Hacker News: refactor_master

New comment by refactor_master in "Wireless magnetic millirobots that deliver medicine inside the beating heart"

refactor_master — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:41:50 +0000

> The researchers successfully tested the robots on phantom heart models that closely mimic a human heart, and on real porcine heart tissue. The robots traveled smoothly and autonomously, even against simulated blood flow.

“In mice” - actually not even.

New comment by refactor_master in "Amazon pushes up prices across the Internet"

refactor_master — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:51:38 +0000

Ironically on this point, Amazon offers some of the best consumer service in Japan. Returns elsewhere are almost impossible.

New comment by refactor_master in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

refactor_master — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:32:51 +0000

> As a parallel, once you learn how to drive you stop walking, as for the primary mode of transportation.

Cars:

- create environments we hate being in

- directly impacts public health

- widens inequality

- makes us productively go faster through the terrible environment we’ve set up

LLMs:

- create markets we hate being in

- directly impacts public health

- widens inequality

- makes us productively put out slop faster through the terrible market we’ve set up

Was this unintended satire?

New comment by refactor_master in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

refactor_master — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:14:52 +0000

That’s what we used to call “bullshitting”.

New comment by refactor_master in "Scientists invent underwater umbrellas to protect coral reefs"

refactor_master — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:48:48 +0000

So how do you install 250k km2 of underwater umbrellas, and who stands to get filthy rich from this?

New comment by refactor_master in "The last time my family was replaced by technology"

refactor_master — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:57:06 +0000

I know what you’re trying to say, but strictly speaking there are many examples of “hard-science” people moving towards and excelling in softer fields, while the opposite is almost never true.

There was a saying where I went to high school: “the language programme students are not better at languages, they’re just worse at math”.

New comment by refactor_master in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

refactor_master — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 05:36:58 +0000

My take is that people “these days” just don’t want to put in the time, money or effort in socializing, especially with new groups of people. Be it dating, meetups or other social gatherings with strangers, it’s about giving as little as you can, in case the event turns out to be a dud. Why risk paying for 2 beers when you could buy one tea for less?

Now, how can I be so sure? Because I’ve been starving at some of these events, whereas others can seemingly call a single slice of pizza dinner.

There’s most definitely a health aspect in there too, but I don’t think it paints the whole story.

New comment by refactor_master in "There is more to code review than (automatable) detection"

refactor_master — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:02:06 +0000

In my experience, automated code review is more pointless than ever.

We have all the linters, tests, and AI writing code for us. I don’t need the left hand to tell the right hand it did a good job. I’m very certain my code runs when I push the PR.

What I need now is architectural, long-horizon and business perspective.

New comment by refactor_master in "There is more to code review than (automatable) detection"

refactor_master — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 23:59:01 +0000

Call for a style guide meeting every time you see feedback like this, and write down what everybody agrees on. You’ll never have to do it again after 3-4 of those. Problem solved.

Still not solved? Guess it was really about the commas and not the value delivered anyway, so do whatever you feel like.

New comment by refactor_master in "Promising discoveries about the potential for life on one of Saturn’s icy moons"

refactor_master — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 02:28:02 +0000

Look up the staggering amount of everyday conveniences invented by space exploration. Theoretically the private market would’ve filled this gap, but in practice we know the market will never be willing to spend the first few trillions on foundational research.

New comment by refactor_master in "Evolving programming languages in the AI era"

refactor_master — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:06:00 +0000

AI still makes mistakes on code with a trillion billion examples, but let’s invent a DSL that only AI can read and hope for the best?

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

refactor_master — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 04:16:32 +0000

Why not spend a few tokens or so on making a frontier LLM build the classifier from scratch? Then you also know exactly what the classifier is capable of, and whether it’s easily learnable/informative data.

Why would you be confident in feeding garbage to a “cheap and fast” classifier with unknown domain-specific performance?

I know we kind assume omniscience for frontier models, but at this point the evidence is kind of out there.

New comment by refactor_master in "Winning the visa lottery"

refactor_master — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 06:39:21 +0000

Not really. China is essentially a microcosm of capitalism playing out entirely internally.

E.g. to move to the capital permanently from outside you're basically under the same scrutiny as an immigrant on a greencard.

New comment by refactor_master in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

refactor_master — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 13:21:20 +0000

Are you insinuating those 1970s fonts takeout fonts aren’t actually how Chinese people communicate? I knew they were AI!

New comment by refactor_master in "Replacing Pull Requests with Delta"

refactor_master — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:59:15 +0000

But what if your PR was created as half chat, then an agent, then some more chat planning, possibly in a new chat to clear the context? I think my teammates would find my inner monologue rather confusing at times.

The sequence of commits I present a purely optimized for reviewing, and not an actual record of what happened. I’m not going to read another person’s 100 turn slop factory, because they couldn’t express their change in one paragraph.

New comment by refactor_master in "Performance Improvements in .NET 11"

refactor_master — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 02:30:46 +0000

Too bad there’s such a lingering culture of Windows and creaky Lenovos and Dells around it. I’m sure it can be different, but I’m not taking my chances ever again. Simply not worth my sanity.

New comment by refactor_master in "OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability"

refactor_master — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:43:14 +0000

> You don't blame a knifemaker for somebody getting cut by a sharp knife. AI is a knife. Very handy, very dangerous. We have to use them safely, that's all there is to it.

If I grossly neglected to maintain live deadly bacteria in my containment facility, am I absolved of blame? Since, you know, the bacteria is the real bad guy who should be put in jail?

New comment by refactor_master in "Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously"

refactor_master — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:01:35 +0000

Until everybody’s AI talks to everybody’s AI and tokens will be churned with no utility, and all the valuable business meetings will happen face to face behind closed doors.

New comment by refactor_master in "Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet"

refactor_master — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:27:48 +0000

> The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like

So… letters?

New comment by refactor_master in "iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max"

refactor_master — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 10:11:23 +0000

If you think a cryptographically signed image can’t be JPEGed 5 times and shared on Facebook for misinformation then here’s a relevant XKCD for you:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png