Hacker News: sd9

New comment by sd9 in "Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence"

sd9 — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:32:01 +0000

It's not cut and dry to differentiate between the act and the wager.

One issue is that prediction markets provide financial incentives to perform actions in the real world. For example, if I want a head of state murdered, I can wager lots of money that they won't be murdered. If somebody wants to earn that money, they can simply bet against me and then murder them.

It's not an dispassionate wager like betting on roulette, it's a wager that directly influences the real world, at least a bit.

Of course you could directly hire an assassin, but that doesn't come with plausible deniability.

New comment by sd9 in "Use Boring Languages with LLMs"

sd9 — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:13:13 +0000

I wonder if the training data for some languages has higher quality code. I can imagine some niche languages having a higher standard than, for example Python, which surely has a bunch of random buggy scripts in the mix.

On the other hand, even if that were true, I don’t know how important it would actually be since LLMs can generalise across languages well.

It might be best to pick languages where it’s just harder to screw up, the canonical example being to prefer typescript over JavaScript.

New comment by sd9 in "What happens when you post a real Monet and say it's AI?"

sd9 — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:50:18 +0000

This is a real Monet.

New comment by sd9 in "Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains"

sd9 — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:38:06 +0000

That's what I'd like to do in my spare time. My job has become intolerant of that slow pace though now they've drunk the kool aid. I work at a startup and we're expected to produce game changing new features every day.

New comment by sd9 in "Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains"

sd9 — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:34:52 +0000

AI agents have made me far more productive, but the work now feels like drudgery. The most intellectually stimulating parts of the job were automated away first, and I am getting increasingly sick of typing into a chat bot all day.

I got into software engineering because I was always fascinated by getting computers to do stuff, and I really enjoyed the manual task of programming. It's been a dream to earn a living doing something I would do in my spare time. I was pretty good at it too.

I'm not having fun any more, so I've decided to leave the field and become a teacher. I won't earn nearly as much money but I expect to feel more fulfilled, and I hope I can help make a difference to some young people.

I've had an extraordinarily privileged career, and many people never get the luxury of enjoying their work at all. But I'd rather try to enjoy what I do day to day than persist in something that's lost its spark.

New comment by sd9 in "Red Squares – GitHub outages as contributions"

sd9 — Wed, 06 May 2026 11:10:52 +0000

Weekends are the untapped frontier. Still room to scale.

New comment by sd9 in "Bob Odenkirk would like to remind you that life is a meaningless farce"

sd9 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:36:20 +0000

How far through did you get? I think it gets significantly better in season 2, and continues improving thereafter. Basically after they starting bringing in bigger overarching storylines.

I made a few false starts where I couldn’t really get through season 1, but after I persisted it was worth it.

New comment by sd9 in "Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players"

sd9 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 22:59:45 +0000

The official Sony AI video, which is really interesting and has some glorious footage: https://youtu.be/FrGq8ltb-_E?si=PWm1Dv0T9UHUFw0t

New comment by sd9 in "Website streamed live directly from a model"

sd9 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 20:08:55 +0000

This seems like an expensive product to subject to the HN hug of death.

The sample videos on the tweet are very very cool.

Unfortunately it didn’t really work for me, I’ll try it out in a few days when the traffic’s died down.

New comment by sd9 in "[dead]"

sd9 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:53:19 +0000

It’s hard to tell exactly how much of this is true and sourced vs hallucinated, since it all looks the same. How confident are you that this is largely accurate?

I’m not sure I buy the methodology of “Monitoring 39 public signals”. Claude just loves to make up stats. I clicked the Methodology tab but lost interest quite quickly after realising it was typical overwritten Claude bs.

Less is more. This is a rather overwhelming presentation for something purportedly simple. What exactly am I supposed to care about here, without sifting through screeds of text?

I would have thought that the list of entities with access to Mythos would be hard to get a hold of, and really the only source worth any weight is Anthropic’s own statements.

New comment by sd9 in "Scoring Show HN submissions for AI design patterns"

sd9 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:07:38 +0000

I kinda feel bad for the startups that were singled out here.

New comment by sd9 in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

sd9 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:16:46 +0000

You actually believe that transporting _water_ from the moon to earth could ever be profitable, no, lucrative? Can you lay out the economics? Just so I understand.

New comment by sd9 in "Tindie store under "scheduled maintenance" for days"

sd9 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:29:03 +0000

I don't know, it just doesn't feel very scheduled to me.

> I'm about to loose thousands of dollars by the end of Monday 20th because of the automatic shipping deadline on Tindie and it currently being down. I've tried contacting support multiple times but they are not helping. Please respond before my business fails!

https://mastodon.social/@thereminhero/116432503640568650

New comment by sd9 in "Tindie store under "scheduled maintenance" for days"

sd9 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:09:20 +0000

> The goal of the current maintenance is to fix a lot of long-standing issues with the site. The underlying infrastructure was getting very fragile as technical debt accumulated over time. A team is working very hard right now to make sure that once the site is back up, it's on much better footing and will be solid and reliable for the long term. Despite the unfortunate amount of time this is taking, it will be a major benefit to the site in the long run.

If I were a developer there I would be feeling really not very good. Just minutes of downtime on the systems I’ve worked on gets my heart rate going.

It also feels like there’s a lot being left unsaid in this statement. Normally you would work on these things in parallel to production… so something is seriously wrong.

New comment by sd9 in "Louis Zocchi, games industry pioneer, has died"

sd9 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:25:31 +0000

It had never occurred to me that somebody needed to invent polyhedral dice. There must be so many inventions in the world that I’m completely unaware that there was a point in time before which something didn’t exist and after that it did, thanks to somebody.

New comment by sd9 in "Sauna effect on heart rate"

sd9 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 23:17:42 +0000

Wow, they look really quite dangerous. I wouldn’t want to pass out in one. Yeah you can pass out in a sauna too, but it feels easier to lurch for the door than to fight with a sleeping bag.

New comment by sd9 in "NSA is using Anthropic's Mythos despite blacklist"

sd9 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:04:05 +0000

Wow, "magic e" just transported me back to primary school. And I had a little heart flutter fearing that I wouldn't be able to remember/explain it today.

New comment by sd9 in "Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall"

sd9 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:06:28 +0000

Maybe each one is fine in isolation - what doesn’t come across from the sample is that every single one is practically the same. If you have Uber Eats, open up the app and look through the summaries for a bunch of restaurants and you’ll see what I mean.

And besides that, this just feels like something nobody asked for that probably doesn’t sell more food compared to, for example, more pictures.

New comment by sd9 in "Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall"

sd9 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:56:59 +0000

I see things like 2 sentence menu summaries in Uber Eats that are completely off in tone.

A quick sample from my app right now:

“Authentic Caribbean Flavours. Jerk Chicken, Curry Goat, and more. A vibrant culinary journey awaits.” - local Caribbean place

“Customisable burgers with 250,000+ toppings. Hand-cut fries and rich milkshakes await.” - Five Guys

“Authentic Indian cuisine bursting with rich flavours. Perfect for late-night cravings” - local Indian

Everything is Authentic, or Rich, or whatever.

—-

They’re investing in the wrong bits of AI. I’m sure they’re AB testing these soulless often inaccurate blurbs but I just cannot see how investing money into them actually sells more product.

On the other hand, if they had a coherent product vision, and trusted their engineers to use AI how they see fit, then I’m sure they would be more successful, and it would be cheaper.

New comment by sd9 in "Spending 3 months coding by hand"

sd9 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:31:20 +0000

What has been most valuable for you?

It is hard indeed. I find it really quite exhausting.

Personally, I feel like I have always been a very competent programmer. I'm embracing the new way of working, but it seems like quite a different skillset. I somewhat believe that it will be relevant for a long time, because there is an incredibly large gap in outcomes between members of my team using AI. I've had good results so far, but I'm keen to improve.