Hacker News: rco8786

New comment by rco8786 in "Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red"

rco8786 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:33:13 +0000

Sounds eerily familiar to how we talked about ChatGPT doing [various things that it now does easily] when it was released.

New comment by rco8786 in "Coding is not solved"

rco8786 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:07:58 +0000

Nothing you’re saying excludes AI from writing code. In fact I’ll bet my salary that boto3 has AI written code in it and you happily trust it.

New comment by rco8786 in "Coding is not solved"

rco8786 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:03:18 +0000

You can’t say a new project is battle tested. Those are mutually exclusive, regardless of who or what wrote the code.

New comment by rco8786 in "Coding is not solved"

rco8786 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:01:52 +0000

Low trust is not a reason that code can’t be battle tested. All non battle tested code starts as low trust by default. AI written or otherwise. I’m not even sure what you mean by fragmentation tbh. This feels like a very vague argument in general.

But you’re right that it’s the hill climb of human trust that AI is going through right now. Some of us are just farther along than others. Some of us refuse to consider trusting AI out of fear, and not rational evaluation of its capability.

New comment by rco8786 in "Coding is not solved"

rco8786 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:05:10 +0000

That's because it's new. libflac and libcurl didn't come out as battle tested code. That takes time and...battles. And what are those battles if not people seeing issues with what those libraries are doing and fixing the code? There absolutely no reason that AI written code can't or won't become battle tested.

New comment by rco8786 in "Coding is not solved"

rco8786 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:47:36 +0000

Of course. And then we fix the problem. It's no different here. The point is that reading the code first is absolutely not a requirement when adopting a new library.

New comment by rco8786 in "Coding is not solved"

rco8786 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:16:40 +0000

I believe I can understand how a library behaves from the README and docs. I do this all the time. We all do.

New comment by rco8786 in "Coding is not solved"

rco8786 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:15:33 +0000

Are they? I've never been able to blame library authors or hold them accountable for code running in my production environment.

New comment by rco8786 in "Coding is not solved"

rco8786 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:59:54 +0000

> believing you can understand the behaviour of a program without at least reading the high level code is truly silly.

have you ever used a library after only reading the README and documentation, or do you always pull the source and read through it before you think you understand it?

New comment by rco8786 in "Claude's Load-Bearing Seams"

rco8786 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 22:54:11 +0000

Yes I’ve noticed AI speak popping up more in verifiably human communications also.

New comment by rco8786 in "A Tesla ran a stop sign and killed a man, Full Self-Driving/Autopilot was on"

rco8786 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:47:36 +0000

That's extremely silly. drunk, inexperienced, and elderly drivers are all human drivers. You can't just exclude them from your baseline because they are not in perfect driving form.

Let's also exclude young drivers, stupid drivers, distracted drivers, drivers who never took driver's education classes, short drivers, barefoot drivers, glasses-wearing drivers who forgot their glasses, and one handed drivers.

The insane variation of human drivers is exactly why AVs should ultimately bring vehicular deaths down..which is the goal.

New comment by rco8786 in "A Tesla ran a stop sign and killed a man, Full Self-Driving/Autopilot was on"

rco8786 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:45:08 +0000

> I don't need to consult a datasheet or design an AI test suite with a zillion simulations and a bunch of closed-course tests.

Traffic engineers have been doing this for decades though?

New comment by rco8786 in "A Tesla ran a stop sign and killed a man, Full Self-Driving/Autopilot was on"

rco8786 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:04:24 +0000

I don't know anything about this specific case but this exact thing will be a major barrier for autonomous vehicles to overcome. Instead of benchmarking AVs against the current, human-caused number of vehicular deaths - people will naturally benchmark AVs to 0 and treat every instance of death as a failure of AVs, even if the reality is that AVs end up 99% safer than human controlled vehicles.

New comment by rco8786 in "PageRank explained"

rco8786 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:15:09 +0000

Please, tell me more about my educational background.

New comment by rco8786 in "Study reveals UnitedHealth's profit margins four times what it claimed [pdf]"

rco8786 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:10:49 +0000

Seems to me that the argument is really "are my premiums a passthrough to medical providers" and I have a really hard time answering Yes to that.

If they are, then what do we call it when my medical expenses surpass my premiums? Negative passthrough? Contra passthrough?

What do we call it when I pay premiums for a year, never use a dime of it, and then cancel my insurance? I don't get that money back, nor does it get passed through to medical providers.

Do life insurance companies consider my premiums to be a passthrough to my eventual benefit payment or do they count them as revenue?

New comment by rco8786 in "Study reveals UnitedHealth's profit margins four times what it claimed [pdf]"

rco8786 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:09:27 +0000

No, they're collecting money specifically on behalf of a 3rd party and then giving it directly to that 3rd party. They are custodians of that money only, it never even hits their bank account (goes into a dedicated trust account before distribution), and they cannot legally keep it. THAT is an actual passthrough.

New comment by rco8786 in "It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI"

rco8786 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:25:54 +0000

We have this in our harness markdown:

```

## Comments

Use comments extremely sparingly. Most comments should be at the request of the user. When something warrants a comment, keep it to one or two lines: what the code does and why it's necessary. No background narrative, no replaying the investigation or failure mode, nothing a test name or the commit message already says. Applies to specs too. If a comment needs a paragraph, make the code clearer instead.

```

The comments Claude was leaving got absolutely out of control. Just lines and lines of LLM drivel that was barely intelligible and not remotely relevant to what a code comment should be used for.

New comment by rco8786 in "Study reveals UnitedHealth's profit margins four times what it claimed [pdf]"

rco8786 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:22:44 +0000

Not sure I'm buying it tbh. I'm no fan of the American healthcare system, but we don't need to invent new accounting to make it look worse than it is.

Lots of businesses and industries have legal obligations to pay money for various things at various times, they don't treat that as pass through...it's revenue and expenses. Money is fungible.

New comment by rco8786 in "PageRank explained"

rco8786 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:06:12 +0000

Pretty sure that came after. And funding never made anyone smarter.

New comment by rco8786 in "New MCP Roadmap"

rco8786 — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:24:25 +0000

> With the 2026-07-28 release, a remote MCP server is now no different from any other HTTP workload

Good. Introducing a bespoke new protocol was one of the more bone-headed things MCP did on initial release.