Hacker News: thatoneengineer

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Extinction-Level Capitalism"

thatoneengineer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:34:28 +0000

I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.

Jenny Haniver

thatoneengineer — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:51:15 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Haniver

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498004

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

Don't Conflate Intelligence with Value

thatoneengineer — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:57:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/07/dont-conflate-intelligence-with-value/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492128

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Likely AI-generated short story won a major prize

thatoneengineer — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:03:11 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/nabeelqu/status/2056397504824963296

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197814

Points: 9

# Comments: 2

New comment by thatoneengineer in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

thatoneengineer — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:34:25 +0000

Shout out to the apparently large class of programmers who think LLMs make it okay not to understand their own code, yet react with horror when someone suggests porting it to Go or Rust.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Ti-84 Evo"

thatoneengineer — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:48:49 +0000

I see we've finally progressed beyond https://xkcd.com/768/, in specs if not in functionality or price point.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)"

thatoneengineer — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:00:27 +0000

If you like this kind of thing, try reading Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Similar themes, full novel, even older. It makes for interesting reading in that it more obviously represents a "path not taken" by science fiction (and by science?!) but still has that early-sci-fi spirit of fundamental curiosity.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

thatoneengineer — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:45:29 +0000

What article is he referencing in the fourth paragraph? The New Yorker one? I got the impression that it was careful in its reporting and by no means one-sided.

Seems pretty sleazy for him to associate that (based on no evidence!) with the violent attack.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game"

thatoneengineer — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:26:55 +0000

Same!

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Meta’s renewed commitment to jemalloc"

thatoneengineer — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:30:09 +0000

First impressions: LOL, the blunt commentary in the HN thread title compared to the PR-speak of the fb.com post.

Second thoughts: Actually the fb.com post is more transparent than I'd have predicted. Not bad at all. Of course it helps that they're delivering good news!

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Ask HN: Burned out from tech, what else is there?"

thatoneengineer — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:00:02 +0000

This very closely resembles my own experience, right down to the timeline.

I don't have an answer, but just seeing this thread has been cathartic for me.

Some of the options I'm considering (all speculative):

- It's okay to be a "hired gun" and switch companies every few years just to ensure you stay interested. Some people's minds are stimulated by novelty and learning; that's not a bad thing! In fact some of the engineers I most respect work as consultants not traditional employees.

- Try working at a more "stodgy" company. Your average Fortune 500 employs more developers than most unicorns and is probably a decade behind the curve in terms of technology-- maybe you can go to one of those, take it easy, and be a hero.

- If it's an option financially, "hire yourself" for a few months to go do a passion project-- hobbyist app? major OSS improvement? creative endeavor?-- and see how it feels.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Gadget Exposed a Spy Camera [video]"

thatoneengineer — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:29:45 +0000

...in testing. Clickbait title IMO.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Ask HN: How did you learn to code?"

thatoneengineer — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 08:15:38 +0000

TI-83, a few afterthought programs in my precalc textbook, and a bunch of bored afternoons in class. This would be back in '06 or so.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "The compiler is your best friend"

thatoneengineer — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 19:08:43 +0000

Ideally, if you can convince yourself something cannot happen, you can also convince the compiler, and get rid of the branch entirely by expressing the predicate as part of the type (or a function on the type, etc.)

Language support for that varies. Rust is great, but not perfect. Typescript is surprisingly good in many cases. Enums and algebraic type systems are your friend. It'll never be 100% but it sure helps fill a lot of holes in the swiss cheese.

Because there's no such thing as a purely internal error in a well-constructed program. Every "logic error" has to bottom out in data from outside the code eventually-- otherwise it could be refactored to be static. Client input is wrong? Error the request! Config doesn't parse? Better specify defaults! Network call fails? Yeah, you should have a plan for that.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Prototaxites"

thatoneengineer — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 03:51:04 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototaxites has more context. Tree sized and shaped living thing that wasn't a plant, which probably fed and reproduced like a fungus but per this latest research wasn't a fungus either, by far the largest known organism on land up to that point, in a time when land animals barely existed. Unsettling!

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Hybrid Aerial Underwater Drone – Bachelor Project [video]"

thatoneengineer — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 21:03:29 +0000

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/2128/

Or for the more cynical, replace "search and rescue" with "military covert ops".

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Show HN: Titan – JavaScript-first framework that compiles into a Rust server"

thatoneengineer — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 16:55:42 +0000

One does not simply "get Rust performance".

Rust can go that fast because of guarantees its compiler enforces about what the code is doing, that JS emphatically doesn't.

By all means build your tooling and runtime in Rust if it helps, but "you can write high-performance code in JS with no Rust-like constraints" is fundamentally a nonsense pitch.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "AI will make formal verification go mainstream"

thatoneengineer — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 23:17:34 +0000

I disagree. Right now, feedback on correctness is a major practical limitation on the usefulness of AI coding agents. They can fix compile errors on their own, they can _sometimes_ fix test errors on their own, but fixing functionality / architecture errors takes human intervention. Formal verification basically turns (a subset of) functionality errors into compile errors, making the feedback loop much stronger. "Come up with what software we need better than us in the first place" is much higher on the ladder than that.

TL;DR: We don't need to be radically agnostic about the capabilities of AI-- we have enough experience already with the software value chain (with and without AI) for formal verification to be an appealing next step, for the reasons this author lays out.

The World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems

thatoneengineer — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:06:49 +0000

Article URL: https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/the-world-happiness-report-is-a-sham

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46282874

Points: 167

# Comments: 212

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Tesla Is Testing Robotaxis Without Safety Drivers – Or Riders"

thatoneengineer — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 19:13:24 +0000

Isn't this just a normal step in self-driving testing? Weird that Gizmodo is being so negative about it.