Hacker News: sputknick

New comment by sputknick in "ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026"

sputknick — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:32:52 +0000

Fair point, ASML is a linchpin in the global economy, and very much a European company. But Europe has a population larger than USA, shouldn't they at least be close to us in leading edge companies? They invented the Industrial Revolution.

New comment by sputknick in "ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026"

sputknick — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 23:39:17 +0000

What do Europeans think of the European economy? From my American perspective it looks like they are trying to lose, trying to fall backwards, trying to become a less prosperous society. No one seems to be building anything, and the governments seem to be preventing anyone who tries to advance from doing so. What am I missing?

New comment by sputknick in "Anyone using a Wispr Flow alternative that is non-cloud?"

sputknick — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 01:35:24 +0000

I use Handy, it's fine, my complaint is that you can't have it clean up your grammar mistakes, it just records your words exactly as is. But for that it's great

New comment by sputknick in "Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?"

sputknick — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 02:30:24 +0000

They did not lie or cheat. They technically acted within their given rules while ignoring the intent of those rules. Anyone who served in the military or attended a military school is very familiar with this behavior pattern.

New comment by sputknick in "US Treasury undertakes historic intervention in yen market"

sputknick — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 13:49:53 +0000

Best I can do is point out that much of American economic history for the past 300 years has been stumbling from crisis to crisis, and somehow we muddle through. A good book to understand this is https://a.co/d/0aTW4L6D

New comment by sputknick in "Just brute force your embeddings"

sputknick — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 06:55:59 +0000

I don't understand what he means by "brute force your embedding". Does this mean "don't calculate your embedding ahead of time, just generate them as you need them?

New comment by sputknick in "15-Year-Old Alan Turing's Notebook Summary of Relativity Theory"

sputknick — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:29:03 +0000

I usually read handwriting from previous eras and marvel at how good everyone's handwriting was in the past. I feel encouraged that Alan Turing had handwriting almost as bad as mine.

New comment by sputknick in "Bible as RAG Database"

sputknick — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 01:56:55 +0000

Nevermind, it eventually loaded

New comment by sputknick in "Show HN: Bible as RAG Database"

sputknick — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 01:55:27 +0000

Would love to use if you can get it back up! Sounds like an awesome idea for a way to converse with the Bible

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

sputknick — Mon, 25 May 2026 23:52:28 +0000

Hot take: I'm reading programming books more now. There is so much to know about any technological topic and an LLM can tell you all of it, but it's overwhelming. What a book does is disciple and structure what you need to know, and what order to learn it in. Start with a book, grow your knowledge and put it into practice with an LLM.

New comment by sputknick in "Googlebook"

sputknick — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:18:43 +0000

You have my attention. I assume this would also work well on a worse laptop (since the processing is done in the cloud)?

New comment by sputknick in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"

sputknick — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:51:34 +0000

I'm surprised with how quickly I stopped anthropomorphizing AI. I can remember in college have dorm room pseudo-intellectual debates about AI being alive and AI being "conscience". then once we had AI that could pass the Turing Test, and I knew how it was architected, any thought of it being alive or conscience went right out the window.

New comment by sputknick in "Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?"

sputknick — Sat, 02 May 2026 17:56:36 +0000

I've been looking for 4 months and only had one phone screen from HR. Cybersecurity in Raleigh, my last employer was MAG 7. My particular problem is I took off 6 years to be a stay-at-home parent.

New comment by sputknick in "Quarkdown – Markdown with Superpowers"

sputknick — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:02:09 +0000

The nice thing is that with LLMs using markdown we are getting a nice ecosystem for a universal method for communicating textual information. The negative is that Markdown is starting to look like the https://xkcd.com/927/ cartoon.

New comment by sputknick in "Show HN: Built a daily game where you sort historical events chronologically"

sputknick — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:51:51 +0000

I'll take the other side of this argument: I like the AI art. Easy way to make it more visually engaging

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

sputknick — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:48:09 +0000

Maybe the lesson here is we shouldn't rely on the guys selling picks and shovels when determining if we should be buying picks and shovels.

New comment by sputknick in "Is anyone actually using OpenClaw?"

sputknick — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:57:17 +0000

I tried using it for a specific web search task. I wrote a skill, got it all set up and deployed. It worked. But also, would have worked just as well as a cron job with some LLM looking at Brave API results. Like a lot of AI tools, it was a lot of work for underwhelming results.

New comment by sputknick in "Vulnerability research is cooked"

sputknick — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:22:52 +0000

I agree with this take. Nothing changes, everything just evolves. Been happening for 60 years, will (likely) continue to happen for the next 60 years.

New comment by sputknick in "Are you team MCP or team CLI?"

sputknick — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 02:05:49 +0000

CLI because if you have to ask, the answer is almost always the more simple one

New comment by sputknick in "So where are all the AI apps?"

sputknick — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:45:50 +0000

This is probably my favorite gain from AI assisted coding: the bar for "who cares about this app" has dropped to a minimum of 1 to make sense. I recently built an app for grocery shopping that is specific to how and where I shop, would be useless to anyone other than my wife. Took me 20 minutes. This is the next frontier: I have a random manual process I do every week, I'll write an app that does it for me.