Hacker News: polytely

New comment by polytely in "The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann's Battle to Publish an Epic (2025)"

polytely — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:23:20 +0000

I haven't read any of his other stuff but I'm very interested in this subject in particular so I'm going pick this up as soon as it is available

New comment by polytely in "Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system"

polytely — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:23:24 +0000

> Automated tests are already the output of these specs, and specs cover way more than what you cover with code.

ok but how are you sure that the AI is correctly turning the spec into tests. if it makes a mistake there and then builds the code in accordance with the mistaken test you only get the Illusion of a correct implementation

New comment by polytely in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

polytely — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:50:01 +0000

unironically yes, I think with the huge payday they get for being responsible for Microsoft they should also carry an equivalent responsibility when they cause social harms. Billionaires have gotten way too comfortable.

New comment by polytely in "OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub"

polytely — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:19:58 +0000

when i use claude opus via opencode/openrouter i'm sometimes suprised by how quickly costs can get out of hand. What are the costs of running openClaw, it seems like it would get crazy expensive crazy fast?

New comment by polytely in "Evolving descriptive text of mental content from human brain activity"

polytely — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:25:30 +0000

torture not being that effective has never stopped the US government before

New comment by polytely in "Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case"

polytely — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:07:49 +0000

I've been using one of these and it is very good.

New comment by polytely in "Sizing chaos"

polytely — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:01:31 +0000

Very cool visualization, worked great on firefox mobile too which isn't always the case with these types of things.

New comment by polytely in "News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns"

polytely — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:27:08 +0000

They run a tight AI ship but it is in their interest to destroy the web so that people can only get to data through their language model

New comment by polytely in "Code is cheap. Show me the talk"

polytely — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:40:07 +0000

as someone who is sort of a medior programmer it is very hard to balance, trying to keep up with the advancements in AI while not shooting myself in the foot by robbing myself of learning experiences

New comment by polytely in "In a genre where spoilers are devastating, how do we talk about puzzle games?"

polytely — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:32:06 +0000

> A game where seeing a single screenshot ruins the experience wasn't very substantial to begin with.

I don't think that follows at all, I'm currently working through Blue Prince and the way in which that game gives you information later on which completely recontextualizes things you have encountered earlier makes it so that a screenshot of something could definitely rob you of experiencing that moment, which is a big part of the joy of that game.

New comment by polytely in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"

polytely — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 23:57:20 +0000

I feel like I'm still a couple steps behind in skill level as my lead and is trying to gain more experience I do wonder if I am shooting myself in the foot if I rely too much on AI at this stage. The senior engineer I'm trying to learn from can very effectively use ai because he has very good judgement of code quality, I feel like if I use AI too much I might lose out on chance to improve my judgement. It's a hard dilemma.

New comment by polytely in "Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal"

polytely — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:40:11 +0000

The RAF does a lot of flights over Gaza so the UK is actually involved, and the big focus in the UK is on Elbit systems who makes parts for the planes that bomb Gaza. The UK government isn't materially supporting the Iranian regime as far as I can tell

New comment by polytely in "Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'"

polytely — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:09:55 +0000

I wonder if having a feel for musical timing works similarly where a brain wave frequency determines how 'thight' your sense of timing is. Would be sick if you could improve that aspect of musicality with stimulation

New comment by polytely in "Claude's new constitution"

polytely — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 11:06:09 +0000

The whole point of those books was to explore the places where those laws produced unexpected behaviour, so they are clearly not sufficient. I would argue those books are actually about demonstrating that it is very hard to build an ethical system out of rules.

New comment by polytely in "Europe could 'weaponize' $10T of US assets over Greenland"

polytely — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:03:44 +0000

If the US would suffer more than the EU we should do it. A less powerful US would be a boon for the world.

New comment by polytely in "Below the Surface: Archeological Finds from the Amsterdam Noord/Zuid Metro Line"

polytely — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:13:21 +0000

the only reason they found all this stuff is because they had to dig deep to make this station, if they hadn't this stuff would just have stayed below ground because there was a whole city on top of this and it is not economically viable to just go dig for this stuff in the middle of the city.

New comment by polytely in "90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet"

polytely — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:24:30 +0000

but US universities aren't working together with Iranian universities, that is the difference

New comment by polytely in "Anyone have experiences with Audio Induction Loops?"

polytely — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:34:40 +0000

Wow the granddad of the chemistry professor of the Periodic Videos[0] youtube channel invented this? wild.

0: https://youtube.com/@periodicvideos

New comment by polytely in "Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation"

polytely — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:44:25 +0000

I think in the case of flying taxi's is just that it is a moronic idea tho.

New comment by polytely in "Backing up Spotify"

polytely — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 11:23:22 +0000

The idea is that the streamers and major labels cannot be trusted to keep this available for future generations, so if we want to preserve our shared culture we should take matters into our own hands.

I think the negatives for artists are minimal while the benefits of preserving a annotated snapshot of contemporary music for future generations is very valuable.