Hacker News: prngl

New comment by prngl in "Interview with Bob Odenkirk"

prngl — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:16:38 +0000

This was an interesting interview. Like a lot of great comedians, Odenkirk has a very grounded and bleak view of the world. I suppose a lot of art, comedy included, is a way of coping with their perspective, for themselves and for the audience.

New comment by prngl in "When the cheap one is the cool one"

prngl — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 04:39:39 +0000

Should have specified old used thinkpads. I’ve never bought one new. My daily driver is 10+yo, bought for $200 and upgraded mem, battery, and ssd with another $100.

New comment by prngl in "When the cheap one is the cool one"

prngl — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 01:06:49 +0000

Resonates. Reminds me of old Thinkpads. Cheap sometimes means accessible, simple, minimal, functional.

Is the Strait of Hormuz Open?

prngl — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:20:54 +0000

Article URL: https://isthestraitopen.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772730

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by prngl in "Public Restroom Doors Are a Nightmare"

prngl — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:06:59 +0000

Very Don Norman problem. It is odd that things like this aren't more of a "solved problem." Maybe they are in some places and builders in the US just ignore the best practices.

Public Restroom Doors Are a Nightmare

prngl — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:06:59 +0000

Article URL: https://holdtherobot.com/blog/public-restroom-doors-are-a-nightmare/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47508352

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by prngl in "Claude struggles to cope with ChatGPT exodus"

prngl — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:21:46 +0000

These are the points I'm making, which I think are fairly one-to-one with my original comment:

- American politics presents a false choice between Democrats and Republicans

- America is both a consumerist and corporatist society

- Anthropic asked for minimal limits on AI usage

- People view Anthropic's stand as heroic, while viewing OpenAI as villainous

- The false choice between Anthropic and OpenAI mirrors the false choice in American politics.

- People at OpenAI, Anthropic, and elsewhere used to view ethical deployment of AI as paramount, but those goalposts have shifted as financial and political incentives changed.

- Specifically, the ethics of AI have become conveniently synonymous with the current financial and political moment.

- The current political moment is fascist.

- Technology is broadly neutral and it is politics that primarily dictates how technology is actually used and deployed, and therefore its broad impacts.

- The internet was developed in the neoliberal era, which began with the election of Ronald Reagan and extended through the Obama presidency.

- The structure and dynamics of the internet over the last 30 years is more reflective of neoliberal politics than it is of anything inherent in the technology. Extreme privitization and the refusal to use public institutions to provision or regulate public goods.

- AI is being developed in a new political era, begun with the first Trump presidency, and taking more full shape under the second Trump presidency.

- We are likely to find that AI's trajectory is similarly dictated largely by politics rather than anything inherent to the technology.

- With this political era being fascist and explicitly neo-imperial/neo-colonial, I fear for the technology's impact on humanity.

- God help us.

New comment by prngl in "Claude struggles to cope with ChatGPT exodus"

prngl — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:39:40 +0000

It's funny how the false choice of American politics (Red vs Blue) also makes it into its consumerist corporatist life. That Anthropic's threadbare "limits" on government usage are seen as a heroic stand is a testament to just how far the goalposts on "ethical" deployment of AI have moved to the (fascist) right. As ever, politics precedes technology. We have Reagan's internet, we will have Trump's AI. God help us.

New comment by prngl in "Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs"

prngl — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 23:22:00 +0000

Looks nice!

New comment by prngl in "America Has Become a Digital Narco-State"

prngl — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 12:44:46 +0000

I think this is spot on. It’s interesting how rhetoric about “liberty” seems to practically serve oligarchy. I suppose an alternative to bans and regulations is to genuinely pursue the elimination of deprivation, orient our collective capacities towards our collective well-being, and then let people do what they will. Anything short of that seems to be a rather false liberty (and a rather false democracy, while we’re at it).

New comment by prngl in "Show HN: KnockKnock – Circular video calls that bring you closer, faster(macOS)"

prngl — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 13:57:28 +0000

Looks nice. Maybe share a bit about the implementation (windowing, networking, security, Mac APIs, …)?

New comment by prngl in "Because I Wanted To"

prngl — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 13:52:34 +0000

Here here. Strategy and efficiency are overrated, desire (even obsession) underrated.

New comment by prngl in "Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy"

prngl — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 20:10:05 +0000

Yes, I think you're right. Seems to reveal a fundamentally extractive, rather than value-generative, economic model.

New comment by prngl in "Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy"

prngl — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:35:02 +0000

I always find it odd when media (and others) consider consumerism as somehow "helping" the economy. The economy is entirely about the collective activity of humans serving humans. Everything we make or do is really about prioritizing that activity over others. Why would it be advantageous to prioritize barely-distinguishable "new" devices over the myriad other things human labor and capital could be put to?

New comment by prngl in "How to use Claude Code for big tasks without turning your code to shit"

prngl — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:55:10 +0000

"Metaphorically, I think about any job given to Claude as having 3 dimensions. There's the breadth of the task (roughly how many lines of code it will touch), the depth of the task (the complexity, the layers of abstraction needed, the decision making involved, etc.), and the time spent working on it. Those three axes define a cube, and the size of the cube is how much entropy I'm shoving into the project."

That's an interesting conceptualization that tracks with my experience using CC. And they were able to get an impressive amount of work done:

"""

The specifics don't matter too much here, but for context, some of what I had it do:

- Research all the available on-device speech-to-text models with permissive licences

- Demo the transcription speed of each one on an android device attached to the PC

- Write a C wrapper for the best one (Moonshine) and build an embeddable dynamic library

- Build this for iOS, Android, Linux, and macOS, and integrate it with my app code using the FFI

- Build a Nim wrapper for the fdk-aac library

- Integrate it with miniaudio, so I can play AAC audio and pipe the audio into Moonshine

"""

How to use Claude Code for big tasks without turning your code to shit

prngl — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:55:10 +0000

Article URL: https://holdtherobot.com/blog/how-to-use-claude-code-for-big-tasks-without-turning-your-code-to-shit/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45880161

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

My computing prayer

prngl — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 23:45:23 +0000

Article URL: https://ryansepassi.com/notes/computing-prayer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45663210

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by prngl in "Two Paths to Memory Safety: CHERI and OMA"

prngl — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:28:12 +0000

Thinking of bunny huang’s open source hardware efforts, a 28nm nommu system seems like a good long term open source target. How much complexity in the system is the mmu, and so how much complexity could we cut out while still having the ability to run third-party untrusted code?

New comment by prngl in "Arenas in Rust"

prngl — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 16:00:12 +0000

I’m sorry, I did not intend to accuse you of being part of the evangelical community. Your article only prompted the thought I shared.

On the technical point, I think I do disagree, but open to changing my mind. What would be better? I’m working on an async runtime currently, written in C, and I’m using several intrusive doubly linked lists because of their properties I mentioned.

New comment by prngl in "Arenas in Rust"

prngl — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:29:31 +0000

That would be the “arbitrarily bounded” allocation. Arbitrary because now you have to make a decision about how many items you’re willing to maintain despite that number being logically determined by a sum over an unknown set of modules.