Hacker News: refactor_master

New comment by refactor_master in "Is my blue your blue?"

refactor_master — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 05:08:18 +0000

I only know chartreuse from the liquor.

I thought it was green though.

New comment by refactor_master in "The first 40 months of the AI era"

refactor_master — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:50:40 +0000

If you’re an employee who can finish their work 25% faster but you’re not getting a 4-day work week, what are the incentives for not introducing creep?

New comment by refactor_master in "Chest Fridge (2009)"

refactor_master — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:01:08 +0000

Most people in dense urban areas would actually pay less. By going vertical you’re freezing a whole m2 that was otherwise necessarily occupied by the fridge. In most places, 300 kWh is much cheaper than an extra irrevocable m2 for your fridge.

Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge.

New comment by refactor_master in "Why I'm Not Worried About Running Out of Work in the Age of AI"

refactor_master — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:50:54 +0000

> The real move for the autoworker was sideways, not upward: industrial maintenance, tool and die work, welding, industrial electrical work, construction trades, trucking, or logistics.

But in an AI post-work future, all the sideways moves have also been taken over by AI and robots. After all, “knowledge work” as a discipline will not be there, right? Whether I can write code, manage teams or copywrite. All of them automated.

When the complexity vs cost of automation tips in the favor of humans, that’s where I’ll have to skill to. You said it, trucking, welding, … That I have a PhD in knowledge work is just worthless paper now.

New comment by refactor_master in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

refactor_master — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:15:25 +0000

To add to this, voicing is also a way for Japanese words to become more “coherent”, the same way you write “dislike-chopsticks” as one combined noun, and not “dislike chopsticks”.

New comment by refactor_master in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

refactor_master — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:07:25 +0000

Well that certainly depends on the establishment. I’ve picked out plenty of splinters here in Japan.

New comment by refactor_master in "Comparing Python Type Checkers: Typing Spec Conformance"

refactor_master — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:10:29 +0000

How does Zuban manage to be developed by what appears to be a single person without megacorp backing, yet be mere inches behind pyright at this stage?

New comment by refactor_master in "Big data on the cheapest MacBook"

refactor_master — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:08:02 +0000

I think it’s relevant to first read [1] to see why they’re doing this. It’s basically done as a meme.

[1] https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/

New comment by refactor_master in "If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?"

refactor_master — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 05:54:52 +0000

If A vibes, and B is overwhelmed with noise, how does B reliably go through it? If using AI, this necessarily faces the same problems that recording all A's actions was trying to solve in the first place, and we'd be stuck in a never-ending cycle.

We could also distribute the task to B, C, D, ... N actors, and assume that each of them would "cover" (i.e. understand) some part of A's output. But this suddenly becomes very labor intensive for other reasons, such as coordination and trust that all the reviewers cover adequately within the given time...

Or we could tell A that this is not a vibe playground and fire them.

New comment by refactor_master in "AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton"

refactor_master — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:12:54 +0000

Here’s a talk about leaning into the garbage flow. And that was a decade ago.

https://youtu.be/E8Lhqri8tZk

I can’t imagine the number being economically meaningful now.

New comment by refactor_master in "Roads to Rome (2015)"

refactor_master — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:33:15 +0000

Yes, even ferries in Scandinavia can be roads when it makes for a better map… Or not ferries in the Mediterranean when it doesn’t.

Honestly I think this part

> The resulting images bring insights into the ways in which road infrastructure reflect regional, political and geographical situations.

should just be taken as pseudo-profound art fluff. Are you telling me all Greek commercial transport goes straight through non-Schengen instead of just ferrying across?

New comment by refactor_master in "The Problem with LLMs"

refactor_master — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 06:06:03 +0000

Yes, that seems to hold for rocks. But that doesn’t shut down the original post’s premise, unless you hold the answer to what can and cannot be banged together to create emergent intelligence.

New comment by refactor_master in "Why "just prompt better" doesn't work"

refactor_master — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 05:06:04 +0000

I think it's meant to be taken more in the abstract. Yes, LLM can refuse your request, and yes you can ask it to prepend "have you checked that it already exists?", but it can't directly challenge your super long-range assumptions the same way as another person saying at the standup "this unrelated feature already does something similar, so maybe you can modify it to accomplish both the original goal and your goal", or they might say "we have this feature coming up, which will solve your goal". Without proper alignment you're just churning out duplicate code at a faster rate now.

New comment by refactor_master in "Beyond agentic coding"

refactor_master — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 13:10:17 +0000

It’s interesting then to ask if this will behave the same as big orgs? Eg once your org is big and settled, anything but the core product and adjacent services become impossible, which is why 23 often see a 50-person company out-innovating a 5k person company in tech (only to be bought up and dismantled, of course, but that’s besides this point).

Will agents simply dig the trenches deeper towards the direction of the best existing tests, and does it take a human to turn off the agent noise and write code manually for a new, innovative direction?

New comment by refactor_master in "I miss thinking hard"

refactor_master — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:23:08 +0000

But the code you’re writing is guard railed by your oversight, the tests you decide on and the type checking.

So whether you’re writing the spec code out by hand or ask an LLM to do it is besides the point if the code is considered a means to an end, which is what the post above yours was getting at.

New comment by refactor_master in "Why The Jetsons still matters (2012)"

refactor_master — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:20:49 +0000

Maybe I was stupid or maybe it just doesn’t hit the same way if you don’t grow up in the US, but I remember not being terribly fascinated by it as a 90s kid. In fact, I found it kind of uncanny that the world felt so… disconnected. I later learned this was called “modernist architecture”.

New comment by refactor_master in "A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch"

refactor_master — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 03:11:26 +0000

Hell, my bed is on the floor, and my sofa is now also a pillow on the floor.

New comment by refactor_master in "Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them"

refactor_master — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 01:45:40 +0000

I still get made-up Python types all the time with Gemini. Really quite distracting when your codebase is massive and triggers a type error, and Gemini says

"To solve it you just need to use WrongType[ThisCannotBeUsedHere[Object]]"

and then I spend 15 minutes running in circles, because everything from there on is just a downward spiral, until I shut off the AI noise and just read the docs.

New comment by refactor_master in "Some ecologists fear their field is losing touch with nature"

refactor_master — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 02:47:46 +0000

I think this is a classic old-vs-new tale. I started my PhD in biochemical research where analyzing data by hand was definitely a "craft" in some aspects. Later I forewent going to the lab entirely and instead spent all my time on developing machine learning for automated data analysis. But just like field work, you still need people in labs who can continue the craft.

The article should perhaps introspect a bit more instead of setting up a false dichotomy between "rainforest field work or computers".

New comment by refactor_master in "Paperbacks and TikTok"

refactor_master — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 02:27:35 +0000

But that’s more of a theoretical truth than a practical one, isn’t it? High quality novels are easily found. TikTok videos of equally high quality and depth? Perhaps not so, or exceedingly rarely.

Infinite monkeys with infinite time could surely also produce something spectacular and eye-opening, statistically speaking. But umm, you’d have to wait infinite time for it to be done, so it’s not really efficient when time is a finite resource.