Hacker News: ponco

New comment by ponco in "Ben Bernanke Joins Anthropic Oversight Trust"

ponco — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 05:40:08 +0000

I was being a bit cheeky, but I’m not really arguing that individual inventions can be determined as good or bad. My point is it comes from the same underlying mode of production. "Claude is useful" and "the way we have organised society that led to its creation may be ecologically catastrophic” can both be true.

New comment by ponco in "Ben Bernanke Joins Anthropic Oversight Trust"

ponco — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 05:25:17 +0000

Darn, I tried this and the lithium battery kicked in.

New comment by ponco in "Ben Bernanke Joins Anthropic Oversight Trust"

ponco — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:28:54 +0000

The benefits of modernity (electricity, cars, iPhone, Claude) are good, but they come bundled with potentially terminal ecological costs which is bad.

New comment by ponco in "Cocktail Optimization, an Integer Programming Problem"

ponco — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 20:10:28 +0000

Writing a custom solver seems kind of absurd to me. There are 10s(/100s?) of open source ones out there. HiGHS in particular seems to be challenging the paid solvers with its LP improvements of late. But now I want to write my own.

New comment by ponco in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

ponco — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:33:33 +0000

Always good to challenge the narrative - but I don't pay for RDS Postgres because of the WAL, replication, all the beauty of pg etc. I pay RDS because it's largely set and forget. I am gladly paying AWS to think about it for me. I think at a certain scale, this is a really good tradeoff. At the very beginning it could be overkill, and at the top end obviously its unsuitable - but for most of us those tradeoffs are why it's successful.

New comment by ponco in "Can AI Think?"

ponco — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:25:07 +0000

(disclosure: I wrote this)

Can AI Think?

ponco — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:25:07 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@henry.ponco/can-ai-ever-truly-think-92d62e509862

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737293

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by ponco in "AWS engineer reports PostgreSQL perf halved by Linux 7.0, fix may not be easy"

ponco — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:45:01 +0000

more throughput WITHOUT huge tail latency is my understanding. A user above posted this link https://lwn.net/Articles/994322/ which goes into the background. My mental model is "give the kernel more explicit information" and it will be able to make better decisions

New comment by ponco in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

ponco — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:59:11 +0000

I've speculated about this myself, but haven't heard anyone actually discuss it or reveal/leak this is the case. Do you have a source for this?

New comment by ponco in "Warcraft III Peon Voice Notifications for Claude Code"

ponco — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 07:44:38 +0000

`peon --pack peasant`

This was my first thought too, thankfully they thought of it!

New comment by ponco in "Claude Code is being dumbed down?"

ponco — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 05:18:13 +0000

This was a very bitter pill to swallow! It took me more than one mistake to learn this - "you are not the user".

New comment by ponco in "The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup"

ponco — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 07:51:56 +0000

Not OP, but I think that without some creative impetus like 'agency', how useful is an AGI going to be?

New comment by ponco in "The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup"

ponco — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 07:49:43 +0000

I agree. I'm imagining a large software team with hundreds of tickets "ready to be worked on" might support this workflow - but even then, surely you're going to start running into unnecessary conflicts.

The max Claude instances I've run is 2 because beyond that, I'm - as you say - unable to actually determine the next best course during the processing time. I could spend the entire day planning / designing prompts - and perhaps that will be the most efficient software development practise in the future. And/or perhaps there it is a sign I'm doing insufficient design up front.

New comment by ponco in "Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure"

ponco — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 14:42:32 +0000

The privatisation of the commons will endure as our generations' greatest folly. I look at the Australian NBN as a great example of a project that is not economical for a private business to entertain - it requires "The Government" to build. How do we reason with this in the capitalist system?

New comment by ponco in "Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region"

ponco — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 08:55:11 +0000

Respectfully, I don't think that piece adds anything of material substance. It's a list of hollow platitudes (vapid writing listing inactionable truisms).

New comment by ponco in "Computer science courses that don't exist, but should (2015)"

ponco — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 03:55:22 +0000

I reflect on university, and one of the most interesting projects I did was an 'essay on the history of ' as part of an OS course. I chose OS X (Snow Leopard) and digging into the history gave me fantastic insights into software development, Unix, and software commercialisation. Echo your Mr Kay's sentiments entirely.

New comment by ponco in "Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels"

ponco — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 02:16:52 +0000

A simple Google tells me (as I was curious) it's between 6 months to 20 years, with the average being 2 years. https://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+payback+time+solar+pa...

Hard to imagine a large scale rollout like this would have been on the low quality side (plus hey its Germany after all).

New comment by ponco in "Rock, paper, scissors showdown"

ponco — Tue, 27 May 2025 07:38:33 +0000

I had an old colleague who had a favourite lunch room trick - if challenged to Scissors, Paper, Rock then he would win every single time. I presumed it was some kind of behavioural psychology trick, but it didn't occur to me it's just a pattern recognition. Or maybe it was both. I should get in touch again...

The dark side of account bans

ponco — Fri, 09 May 2025 06:29:38 +0000

Article URL: https://madelinemiller.dev/blog/dark-side-account-bans/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43934313

Points: 127

# Comments: 113

New comment by ponco in "Australian Parliament bans social media for under-16s"

ponco — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 06:11:21 +0000

For a time, we did not have an “R” rating for video games and this sort of content called for this rating, which legislation said could not be given. Fortunately saner heads prevailed and they created an “R” rating for video games and this oddity went away.