Hacker News: tags2k

New comment by tags2k in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

tags2k — Wed, 06 May 2026 08:23:07 +0000

It's a Brave new world.

New comment by tags2k in "Postgres Is Your Friend. ORM Is Not"

tags2k — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:10:00 +0000

This straw-mans ORMs by listing out what crappy ones do. I mean, accidental writes? You've either got a terrible ORM, no tests, or both.

New comment by tags2k in "You can't pay me to prompt"

tags2k — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 12:44:01 +0000

It seems that poor tech leadership are fearing that they won't be able to move onto their next job if they don't put "implemented AI efficiencies" on their CV now. It's up to us grunts to work out how to actually make it not suck.

New comment by tags2k in "You can't pay me to prompt"

tags2k — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 12:39:37 +0000

That's a very thorough takedown of something the guy you're replying to never said. The end of their comment was "yet look at most of the replies here".

New comment by tags2k in "Advent of Code 2025"

tags2k — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 10:57:49 +0000

One way I've found is to break the problem down, and think about each step in reverse. So for example, what does the final stage want to do in order to achieve the result in a simple way? It might be that to get the final result it needs to sum numbers, but also needs to know their matching index in another array, plus some other identifier you got from an as-yet-unwritten previous step. This means your final stage needs a bunch of records that are (number, idx, sourceId), which means the step before needs to construct them - what information does it need to transform into that?

Write the simple code you want to write, and think about what makes the prior step possible in the easiest way and build your structures from there, filling in the gaps.

New comment by tags2k in "Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)"

tags2k — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:16:46 +0000

Indeed - stick me in my pod and inject those experience chemicals into me, what's the difference? But also, what would be the point? What's the point anyway?

In one scenario every atom's trajectory was destined from the creation of time and we're just sitting in the passenger seat watching. In another, if we do have free will then we control the "real world" underneath - the quantum and particle realms - as if through a UI. In the pod scenario, we are just blobs experiencing chemical reactions through some kind of translation device - but aren't we the same in the other scenarios too?

New comment by tags2k in "Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)"

tags2k — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 12:41:33 +0000

Most of us actually want to get somewhere to do an activity to then have known we did it for the rest of our lives as if to extract some intangible pleasure from its memory. Why don't we just hallucinate that we did it?

New comment by tags2k in "Tell HN: Azure outage"

tags2k — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 20:50:26 +0000

You have early voting, some choose not to trust the early voting system.

New comment by tags2k in "Simplify your code: Functional core, imperative shell"

tags2k — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 08:35:42 +0000

Since everyone's giving !opinions, in my C# DDD world you'd ideally be able to:

  _unitOfWork.Begin();

  var users = await _usersRepo.Load(u => u.LastLogin <= whateverDate);
  users.CheckForExpiry();

  _unitOfWork.Commit();

That then writes the "send expiry email" commands from the aggregate, to an outbox, which a worker then picks up to send. Simple, transactional domain logic.

New comment by tags2k in "JSON River – Parse JSON incrementally as it streams in"

tags2k — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 06:28:57 +0000

If you're updating the UI every time you receive a single character from this library, you've got bigger problems than font size.

RTO: WTAF

tags2k — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 08:56:52 +0000

Article URL: https://wordsrightman.beehiiv.com/p/rto-wtaf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45370678

Points: 88

# Comments: 144

New comment by tags2k in "Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time"

tags2k — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 06:49:15 +0000

Imagine imagining things.

New comment by tags2k in "The way we're thinking about breaking changes"

tags2k — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 15:37:49 +0000

I'm entirely unsure how database migrations aren't breaking changes - you migrate to a new version of your schema, queries that use an older schema aren't going to work. Database server functions can be changed through migrations too.

New comment by tags2k in "Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”?"

tags2k — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 08:20:48 +0000

But programmers are LLMs augmented with the ability to run code. It seems odd to add a restriction when testing if an LLM is "as good as" a programmer, because if the LLM knows what it would need to do with the external code, that's just as good.

New comment by tags2k in "BlenderGPT"

tags2k — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 18:13:09 +0000

"Unacceptable"? Pretty hyperbolic response. I mean, they could just call it BlendGPT instead and nobody would be able to say a thing.

New comment by tags2k in "Never fail a technical interview again"

tags2k — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 09:24:41 +0000

I do agree, however from my experience some folk smart enough to build this kind of system will struggle in an interview situation. Maybe rather than outright cheating, this could be more of a leg-up for those who find interviews difficult. Still wouldn't use it myself.

New comment by tags2k in "Lies I was told about collab editing, Part 1: Algorithms for offline editing"

tags2k — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 09:09:53 +0000

o1 gets the original article question correct: https://chatgpt.com/share/675410c1-22c4-8001-b36a-24425127cc...

New comment by tags2k in "What will enter the public domain in 2025?"

tags2k — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 16:34:37 +0000

This definitely doesn't translate - if you say "half 11" to a British person you are getting them at 11:30, not 10:30.

New comment by tags2k in "Advent of Code 2024"

tags2k — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 11:43:31 +0000

As with real life, the speed generally doesn't matter as long as you get a working solution and you find it fun. If you find "copy and paste into an LLM and then copy and paste the answer back out" fun, then I suppose you do you.

I didn't realise it was be timed, which is good because I casually set up a new rig to give future puzzles some kind of rig. I used C# which, although probably more wordy than other solutions, did the job and LINQ made light work of the list operations. Ended up with about 6.5 minutes for each one but most of that was refactoring out of pedantry.