Hacker News: sixtram

New comment by sixtram in "Software design is now cheap"

sixtram — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 05:00:14 +0000

Why does the AI need SQL queries? Who needs that? It will just write its own ACID-compliant database with its own language, and while it's at it, reinvent the operating system as well. It's turtles all the way down.

New comment by sixtram in "In praise of –dry-run"

sixtram — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 06:42:35 +0000

To continue, this design has additional benefits:

The code is not littered with dry-run flag checks; the internal code doesn’t even know that a dry run is possible. Everything is rolled back at the end if needed.

All database referential integrity checks run correctly.

Some drawbacks: any audit logging should run in a separate transaction if you want to log dry runs.

New comment by sixtram in "In praise of –dry-run"

sixtram — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 06:38:36 +0000

I use a similar strategy for API design. Every API call is wrapped in a large database transaction, and I either roll back or commit the transaction based on dry-run or wet-run flags. This works well as long as you don’t need to touch the file system. I even wrap emails this way—emails are first written to a database queue, and an external process picks them up every few seconds.

New comment by sixtram in "Windows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare: Microsoft says some PCs might not boot"

sixtram — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 05:51:08 +0000

love the title of Windows recovery process screen: uninstall latest quality update

New comment by sixtram in "Dell UltraSharp 52 Thunderbolt Hub Monitor"

sixtram — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 07:03:04 +0000

could you share an anonymized desk photo?

New comment by sixtram in "Making Google Sans Flex"

sixtram — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:57:11 +0000

I've just got a new Samsung and it's wobbling too. I hate this. Why can't they at least put the cameras in the middle? Or maybe horizontally centred? Or they could just put another bumper on the other side to make it symmetrical. I'm looking for a cover to balance this out, but no luck so far.

New comment by sixtram in "Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class"

sixtram — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:30:58 +0000

When I started high school in the early '90s, there was a compulsory summer reading list of 10–12 books, each ranging from 300–800 pages. Then we had to write essays about them. This was just our summer homework before the new school year started. I didn't enjoy it at all; at the same time, I read lots of easy fiction, sometimes several hundred pages a day.

My six year old (who is still in kindergarten) reads about 70–100 pages per week of books aimed at eight to nine year olds.

New comment by sixtram in "Waiting for SQL:202y: Group by All"

sixtram — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 05:45:26 +0000

What about reusing a CTE? Let me import a CTE definition so that it can be used throughout my app, not just in the current context.

New comment by sixtram in "AI tools I wish existed"

sixtram — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 10:26:00 +0000

Just two days ago, I asked ChatGPT to provide an explanation of the place-value system that my six-year-old could understand. The only problem was that it mixed up digit value and place value, which caused it to become confused. I spotted the mistake, and ChatGPT apologised, as it usually does. But if my six-year-old had asked it first, she wouldn't have noticed.

I'm not sure how much misinformation my child would learn as truth from this device.

New comment by sixtram in "Meta CTO explains why the smart glasses demos failed at Meta Connect"

sixtram — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 08:59:35 +0000

For me, it seems the issue with the recipe was due to pre-recorded segments. The guy quickly realized that the "AI" was ahead of the script and cut it short to avoid making a bigger mess during the demo.

As for the Zuck segment, I believe it was a race condition.

Here is the video:

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nkbqyk/...

New comment by sixtram in "DeepMind and OpenAI win gold at ICPC"

sixtram — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 18:40:30 +0000

The last time I asked for a code review from AI was last week. It added (hallucinated) some extra lines to the code and then marked them as buggy. Yes, it beats humans at coding — great!

New comment by sixtram in "AI fabricates 21 out of 23 citations lawyer sanctioned reported to state bar [pdf]"

sixtram — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 07:05:46 +0000

A PhD-level degree in fabrication.

New comment by sixtram in "You Have to Feel It"

sixtram — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 18:57:57 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy4mXZN1Zzk

New comment by sixtram in "Ask HN: Should we stop worrying that AI will replace developer jobs?"

sixtram — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 19:19:41 +0000

The last time I asked an LLM AI to review my code, it added extra lines that weren't originally there. Then, it claimed that there were many bugs in those lines. When I pointed this out, it apologized. But I don't know how much time I wasted on this thing. I'm a developer with over 30 years of experience. Should I ease into vibe coding?

New comment by sixtram in "Ask HN: What to Do with Old iPads?"

sixtram — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 16:47:56 +0000

I have two iPad Airs, first generation, but the latest YouTube app no longer works on them. Skype and Teams don't work on old iOS either. Do you have any ideas other than using them as photo frames?

New comment by sixtram in "Dicing an Onion, the Mathematically Optimal Way"

sixtram — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 16:55:52 +0000

and then there is Marco Pierre White, How to finely chop onions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBj9H6z6Uxw

New comment by sixtram in "Ask HN: To what extend have you stopped or limited your use of AI?"

sixtram — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:14:18 +0000

https://xkcd.com/386/

New comment by sixtram in "Slack's 57MB 404 page"

sixtram — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 09:29:25 +0000

But you can click on the chicken and it will jump. KPIs matter.

New comment by sixtram in "I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old"

sixtram — Thu, 29 May 2025 14:36:23 +0000

I taught my five-year-old to read in approximately three months. We progressed from simple letters to sounding out two letters, then three, then words with hyphens, then simple stories, and finally children's books. We practiced daily for 5-20 minutes, five times per week. There were plateaus, but also huge jumps in ability, especially when we took a two-week break. Now, she can read two to three pages of an A4 document in one sitting with great speed (i.e., she looks at the words and sentences in one quick pass). She still slows down and makes some errors with complex new words.

Note that our language is Hungarian, which is much easier to teach because writing and sounding out words are nearly one-to-one in terms of letters and sounds. The AI part: Phonemic orthography: A writing system in which each letter (or combination of letters) consistently represents a specific sound (phoneme), and each sound is represented by a consistent letter. Hungarian is highly phonemic, meaning you can usually tell how to pronounce a word just by looking at how it's written, and vice versa.

New comment by sixtram in "Windows 11 Start Menu Revealed as Resource-Heavy React Native App"

sixtram — Thu, 29 May 2025 12:43:53 +0000

I'm just wondering, if AI replaces programmers, will our super AI also fix all the slowness and bugs in current software?

I saw an Anthropic Claude guy talk about how AI will replace most programmers within 2-3 years, but definitely by the end of this decade. I suppose an additional data center of AI agents could also fix all known bugs.