Hacker News: seanc

New comment by seanc in "Show HN: K10s – A Clickable Kubernetes TUI (Go, Bubble Tea)"

seanc — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:00:46 +0000

XMonad! Also has nice hot-keys for moving focus.

New comment by seanc in "Alan Kay's answer to “Did the ENIAC have a BIOS”?"

seanc — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:24:16 +0000

How often would those cold-start switches be altered?

Just when they wanted to swap tape-reading hardware?

Or did different programs want slightly different loaders?

New comment by seanc in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

seanc — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:31:29 +0000

Agree 100%. I often tell expecting parents "All the hard stuff they tell you about; the sleep loss, the stress, the cost... All that stuff is true. But there's also all this amazing stuff they don't tell you about, which is also true."

New comment by seanc in "Incident with Github.com"

seanc — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:25:22 +0000

Which is why they cleverly moved the central story of a software change from the commit to the PR. Commits migrate automatically with the repo. But migrating PR descriptions and comments takes engineering effort.

New comment by seanc in "Google's Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era"

seanc — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:01:55 +0000

My goodness, the security layer looks like it could be more complex than the applications themselves.

And if this security agent is wandering around the IT system gathering all of these details about access and identity and business process, who watches the watcher? How does that thing build and maintain trust?

New comment by seanc in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

seanc — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:29:30 +0000

If you're NVIDIA then open-weight models are a classic example of commoditizing your complements; cheaper models mean more people buying GPU's to run them. [1]

Your guess is as good as mine for China though.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

New comment by seanc in "The git history command"

seanc — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:42:59 +0000

Not as such, but out of the box you get reword and fixup as first-class rebase macros. I use them all the time.

If you wanted to split a commit you'd still have to use a magit-assisted rebase.

So if magit added explicit 'history' support I just about wouldn't notice, it would mostly be under the hood.

New comment by seanc in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

seanc — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:45:27 +0000

I agree. It's amazing. I feel like I've got a private Emacs consultant at my elbow.

New comment by seanc in "Clojure Hosted on Go"

seanc — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:17:30 +0000

This is the way.

New comment by seanc in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

seanc — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:00:12 +0000

Folks focus on the impact simplicity has on the customer, but it's also worth noting the impact it has on the manufacturer. With a simple product they get a simple business.

- Simple warranty support - No deep bench of customer support staff - No complex financing - Straightforward sales process

Heck, even the website is bare bones.

New comment by seanc in "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder"

seanc — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:56:34 +0000

Upvoted. Sooner or later the Grim Reaper comes for us all.

New comment by seanc in "The "are you sure?" Problem: Why AI keeps changing its mind"

seanc — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:00:08 +0000

I'm more curious about the other direction. How many times has a model replied to a request with "Are you sure?" I'd bet just about zero.

In my job I do it all the time; people ask for stuff and I often spend a lot of time on clarifying questions, the most fundamental of which is "Are you sure this is what you want?"

New comment by seanc in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

seanc — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 14:30:45 +0000

We had to pause the movie and explain to our kids who June Cleaver was.

It was a fun echo, because when I was a kid I watched it with my parents, and my Mom had to explain to me who Ethel Merman was.

New comment by seanc in "Scaling long-running autonomous coding"

seanc — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:24:07 +0000

Code filled with errors and warnings? PR's merged with failing CI?

So I guess they've achieved human parity then?

(I'll see myself out)

New comment by seanc in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

seanc — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 21:00:17 +0000

As always, anticipated (at least in some sense) by Neal Stephenson:

https://www.wired.com/1994/10/spew/

New comment by seanc in "Space Elevator"

seanc — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 13:12:48 +0000

Kim Stanley Robinson's description of a Martian space elevator falling and wrapping twice around the entire planet convinced me that they aren't a good idea.

https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/clarke

New comment by seanc in "Robert Redford has died"

seanc — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 13:53:18 +0000

I knew which scene that was before I clicked the link.

New comment by seanc in "Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?"

seanc — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:03:37 +0000

I think Library Science has contributed much more to modern computing than we ever realize.

For example, I often bring up images of card catalogs when explaining database indexing. As soon as people see the index card, and then see that there is a wooden case for looking up by Author, a separate case for looking up by Dewey Decimal et. cet. the light goes on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog

New comment by seanc in "Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal"

seanc — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 13:57:19 +0000

Back in the 90's I worked at Nortel and visited a modest size Captive Office in Los Angeles. It supported maybe 20k or 30k people. I was amazed by the field of lead-acid batteries, 1.5m high x 50m^2.

New comment by seanc in "Show HN: Flowcode – Turing-complete visual programming platform"

seanc — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 13:52:31 +0000

"The past is never dead. It's not even past" - William Faulkner

Visual code is all over the place if you look; Any time something advertises itself as "low code" or "no code" it's a drag-and-drop flow based UI like this one. Most (if not all) ETL systems work this way, and all kinds of low-code AI Agent frameworks are cropping up.

I do agree that there very high prices to be paid for this stuff, and worst of all most of those costs are hard to see, and only crop up late in the project, when, as you point out, the more complex algorithms and processes crop up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load https://nifi.apache.org/ https://hop.apache.org/