Hacker News: saulpw

New comment by saulpw in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

saulpw — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 22:49:32 +0000

It's tricky because I don't want to write what no one is going to read (but that for some reason I'm required to write).

New comment by saulpw in "The senior engineer death spiral"

saulpw — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:19:15 +0000

Yeah should have put it through an LLM to clean it up.

New comment by saulpw in "One-Electron Universe"

saulpw — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:16:12 +0000

Yeah an electron is not a 'thing'. It's like saying there's only one wave in the ocean.

New comment by saulpw in "Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage"

saulpw — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:49:33 +0000

"Awhile" IME is 3-6 months. And they won't stay for 10% more when Meta offers them 50% more. It's brutal but I'm not sure the economics of 'training' add up for any individual company.

New comment by saulpw in "How to Write with an LLM"

saulpw — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 23:20:44 +0000

I wrote a contract proposal a few months ago and I absolutely did a few rounds with an LLM to get the result I wanted. Anyone applying for a job should be doing this with their cover letters. You know that HR has a pipeline set up with a prompt like "here's the job description, here's the candidate's info, rate the candidate on a scale from 1-10" so you can do the same and learn how to boost your own signal. I have zero qualms about doing this.

As for "verbiage", I guess that's too bad, I'm going to continue using it anyway. Interesting factoid about the word though. I will say that "utilize" is one of my pet peeves (99% of the time the word you actually want is "use") and I've excised it from my spoken vocabulary, but I like(d) how verbiage rhymes with foliage so I'm more reticent to give that one up.

New comment by saulpw in "How to Write with an LLM"

saulpw — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 21:32:41 +0000

You have to assume that in many situations a human is asking an LLM about the content you've provided, even if they or another human reads some or all of it themselves too. So it's valuable to proactively ask your own LLM in the same way, so you can see what the other person will get out of it. And tune the verbiage until the LLM tells them what you want it to :)

New comment by saulpw in "Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage"

saulpw — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 21:09:43 +0000

So let's think one more step out. You're supposed to train your juniors so that you have seniors when everyone else is scrambling. But when everyone is scrambling, the biggest and most-funded/most-profitable companies will be offering a lot more money than you can afford to pay your now-senior devs. Now I suppose you think those former juniors would be so grateful that you trained them, that they would be loyal to your company and continue working for what you're paying them, right? ...right?

New comment by saulpw in "More than 100k people in Japan are now aged 100 or older"

saulpw — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:37:59 +0000

A 100-year-old's children are 70-80 years old themselves, if they are still alive. They very well might be not be capable of taking care of a 100-year-old person. And not everyone has children. Rather than throw up our hands and say "too bad", perhaps we collectively have some responsibility to take care of those who aren't able to take care of themselves?

New comment by saulpw in "I hate you Microsoft"

saulpw — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:59:53 +0000

Perhaps Microsoft is the biggest one though? (Who could possibly be bigger?)

New comment by saulpw in "I Don't Like LLMs"

saulpw — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:29:25 +0000

I've had several jobs that were great for the first 12-18 months before the manager that hired me left. Then they sucked for another couple years but the pay didn't change.

New comment by saulpw in "Small programming tricks"

saulpw — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:54:37 +0000

I thought it sounded like a nice gesture of trying to be helpful and making a small connection with their coworkers. One message a day is hardly "a bunch of noise". Even though you say you wouldn't have said anything at the company, you said something here, and that has a similar chilling effect on other people who might have been inspired by the OP to share their tips and tricks with their coworkers.

Sorry for the "personal attack" but my point stands, you may not think of yourself as a jerk, but I saw your comment and thought "this guy imagining himself being annoyed at a coworker for a daily message with a helpful tip might be more of a jerk than he realizes". As a jerk myself I judged myself qualified to make that assessment and commented accordingly.

New comment by saulpw in "Small programming tricks"

saulpw — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:52:44 +0000

s/seen as//

Annoyance is a clue; not about them, but about you.

New comment by saulpw in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)"

saulpw — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 23:17:25 +0000

> doing that on a blog has become much harder nowadays because trust in written content has been lost.

I also like writing, but I started a podcast for similar reasons. I call it "proof of human".

Show HN: Below the Root (1984 game) ported to JavaScript

saulpw — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 17:57:12 +0000

As a kid, I loved this relatively unknown game, Below the Root. The world-building of the original trilogy of novels from the 1970s, is lovingly carried through into this side-scrolling "platform-adventure".

You can play the IBM PC port of this game online fairly easily, but the quality of the C64 version is much better (non-dithered graphics, better colors, polyphonic sound). However I found there was a lot of friction to just play the C64 version. So back in 2013, I tried restoring and packaging the C64 version of the game to make it just one step to play. I made a bootable x86 ISO with a Linux unikernel that only ran the VICE C64 emulator, pre-configured to launch the game from some .G64 disk images that a German hacker cracked for me. Took about 4 months of effort and the results were mid; the game would be running from VMWare boot in 5 seconds but it still required a whole VM, the sound was choppy, and save games were kind of a hassle. I made a basic webpage and shelved it as a beta experiment.

Then, for some reason about a week ago I decided to try again. But this time I directed Fable and Astra in varying capacities to dissect and disassemble the original .G64 images, produce a spec, and produce a Javascript version equivalent to the original. They got about 75% mostly autonomously in a single evening. I've since spent a few tens of hours playing it through, getting bugs fixed, tweaking the interface, improvements, and writing the About page. I had to have some difficult conversations with Claude and I made some unpopular decisions, but after all that, this is the result and I'm kinda proud of it. It's not a major project, but then it never should have been.

So I just wanted to share this game from my childhood and the process and the result. Hope other people remember this game fondly and enjoy playing it again!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686686

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by saulpw in "Show HN: Bodily Oddities"

saulpw — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 16:35:28 +0000

Migraines don't have to be painful, and 'inverted tunnel vision' is one of the effects I've experienced.

New comment by saulpw in "Show HN: Bodily Oddities"

saulpw — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:22:02 +0000

Sounds like a migraine.

New comment by saulpw in "Feeling Sad about AI"

saulpw — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:01:24 +0000

You can't cross the Hudson. Every crossing bans ridden animals. If you can find a ferry to take your horse I'll concede the point. But...good luck.

New comment by saulpw in "Feeling Sad about AI"

saulpw — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:42:45 +0000

You can't ride a horse from New York to Washington DC today, and it hasn't been possible for almost 100 years.

So enjoy the manual coding while you can. I don't hold out hope that it will be possible in the long run.

New comment by saulpw in "Hear Me Out: If We Find Life Out There Maybe We Should Kill It"

saulpw — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 01:48:17 +0000

Well, hm, for the best of the world you may have a point.. :)

New comment by saulpw in "Hear Me Out: If We Find Life Out There Maybe We Should Kill It"

saulpw — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:00:06 +0000

Because your neighbor is the same species and so you have some idea of what it's like inside their head.

When your neighbor is a different species, this is pretty much exactly what humans do: kill it. The more unfamiliar, the faster it gets killed.

Is it bad for the ecosystems, biodiversity, your soul? Yes on all counts. But it's pretty consistent human behavior.