Hacker News: pnathan

New comment by pnathan in "Taste Is All That's Left"

pnathan — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:38:29 +0000

> Suppose you have taste. Suppose you paid the full price and you can feel the sag in the sentence and the wrongness in the function. > > Congratulations! You now ship at exactly the same speed as the person who cannot.

Yes, previously the person who didn't understand shipped faster. It was a long standing problem. The people who crapped, got the bonus, and ran were much faster than the patient engineer of quality.

By the way, what were the essays that formulated Claude Style? if the author was indeed formed by them, I'd like to read them - or at least enough of them to understand.

New comment by pnathan in "Almost no skill required to cook a steak"

pnathan — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:29:49 +0000

Reflecting on the matter with a colleague -

Some people just want to _cook the steak_.

They don't want to attend or understand to cuts, thermometers, and searing.

New comment by pnathan in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

pnathan — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:09:01 +0000

(1) personally very annoying. I have been using fable to try to collect cutting edge math in one area and work on a hopefully new result with lean verification.

(2) I am really tired of the AI community trying to threaten everyone with grey goo and finding out the hype doesn't land comfy with others. It's a freaking text generator, not god in a pocket.

New comment by pnathan in "I Made the "Next-Level" Camera and I love it"

pnathan — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:29:51 +0000

Shoot at high f numbers - as high as the lens will take without inducing diffraction.

New comment by pnathan in "I Made the "Next-Level" Camera and I love it"

pnathan — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:26:47 +0000

I have found TTArtisans 50mm f0.95 to be quite nice.

New comment by pnathan in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

pnathan — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:18:04 +0000

This is good. I recently had to replace a generally working phone because the battery was dying and there was no cost effective & reliable means of replacing.

A proper gasket and screws needs to be the standard solution here.

New comment by pnathan in "Are LLM merge rates not getting better?"

pnathan — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:57:45 +0000

Data is missing on this chart.

It's my experience that opus 4, and then, particularly, 4.5, in Claude code, are head and shoulders above the competition.

I wrote an agentic coder years ago and it yielded trash. (Tried to make it do then what kiro does today).

The models are better. Now, caveat - I don't use anything but opus for coding - Sonnet doesn't do the trick. My experience with Codex and Gemini is that their top models are as good as Sonnet for coding...

New comment by pnathan in "When AI writes the software, who verifies it?"

pnathan — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 02:19:07 +0000

I am experimenting at a very early stage with using Verus in Rust to generate proveably correct Rust. I let the AI bang on the proof and trust the proof assistant to confirm it.

There is another route with Lean where Rust generates the Lean and there is proof done there but I haven't chased that down fully.

I think formal verification is a big win in the LLM era.

New comment by pnathan in "Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)"

pnathan — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:20:16 +0000

I'd have to see more to have a final thought.

As presented, Gollum is badly off, I reckon - missing the books textual description. The flowers are out of line.

The dragon scene is wonderful and captures the situation.

The dwarves are a bit dopy looking but I think could cohere with the early introduction in the Hobbit.

New comment by pnathan in "Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking"

pnathan — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:10:38 +0000

Great article.

I do have a deep fondness for SF billboards being building-stuff oriented. I don't care for consumerism.

The vapidity of the products created is remarkable, however.

New comment by pnathan in "Clawdbot Renames to Moltbot"

pnathan — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 04:01:33 +0000

I'm looking forward to when I can run a tolerably useful model locally. Next time I buy a desktop one of its core purposes will be to run models for 24/7 work.

New comment by pnathan in "After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand"

pnathan — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:26:54 +0000

a lot of AI assisted development goes into project management and system design.

I have been tolerably successful. However, I have almost 30 years of coding experience, and have the judgement on how big a component should be - when I push that myself _or_ with AI, things go hairy.

ymmv.

New comment by pnathan in "There is an AI code review bubble"

pnathan — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:19:46 +0000

Claude code's code review is _sufficient_ imo.

still need HITL, but the human is shifted right and can do other things rather than grinding through fiddly details.

New comment by pnathan in "The coming industrialisation of exploit generation with LLMs"

pnathan — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:56:53 +0000

I don't remember all the places I got software... :)

New comment by pnathan in "The coming industrialisation of exploit generation with LLMs"

pnathan — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:17:54 +0000

> 30 years ago, it was safe to go to vendor XY page and download his latest version and it was more or less waterproof.

You _are_ joking, right? I distinctly remember all sorts of dubious freewarez sites with slightly modified installers. 1997-2000 era. And anti-virus was a thing in MS-DOS even.

New comment by pnathan in "The coming industrialisation of exploit generation with LLMs"

pnathan — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:12:29 +0000

I am working on a little project in my offhours, and asked a non-hacker (but competent programmer) friend to take a run at exploiting it. Great success: my project was successfully exploited.

The industrialization of exploit generation is here IMO.

New comment by pnathan in "Anthropic: Developing a Claude Code competitor using Claude Code is banned"

pnathan — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 21:30:10 +0000

I am _much_ more interested in i. building cool software for other things and ii. understanding underlying underlying models than building "better claude code".

New comment by pnathan in "Anna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension"

pnathan — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:50:30 +0000

Did the operators _want_ to poke the well connected & well funded bear with a historical anger problem?

New comment by pnathan in "AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'"

pnathan — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 22:04:27 +0000

This is it. Otherwise I'd know more about $that_technology than I would otherwise.

New comment by pnathan in "AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'"

pnathan — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 18:16:26 +0000

I - senior - can patch an application in an unknown language and framework with the AI. I know enough to tell it to stop the wildly stupid ideas.

But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm.

I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash.

Food for thought.