Hacker News: phillmv

New comment by phillmv in "A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website"

phillmv — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:28:19 +0000

Similarly, I've never understood the economics behind the constant rescraping that is flooding the internet or really what's triggering it.

It can't all be agents reacting to user queries. It's confounding how much CPU and bandwidth is getting flushed down the drain.

New comment by phillmv in "How to automate Instagram engagements with computer vision (and get banned)"

phillmv — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:48:42 +0000

what if i were purely interested in archiving local community posts? does anyone have experience on scraping without getting banned?

i have no interest in juicing engagement, purely from a "20 years from now it'll be cool to know this existed at all" aspect.

New comment by phillmv in "Port React Compiler to Rust"

phillmv — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:11:17 +0000

i feel like ppl have magical beliefs about type systems. just because it's _probably_ (did it use unsafe?) memory-safe doesn't mean it does what you want it to do

New comment by phillmv in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

phillmv — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:41:33 +0000

javascript is like… unusually messy and weird, so maybe that colours most people's perspective. you don't have to worry about type coercion and weird kinds of equality and so on in python and ruby to anywhere near the same extent.

New comment by phillmv in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

phillmv — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:37:29 +0000

>Type systems restrict which programs can be expressed and increasing expressiveness often requires increasing type-system complexity (which, speaking from experience, both humans and agents will struggle with). Plus they are not the only mechanism to assert correctness (they only validate a subset of your program correctness and do not replace tests)

This articulates a lot of my own thinking wrt type systems, speaking as a downstream user without a lot of exposure to prog language theory, and I wish this debate were more often framed in these terms.

Another reply to this comment hinted that it might be more about giving LLMs feedback loops and that to me also seems like a more likely mechanism.

I'm not an elixir user but I've watched it from a distance over the years – thank you for your efforts and your experimentation.

New comment by phillmv in "Magnifica Humanitas"

phillmv — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:05:15 +0000

not going to debate bad faith right wing cause celebres arguing the inverse.

i see it with my own two eyes when i have to yell at recruiters to stop bringing me all-male candidate slates, i see it from studies in social sciences, and i know it from having seen the progression over my own career and listening to my female colleagues. at the end of the day a lot of men don't see women and minorities as people with full agency.

New comment by phillmv in "Magnifica Humanitas"

phillmv — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:00:21 +0000

there's loads of evidence, y'all just don't like engaging with it cos you don't like the answer because fixing it is work and fundamentally women and minorities are not seen as people with full agency.

i'm old enough to remember when software engineering conferences were _2%_ female. it's exhausting to be having this same conversation decades later.

New comment by phillmv in "Magnifica Humanitas"

phillmv — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:24:49 +0000

>The fact that a company does not have representation that is exactly equitable with the general population

i didn't say exactly equitable, i said 80%. it's not possible to have 80% white guys and not be discriminatory.

you're making a bad faith apples to oranges comparison, to say nothing of the merit of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. your viewpoint and disinterest is very clear, i don't know why you even bother arguing about it.

New comment by phillmv in "Magnifica Humanitas"

phillmv — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:33:06 +0000

the discrimination already happened! it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating. it's curious that the status quo isn't nearly as concerning.

New comment by phillmv in "Magnifica Humanitas"

phillmv — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:20:20 +0000

i like how when a company obviously discriminates against women and minorities by hiring almost entirely white guys that's fine that's to be expected but if you try to fix that discrimination it's an evil conspiracy

New comment by phillmv in "Migrating from Go to Rust"

phillmv — Mon, 25 May 2026 15:23:01 +0000

>Are Go backend building custom auth, admin, DB ORM/migrations/auto migrations, templates, email, dev server etc for each project?

lmao, basically, yes. except when you bring this up ppl think it's not a big deal / a means for self-expression. having to sort through which libraries you prefer to glue together is a kind of freedom, if you squint hard enough.

New comment by phillmv in "Permacomputing Principles"

phillmv — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:54:52 +0000

> does not mean you have to be a post-marxist anarchist

if you oppose a far-right project, what are they going to call you? lol. here is your membership card for the cultural marxist party, welcome aboard comrade!

i just think it's folly for people to complain that "not destroying the environment" is a partisan issue in 2026. being a nice person is a partisan issue in 2026.

New comment by phillmv in "Permacomputing Principles"

phillmv — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:39:18 +0000

>You can advocate for sustainability … while being strongly capitalist just fine. […] excluding a large intersection of people otherwise interested in the non-political parts

the far-right is literally trying to make it illegal for companies to say they're taking environmental concerns seriously (i.e. ESG bans in tx, fl, etc). in 2026, sustainability is not apolitical.

(it's _never_ been apolitical but i will spare you that lecture.)

New comment by phillmv in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

phillmv — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:25:29 +0000

it helps that there's a regulatory agency that verifies the cleanup happened! if the 4th of july might get canceled the following year ppl might be more aggressive around cleaning up.

New comment by phillmv in "Spinel: Ruby AOT Native Compiler"

phillmv — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:42:07 +0000

i have wanted to be able to compile ruby to a binary for some time – and have dreamed of poking at this problem with claude – so this is pretty cool.

if you can get a Rack compatible web server to build… i'd waste some serious time playing with this.

New comment by phillmv in "Codex for almost everything"

phillmv — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:07:46 +0000

giving these things control over your actual computer is a nightmare waiting to happen – i think its irresponsible to encourage it. there ought to be a good real sandbox sitting between this thing and your data.

New comment by phillmv in "Can I run AI locally?"

phillmv — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:20:16 +0000

i can think of some tasks (classification, structured info extraction) that i _imagine_ even small meh models could do quite well at

on data i would never ever want to upload to any vendor if i can avoid it

New comment by phillmv in "We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler"

phillmv — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:56:06 +0000

i mean… your work also went into the training set, so it's not entirely surprising that it spat a version back out!

New comment by phillmv in "Malicious skills targeting Claude Code and Moltbot users"

phillmv — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:17:01 +0000

i can't imagine running these things outside of a vm and it's bizarre to see how many people yolo it

New comment by phillmv in ""Good engineering management" is a fad"

phillmv — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 19:32:00 +0000

i found this comment to be more insightful than the article