Hacker News: pgwhalen

New comment by pgwhalen in "Why Can't You Pack a Bag? (2024)"

pgwhalen — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:05:29 +0000

As someone raised as a light packer, I've come to the opposite conclusion a little: I'd prefer packing "medium" to have a lot of flexibility to be dressed well for whatever may come up. A small half-full duffel bag isn't that much better than a full one, so if I'm on a short trip I've found that I'll often appreciate having the extra options.

That being said, I literally do not own a roller bag, and am quite happy taking the stairs.

New comment by pgwhalen in "U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal"

pgwhalen — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 12:01:09 +0000

Indeed this is my source for the claim!

New comment by pgwhalen in "U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal"

pgwhalen — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:58:57 +0000

I think you say “as good as they can get with [the] hard manual work that goes into compiling them” as a way to respect the challenge of the BLS and say they’re doing the best with their resources, but it’s worth pointing out they could be better with more resources.

New comment by pgwhalen in "Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library"

pgwhalen — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:08:30 +0000

From experience I can say that traders prefer extraordinarily little whitespace in their UIs.

New comment by pgwhalen in "Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library"

pgwhalen — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:27:02 +0000

I’m no UI expert - what’s wrong with the margins?

New comment by pgwhalen in "Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY actually scales"

pgwhalen — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:39:31 +0000

Could you not send a message that pointed to the state that changed in a non-row-specific way?

New comment by pgwhalen in "Patreon laying off 20% of staff"

pgwhalen — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:42:16 +0000

As someone not good at identifying this myself, what about this post indicates AI editing?

New comment by pgwhalen in "Java 27: What's New?"

pgwhalen — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:19:20 +0000

So if the matters to you, run the LTS release, right? I'm not sure I follow the concern.

New comment by pgwhalen in "Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers"

pgwhalen — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:38:57 +0000

Distinguished version: write the outline of the slide deck for the talk you plan to give at conferences about it, without having shipped anything or even written code yet.

New comment by pgwhalen in "Working With AI: A concrete example"

pgwhalen — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 01:44:34 +0000

These takes Arne necessarily incompatible. It can be a great tool for helping you do this kind of big picture design, but still need you as a guide and taste-maker to get to a good end result.

New comment by pgwhalen in "Siri AI"

pgwhalen — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:11:00 +0000

It’s worrisome, but it’s also worth pointing out that no one else has succeeded at it, or even gotten close. It’s easy to forget that there are not good well-integrated person AI solutions yet, it’s just chat bots. I think it’s just harder than a lot of people think it is.

New comment by pgwhalen in "Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore"

pgwhalen — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:53:25 +0000

If it helps, I could have written this comment just about word for word, and you can check my account and see that I’m clearly human.

I would probably add that I’m nervous about AI search results and how it affects the future of the internet and content creation in general, but from the perspective of a user, I’m pleased with the direction.

New comment by pgwhalen in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

pgwhalen — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:00:48 +0000

Oh I'm sorry, I didn't see you were different than the commenter I was responding to.

New comment by pgwhalen in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

pgwhalen — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:14:46 +0000

Can you link to it? Your comment history does not show such a comment.

New comment by pgwhalen in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

pgwhalen — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:22:33 +0000

Can you explain why? I'm getting better at detecting some kinds of AI writing, but I constantly seem comments like this on HN for things I'm much less suspicious of, and I want to understand why people make them.

New comment by pgwhalen in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

pgwhalen — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:28:06 +0000

Did you read the article? They did not believe that the token the agent had access to had the ability to delete production data using it.

New comment by pgwhalen in "Anatomy of the .claude/ folder"

pgwhalen — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:58:10 +0000

Who is building an artificial wall? Maybe I skimmed the post too fast, but it doesn't seem like this information is being presented as "you have to know/do this before you start agentic engineering", just "this is some stuff to know."

New comment by pgwhalen in "Flighty Airports"

pgwhalen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:14:55 +0000

As not a shill myself, who comments on a variety of stuff regularly, I could totally see why the mention of a product someone loves is the thing that pulls them out of lurking.

New comment by pgwhalen in "AI coding is gambling"

pgwhalen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:28:42 +0000

It’s just how discussion on the internet works, for basically anything at all worth discussing. It’s exhausting, but I can hardly blame HN specifically.

New comment by pgwhalen in "Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta's $2B Lobbying for Age Verification Tech"

pgwhalen — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:37:42 +0000

You could break it down further if you like, yes.

Everything is complicated by money. I wish we were better about shielding politics from money. So much about society in general is about money, it ain’t easy.