Hacker News: photios

New comment by photios in "“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers"

photios — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:25:00 +0000

> Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is.

Now add the time dimension - keeping code correct as the business and the people in it change.

That's how I explain to people that LLMs will not replace us developers.

New comment by photios in "As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program"

photios — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 05:08:48 +0000

Too bad nobody needs to eject a floppy disk anymore :D

New comment by photios in "Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books"

photios — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:21:03 +0000

I've gotten yearly performance reviews that have been obviously ChatGPT-generated. People are just lazy.

Some HR systems even support that and have AI writing/rewording integrated.

Corporate hellscapes intensifying, I guess.

New comment by photios in "What liberal arts education is for (2024)"

photios — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:41:14 +0000

Are we reading the same letter?

1 Corinthians 13 has inspired millions. I think I know several movies quoting it.

New comment by photios in "What liberal arts education is for (2024)"

photios — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:01:03 +0000

I stand corrected. I probably went through the Freshman list only.

> The Bhagavad Gita

Well memed, sir!

New comment by photios in "What liberal arts education is for (2024)"

photios — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 06:21:40 +0000

St. Paul's writing has this effect on people. It's either a burst of love and joy or seething hatred. Never in the middle. :D

> There are curricula based on the Great Books.

List not including the greatest book of them all... What did they mean by this?

New comment by photios in "Three Theses on the Literacy Crisis"

photios — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 05:16:59 +0000

Literacy and reading used to be cool and kids read because successful people around them did. I remember that being the case as recently as the 80s and 90s in my small post-Communist country.

Then culture changed [1]. Now we have different role models with mumble rap and songs about "muh pu*y". Is it a surprise kids don't read anymore?

All the issues with schools, infrastructure and technology are secondary. The spark is gone.

[1] Well, it didn't change all by itself and people that changed it have names and addresses, but that's not a HN post.

New comment by photios in "Qwen 3.8"

photios — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:22:38 +0000

Love the deceleration narrative :)

"No, sir, we haven't reached the peak of this tech... It's those open models! Please, keep pumping dollars into the market!"

New comment by photios in "Guerrilla London bus ads mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta glasses campaign"

photios — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 04:35:45 +0000

It's okay to record everyone around you all the time because:

1. Women do it. 2. The government does it. 3. Private businesses do it.

What?!

New comment by photios in "European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS"

photios — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:31:02 +0000

> Roblox made a change where you’re not allowed to share your games with friends unless you do “age verification”

My son had a similar "making games" interests and I just showed him the Godot engine. Roblox bosses are doing you a favor. Act now :D

New comment by photios in "M/PC – A Concatenative OS"

photios — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 05:43:44 +0000

> Unix pipes are basically concatenative, I've often thought how much mileage you could get out of going more in this direction.

You might enjoy the "Shell Has a Forth-like Quality" article. It's changed my shell scripting a lot.

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/13.html

New comment by photios in "Organic Maps"

photios — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:24:49 +0000

Yeah (2) is the killer feature especially in totalitarian shitholes (pretty much every country nowadays) full of money grab ops disguised as police checkpoints and cameras.

I wonder if we can build a decentralized version of such a reporting service.

New comment by photios in "What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)"

photios — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:16:04 +0000

It's not that different. I'd rather have a different way to do UPSERTs or a different window function here and there [1] than figure out every ORM's join syntax or its sneaky ways to SELECT N+1 me into oblivion.

[1] LLMs make these very easy to handle.

New comment by photios in "Nearly 1M people worldwide became millionaires in 2025, UBS report finds"

photios — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 06:01:36 +0000

> Personal wealth in 2025 grew at its fastest pace in years

s/personal wealth/money supply/

Money printer go brrrr...

New comment by photios in "EU Open Sources Ten-Year Network Development Planning Tools"

photios — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 17:32:43 +0000

Cringe. China and Russia are building energy infrastructure and here we have Europe open sourcing tools to help cope with its self-inflicted bureaucratic burdens instead.

Yay, sustainability!

New comment by photios in "My 1992 view of the problems of computer programming in 1992"

photios — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 09:11:41 +0000

> Now a question: Since we're obviously thousands of times better at producing compilers than we were fifteen years ago, so much so that a single undergraduate can write a passable one in four months, why hasn't IBM invested millions of dollars and hundreds of programmer-years to produce a super FORTRAN I compiler that's thousands of times better than the FORTRAN H compiler?

s/FORTRAN I/Mythos/ for the 2026 version of this.

New comment by photios in "Identity verification on Claude"

photios — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:46:46 +0000

I love this. GLM, Kimi, and DeepSeek await :D

New comment by photios in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

photios — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:01:43 +0000

I came back to reread this last sentence three times. Well done, sir, well done!

New comment by photios in "Loreline – Tools for writing interactive fiction"

photios — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 05:05:55 +0000

I wonder if someone's tried IF tools like Inform 7 as the specification language you give an LLM agent. Looks like a good way to describe UI screens.

New comment by photios in "Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]"

photios — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 05:04:53 +0000

These people have names and addresses. Getting them out in the open will help a lot.

I'm not saying we should lynch them, but a good deal of public shaming is in order. Who knows, their kids might pick a different vocation.