<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: prescriptivist</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=prescriptivist</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:27:35 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=prescriptivist" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "Claude Design"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> good writing, good art, thoughtful code architecture<p>If you are talking about a consumer product, one of these is not like the others.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:58:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47808692</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47808692</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47808692</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "North American English Dialects"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just an update to this. I realize I misspoke and misnamed where that last accent comes from. It's too late for me to edit the original comment, so I'm just going to drop it in here. There's no such thing as the Allagash Valley, only the St. John Valley.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 05:51:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802817</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802817</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47802817</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "North American English Dialects"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maine has multiple distinct accents, though like the parent said, it's not worth making the distinction unless it's for a project like this.<p>In southern Maine, the accent is moderate and is more of a general northern New England accent. Yahd = yard, that kind of thing.<p>The iconic Maine accent is the Downeast accent and is still kicking up/down there. It's kind of nasally and has a lilt to it. You have to dig through a morass of influencer content on youtube to find an authentic example of it, but this is a good one: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZDpx1aLovc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZDpx1aLovc</a><p>But there are a number of different accents throughout Maine. My favorite without a doubt is the accent in way northern Maine, from the Allagash Valley. It's just a pleasant accent. This is a good example: <a href="https://soundcloud.com/mpbn/troy-jackson-allagash-logging" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/mpbn/troy-jackson-allagash-logging</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 02:48:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801976</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801976</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801976</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's no shortage of third places in the American suburbs, you just have to drive to them. I'm sympathetic to the argument that walkable third places are better third places because I lived car-free in New York City for a decade and enjoyed many of them. But living in the suburbs or exurbs doesn't inherently mean you don't have access to shared communal spaces.<p>If I believed there is a crisis of isolation in the United States and degradation of community, I would first focus on more recent technologies, say ones introduced around 2007, than on technologies introduced in the early 1900s.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:48:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47796121</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47796121</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47796121</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I didn't really say what my perspective is on whether the suburbs are good or bad or cars are good or bad. I think there are plenty of reasonable arguments as to whether they are or not. What I am dubious about is that they are somehow the source of some hand-wavy "widespread" mental health issue in America.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:33:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47795900</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47795900</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47795900</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people.<p>Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:48:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47793869</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47793869</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47793869</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>  And yet the companies doing that in those previous generations managed to produce huge profits significantly faster than Generative AI has.<p>Have you considered a simple answer to this inconsistency? The market and investors does not demand that these AI companies make a profit. The only reason companies are expected to make profits is because either those who own shares in the company expect it, or those willing to invest in a company expect it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:26:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778671</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778671</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778671</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Correct, seems like my memory failed me on that one.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:25:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775393</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775393</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775393</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>On top of that, the APIs/Tools/Function Calls into the real world don't exist yet. But consumer products are going to start eventually exposing functionality to these LLMs. By that time, I wonder if we'll all have an edge-inference box sitting in every one of our houses that we buy from a consumer products company like Apple or from Amazon, or directly from OpenAI or Anthropic. These little brains will be the low latency central nervous system of a lot of things in our homes, and gateways to the larger models in the cloud. Or at least that's how I imagine it sorting out in the future.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:17:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775342</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775342</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775342</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Comparing the IPO market today to the IPO market in the late 90s is not very instructive. You could have IPO'd a lemonade stand in 1998 and raised $10 million.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:11:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775300</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775300</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775300</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The lead singer caught my eye and gave me a wide grin<p>Daft Punk doesn't have a singer and unless it was a very early show they wouldn't have seen them smile. Most big beat shows wouldn't have a dedicated vocalist. I'd guess Underworld or Prodigy, but lean toward Underworld.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 03:42:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47774450</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47774450</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47774450</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I used Emacs for about a decade and then switched to VS Code about eight years ago. I was curious about the state of Claude Code integration with Emacs, so I installed it to try out a couple of the Claude packages. My old .emacs.d that I toiled many hours to build is somewhere on some old hard drive, so I decided to just use Claude code to configure Emacs from scratch with a set of sane defaults.<p>I proceeded to spend about 45 minutes configuring Emacs. Not because Claude struggled with it, but because Claude was amazing at it and I just kept pushing it well beyond sane default territory. It was weirdly enthralling to have Claude nail customizations that I wouldn't have even bothered trying back in the day due to my poor elisp skills. It was a genuinely fun little exercise. But I went back to VS Code.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 04:45:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646174</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646174</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646174</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "Honda is killing its EVs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Another comment said it, but that's basically land protected from most use, with some exceptions that are more akin to our national park system, right? I'm talking more about BLM lands in the west, or national forests in the east. Also, there are states with significant public lands holdings that are in the same spirit.<p>With our public lands, I can usually go to them anytime I want, I don't have to reserve anything. I can park my car, I can get out, and I can begin just walking into  the woods or grasslands, sometimes on trail, sometimes off. I can basically camp wherever I want in many of these places. If there's a stream, I can fly fish. If it's hunting season, I can hunt. I can basically disappear into a place that feels wild for a bit.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:53:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47425835</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47425835</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47425835</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "Honda is killing its EVs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I want to say this with the caveat that I am generally a person who always contends with the contradictions of living in a capitalist-imperialist country and my own distaste for it. So this doesn't come from a place of American exceptionalism writ large, but I am a firm believer the we did get this part right:<p>Public lands and culture of the ability to access wild places, whether for hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, and just generally an affordance of access to wilderness that is codified into the laws of the country. In Europe they have the concept of "Right to Roam" which is a powerful concept that I appreciate (and in ways is superior to our systems for just walking in the woods) but it is also fundamentally different than the almost legalistic systems we have in this country towards public lands.<p>My surface understanding of China is that there is no such broad remit given to the people of China and there aren't designated places where the people of China can just go and exist in wilderness. Such places might exist by convention but they don't have the sort of legal framework that we have in America to recreate in these places.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 03:16:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47421238</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47421238</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47421238</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "We might all be AI engineers now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm a principal engineer, been working on the same set of codebases for almost 10 years. I handle the 20% or so of my time that constitutes inbound faster than ever and I know because that inbound volume has clearly increased and yet I have, for the first time ever, begun chipping away at the "nice to have" backlog. My biggest time sink now is interviewing and code reviews -- the latter being directly proportional to the velocity increase across the teams I work with. Actually that's my biggest concern -- we are approaching a breaking point for code review volume.<p>Sorry I don't have DX stats or token usage stats I can share, but based on the directives from on high, those stats are highly correlated (in the positive).<p>[edit] And SEV rates are not meaningfully higher.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Mar 2026 03:46:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47284288</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47284288</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47284288</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "We might all be AI engineers now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Congrats on that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:31:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282508</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282508</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282508</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "We might all be AI engineers now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> We can in fact just NOT do things!<p>I agree with you on that. Not just on AI but a lot of things that suck about this world, and in particular the United States. But capital is too powerful. And these tools are legitimately transformative for business. And business pays our bills and, more importantly, provides the healthcare insurance for our families. The wheel is a real fucking drag isn't it?<p>I don't see anything short of a larger revolution against capital stopping or even stemming this. For that to really happen we would need a lot more people and interests than just those of software practitioners. Which may come yet when trucking jobs collapse and customer service jobs disappear. I don't know. I do know that I'm taking part in something that will potentially (likely?) seed the end of my career as I know it but it's just one of many contradictions that I live with. In the meantime the tools are impressive and I'm just figuring out how to live with them and do good work with them and as you can probably tell, I'm pretty convinced that's the best we can make of the situation right now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:27:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282480</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282480</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282480</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "We might all be AI engineers now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Is there no longer any need to think about new software paradigms, build new frameworks, study computer science, because the regurgitated statistical version of programming is entirely good enough?<p>All I'm saying is you're gonna have to figure out how to do this with an agent. It's not that I don't see value in the craft; it's just that value is less important. As far as the new paradigms, the new frameworks, new studies in computer science -- they still exist, it's just that they are going to focus on how to mitigate heisenbugs, performance regressions and security holes in agent written code. Who knows.. in five years most of the code written may not even be readable. I'm not saying it's going to be like that, but it's entirely possible.<p>In the meantime, there's nothing stopping you from using the agent to write the code that is every bit as high quality as if you sat down and typed it in yourself. And right now there is a category of engineers that exclusively use agents to create quality software and they are more efficient at it than anybody that just does it themselves. And that category is growing and growing every day.<p>I may be out a job in five years because all of this. But I am seeing where this is going and it's clear and so I'm going to have to change with it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:09:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282331</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282331</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282331</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "We might all be AI engineers now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think that people who don't want to use these tools or clean old ways are incurious. But I think these developers should face the fact that those skills and those ways they are reticent to give up are more or less obviated at this point. Not in the future, but now. It's just that the adoption of these tools isn't evenly distributed yet.<p>I think there's a place for thoughtful dialogue around what this means for software engineering, but I don't think that's going to change anything at this point. If developers just don't want to participate in this new world, for whatever reason, I'm not judging them, but also I don't think the genie is going back in the bottle. There will be no movement to organize labor to protect us and there be no deus ex machina that is going to reverse course on this stuff.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:57:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280960</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280960</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280960</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by prescriptivist in "We gave terabytes of CI logs to an LLM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Glad to hear this. I actually went down this path based off of guidance from multiple LLMs (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.), so I wasn't sure if it was just some kind of weird hallucination they all had or if they were regurgitating a very small amount of knowledge on this topic, because it was kinda hard to find stories where people had success with these strategies. Thank you for the link to the paper. I will definitely be reading it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 01 Mar 2026 20:43:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47210469</link><dc:creator>prescriptivist</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47210469</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47210469</guid></item></channel></rss>