Hacker News: smitty1e

New comment by smitty1e in "My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month"

smitty1e — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:50:54 +0000

"Lua: everything is a table

Tcl: everything is a string

Lisp: everything is a list"

Python: {"everything":"dictionary"}

New comment by smitty1e in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

smitty1e — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:51:52 +0000

The future is balkanized.

Occasional communities may survive in a walled garden fashion.

Sorry, Tim Berners-Berners-Lee.

New comment by smitty1e in "The History of "Prisencolinensinainciusol""

smitty1e — Sun, 31 May 2026 23:45:13 +0000

It sounds as though this set the precedent for "I, Zimbra" by Talking Heads.

https://open.spotify.com/track/2zdlkG9g5Mt0alUdqn7s3D?si=L1N...

New comment by smitty1e in "The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History"

smitty1e — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:51:46 +0000

The variables in history seem to be technology and population.

There are various repetitions of the Tower of Babel as individuals come and go.

Or, instead of analysis, we could nail Jell-O to the wall.

New comment by smitty1e in "The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History"

smitty1e — Sat, 30 May 2026 10:16:13 +0000

"as su," indicates a lack of editing.

New comment by smitty1e in "How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?"

smitty1e — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:28:18 +0000

Certainly creatcreated by such.

SMOD may be the only way it's "solved".

New comment by smitty1e in "I hated writing until I learned there’s a science to it (2024)"

smitty1e — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:23:52 +0000

"Everything's easy, when you know how to do it; it's that learning curve..."--me.

New comment by smitty1e in "How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?"

smitty1e — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:23:45 +0000

Let me know when the federal budget is balanced.

New comment by smitty1e in "Extending MySQL with VillageSQL"

smitty1e — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:39:58 +0000

"Young man,

There's a place you can go,

I said young man,

To store a graph with your code..."

New comment by smitty1e in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

smitty1e — Tue, 26 May 2026 02:48:35 +0000

I still maintain an O'Reilly.com subscription, because it's good to read aan edited book on a topic, and the Google search has just gone to seed.

New comment by smitty1e in "Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out"

smitty1e — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:04:28 +0000

"Trying" being the operator.

Meta can get its Sysiphus on all it likes; whether or not genius pours forth remains to be seen.

New comment by smitty1e in "Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out"

smitty1e — Sun, 24 May 2026 06:38:26 +0000

The "fungible" point sounds as though the "cattle, not pets" ethos of the infrastructure management has leaked into the management of the staff.

New comment by smitty1e in "On The
"

smitty1e — Sat, 23 May 2026 14:56:36 +0000

This seems a clear enough win for things that would fit into a simple python dictionary.

Why is it preferred over

for laying out columns via a the character attributes at the bottom of TFA?

New comment by smitty1e in "sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library"

smitty1e — Sat, 23 May 2026 05:19:18 +0000

Family saying: "It ain't bragging if you can do it."

When one is competent to work at this level, strong opinions are in order.

Their correctness is something I cannot gage. I'm barely competent to follow the conversation.

New comment by smitty1e in "Tell HN: I'm tired of AI-generated answers"

smitty1e — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:32:44 +0000

Generalizing, one can foresee a balkanized internet of niche communities fighting to discover/interact without getting hoovered up into the AI Borg.

New comment by smitty1e in "Uv is fantastic, but its package management UX is a mess"

smitty1e — Thu, 21 May 2026 23:38:28 +0000

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”--Yogi Berra

New comment by smitty1e in "Nobody Pushed Back: Why Engineers Stay Silent Until It's Too Late"

smitty1e — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:53:19 +0000

Leadership. We can spend megabytes of characters and fat piles of AI tokens, but the best leaders are those who remain humble enough for anyone to tell them safely that their prize surfboard is really a piece of drywall.

And when such negative feedback arrives, they don't get all Colonel Kilgore from "Apocalypse Now" and decide that CHARLIE DOESN'T SURF.

New comment by smitty1e in "The AI water issue is fake"

smitty1e — Sun, 17 May 2026 18:49:12 +0000

Contra Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the signal-to-noise ratio on the internet has been terrible.

One seriously wonders if GenX didn't manage to hit a sweet spot for technological availability ahead of everything just going to seed.

New comment by smitty1e in "Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques"

smitty1e — Sat, 16 May 2026 10:00:07 +0000

The wiring point is more subtle than that.

Consider the domestic power panel and wiring that is perfectly acceptable, but would 'splode outright if you moved it to an industrial setting and put it under an enterprise load.

Context matters.

New comment by smitty1e in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

smitty1e — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:02:40 +0000

I was just going to invoke Goodhart's Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

Hacker News: smitty1e

New comment by smitty1e in "My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month"

New comment by smitty1e in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

New comment by smitty1e in "The History of "Prisencolinensinainciusol""

New comment by smitty1e in "The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History"

New comment by smitty1e in "The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History"

New comment by smitty1e in "How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?"

New comment by smitty1e in "I hated writing until I learned there’s a science to it (2024)"

New comment by smitty1e in "How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?"

New comment by smitty1e in "Extending MySQL with VillageSQL"

New comment by smitty1e in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

New comment by smitty1e in "Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out"

New comment by smitty1e in "Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out"

New comment by smitty1e in "On The "

New comment by smitty1e in "sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library"

New comment by smitty1e in "Tell HN: I'm tired of AI-generated answers"

New comment by smitty1e in "Uv is fantastic, but its package management UX is a mess"

New comment by smitty1e in "Nobody Pushed Back: Why Engineers Stay Silent Until It's Too Late"

New comment by smitty1e in "The AI water issue is fake"

New comment by smitty1e in "Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques"

New comment by smitty1e in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

New comment by smitty1e in "On The
"