Hacker News: patrick451

New comment by patrick451 in "A Farmer Arrested for Going 5 Seconds over His Time Limit at Data Center Meeting"

patrick451 — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 20:59:32 +0000

The boom in datacenter construction is driven mostly by the AI boom and most of us are sick everything AI too. We don't want to read AI slop, watch AI videos, talk AI customer service or visit a vibe coded website.

New comment by patrick451 in "'We had to get out of the way': The backlash over delivery robots"

patrick451 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 07:00:14 +0000

The vast majority of Americans prefer roads being dedicated to vehicles. I live in a town that is stealing drivable roadway for bike lanes. It's a total wast of tax dollars. There is never anybody in this bike lanes. Because even in this flaming blue, bike friendly city, people drive because it's just better.

New comment by patrick451 in "Orthodox C++ (2016)"

patrick451 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:51:13 +0000

> Which is really no different from someone choosing to terminate.

If you std::abort(), you'll get a useful stack trace in the core dump. If you crash from an unhandled exception, you don't. That's a pretty huge difference and is one of the reasons exceptions suck.

New comment by patrick451 in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

patrick451 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:38:06 +0000

No, they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting.

New comment by patrick451 in "C++: The Documentary"

patrick451 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:13:37 +0000

You are failing to make an argument for why stable sorting is objectively the correct choice. Just because something doesn't match your expectations doesn't make it wrong.

New comment by patrick451 in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

patrick451 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:26:37 +0000

> Users don’t care whether the code was written by AI or by hand, or which framework you used. They care that the product works.

If I wanted to care about what users want, I would have been a founder or salesman, not an engineer.

New comment by patrick451 in "C++: The Documentary"

patrick451 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:23:14 +0000

> Sure, both languages offer both generic comparison sorts†. But the defaults matter and as always in C++ the defaults are wrong, here it's reflected in naming.

Why, exactly, is the c++ std::sort "wrong"? There are tradeoffs both ways. You happen to prefer stable sorting to speed, but that is a preference not an objective fact.

New comment by patrick451 in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

patrick451 — Sat, 16 May 2026 23:32:23 +0000

I work in a FAANG. My sense is that most of my teammates are loving the AI. Personally, I hate the AI tools and the hype around them and what it has turned this job into. My own morale has never been lower in the 7 years I've been there and I'll probably try to switch careers or semi retire sooner or later.

New comment by patrick451 in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

patrick451 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:03:55 +0000

We should not treat this as an acceptable strategy. If we do not have a viable mitigation for the risks of AI, then AI should be banned from public usage, just like nuclear weapons.

New comment by patrick451 in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

patrick451 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:48:15 +0000

Exactly. At the very least, we should be treating AI like nuclear weapons. It can exist but it should be locked away and never used.

New comment by patrick451 in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

patrick451 — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 06:25:58 +0000

> Sure, we built something in 2 mos that would have otherwise taken us 6 mos, but now I'm fixing the mess that we caused.

You didn't actually build it in 2 months.

New comment by patrick451 in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

patrick451 — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 06:21:35 +0000

There are countless other stories about the AI's spouting complete bullshit. This easily wastes as much time as they save.

New comment by patrick451 in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

patrick451 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:29:22 +0000

Context: I work in robotics. We use mostly c++ and python. The entire team is about 200 though the subset I regularly interact with is maybe 50.

I basically don't use AI for coding at all. When I have tried it, it's just half working garbage and trying to describe what I want in natural language is just miserable. It feels like trying to communicate via smoke signals.

I'll be a classical engineer until they fire me and then go do something else. So far, that's working. We've had multiple rounds of large layoffs in the last year and somehow I'm still here.

New comment by patrick451 in "My “grand vision” for Rust"

patrick451 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:55:14 +0000

This comparison is useless until rust commits to a stable ABI.

New comment by patrick451 in "Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native"

patrick451 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:10:44 +0000

> The first thing you need when you make something new is making it work, it is much better that it works badly than having something not working at all.

It is better for something to not exist than for a shitty version to exist. Software doesn't get better over time, it gets worse. If you make a bad, suboptimal choice today chances are that solution becomes permanent. It's telling that all of your examples of increasing efficiency are not software.

If are aren't going to do it well, don't do it.

New comment by patrick451 in "Visual introduction to PyTorch"

patrick451 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:31:24 +0000

Tiny suggestion: make the visualization for torch.zeros and torch.ones have the same y-axis limits so the difference is visually separated.

New comment by patrick451 in "I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)"

patrick451 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:27:37 +0000

At least you can read the switch statement. One of the worst features of c++ is all of the code that gets generated for you automatically.

New comment by patrick451 in "The Waymo World Model"

patrick451 — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:21:39 +0000

No human needs to have seen an elephant standing in the road before to know that you should not drive through an elephant standing in the road. These are not "long tail" events as the waymo says. It's a big object in the road. You have seen that hundreds of thousands of times. Calling that a long tail event is an admission that your model has zero ability to generalize.

New comment by patrick451 in "A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content"

patrick451 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:59:40 +0000

Ideally, we would just ban AI content altogether.

New comment by patrick451 in "AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was"

patrick451 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:39:19 +0000

After you have owned a car for five years, can I come steal it?