, purity etc without fully understanding the problem space. The LLM just saves (a shitload) of time on grunt work.

Of course if you're building some crud app it's all already tread ground, and you probably can just throw a prompt at an LLM and get something acceptable out.

New comment by p1necone in "Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line"

p1necone — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:40:04 +0000

I feel like fast food is a pretty big market for stuff like this. Burger King in New Zealand has had plant based alternatives to the whopper and chicken burger on the menu for > 1 year now so it must be doing ok. I'm not even vegetarian and I get them sometimes, they're pretty good (especially the chicken one - they changed the recipe a while ago and it's now practically indistinguishable from the real chicken option, although that probably says more about their standard chicken than it does about the meat free option).

There's no premium for the plant based versions I don't think (or if there is it's small enough that I never noticed), and I think you're underestimating how many vegans/vegetarians still want junk food.

New comment by p1necone in "The Cost of Indirection in Rust"

p1necone — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:26:00 +0000

Each part of the codebase is a separate self contained module with its own wrapping (boilerplate), except there's like 30 of them and you still have to understand everything as a whole to understand the behaviour of the system anyway.

New comment by p1necone in "The MacBook Neo"

p1necone — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 23:57:43 +0000

I wonder if a big capacitor would be cheaper than a battery, probably not with how huge in scale battery production is at this point.