Hacker News: theteapot

New comment by theteapot in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

theteapot — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:52:45 +0000

I have a vaguely unrelated question re:

> You do what your supervisor did for you, years ago: you give each of them a well-defined project. Something you know is solvable, because other people have solved adjacent versions of it. Something that would take you, personally, about a month or two. You expect it to take each student about a year ...

Is that how PhD projects are supposed to work? The supervisor is a subject matter expert and comes up with a well-defined achievable project for the student?

New comment by theteapot in "The beginning of programming as we'll know it?"

theteapot — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 02:46:34 +0000

Roughly 20y DeepBlue to AlphaZero. I don't think that is comparable though. Use of deep neural networks was what made the machines starting with AlphaZero dominant again. I.e. we're already in the new paradigm.

New comment by theteapot in "The first 40 months of the AI era"

theteapot — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:03:20 +0000

> While I’m certain that this technology is producing some productivity improvements, I’m still genuinely (and frustratingly) unsure just how much of an improvement it is actually creating.

I often wonder how much more productive I'd be if just a fraction the effort and money poured into LLMs was spent on better API documentation and conventional coding tools. A lot of the time, I'm resorting to using an AI because I can't get information on how the current API of some-thing works into my brain fast enough, because the docs are non existent, outdated, or scattered and hard to collate.

New comment by theteapot in "90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars"

theteapot — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:37:08 +0000

Why is this interesting?

New comment by theteapot in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

theteapot — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 02:45:09 +0000

I dunno. I trained as a software engineer, pivoted to civil laborer. I just can't see a robot doing 90% of the stuff I do anytime soon. Same goes for plumber, electrician, ... even most mobile plant operations. As a supplement around the edges, sure. But replace? Not in the near term. And that's not even considering the safety certification moats around skilled labor roles.

New comment by theteapot in "A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4k Developer Machines"

theteapot — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 21:57:26 +0000

> For the next eight hours, every developer who installed or updated Cline got OpenClaw - a separate AI agent with full system access - installed globally on their machine ...

Except those with ignore-scripts=true in their npm config ...

New comment by theteapot in "How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week"

theteapot — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:59:34 +0000

> Most abstractions in software exist because humans need help. We couldn't hold the whole system in our heads, so we built layers to manage the complexity for us.

Kind of a sloppy statement, but I don't think it's accurate to say abstraction or layering exists in software just because humans need help comprehending it. Abstractions often exist to capture the essence of some aspect of the real world, and to allow for software reuse. AIs will still find reusing software useful? Secondly, you equate "abstractions" with "layers" which aren't really the same thing. Layers are more about separation of concerns. Maybe it could be argued layering is a type of abstraction.

New comment by theteapot in "Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI"

theteapot — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 06:33:42 +0000

Nah HA is defs what I want. I agree it's terrible software. All the more motivation for me to try throw AI at it. If the docs were better I'd just grind the docs instead it would probably be ahead, but the HA docs suck almost as bad as the code - which may have something to do with why the AIs are sucking now that I think about it ..

New comment by theteapot in "Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI"

theteapot — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:08:50 +0000

Right now I'm trying to get an AI (actually two ChatGPT and Grok) to write me a simple HomeAssistant integration that blinks a virtual light on and off driven by a random boolean virtual sensor. I just started using HomeAssistant and don't know it well. +2H and a few iterations in, still doesn't work. Winning.

New comment by theteapot in "Time Machine-style backups with rsync (2018)"

theteapot — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 04:59:00 +0000

Need to combine this with LVM or BTRFS or similar to be a true snapshot. Rsnapshot supports LVM snapshot pretty good.

New comment by theteapot in "The browser is the sandbox"

theteapot — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:44:00 +0000

I feel like apparmor is getting there, very, very slowly. Just need every package to come with a declarative profile or fallback to a strict default profile.

New comment by theteapot in "Google co-founder reveals that "many" of the new hires do not have a degree"

theteapot — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:52:39 +0000

And most CS grads forget all that after a few years because it's not relevant to what they're actually doing.

New comment by theteapot in "Dead Internet Theory"

theteapot — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:27:48 +0000

How's your day been?

New comment by theteapot in "Dead Internet Theory"

theteapot — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 06:13:16 +0000

I'm noticing more of these race baiting comments on YC too lately. AI?

New comment by theteapot in "I hate GitHub Actions with passion"

theteapot — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:40:50 +0000

> I can’t overstate how much I hate GitHub Actions. I don’t even remember hating any other piece of technology I used.

Ansible. Same reasons but 100x worse.

New comment by theteapot in "Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]"

theteapot — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 20:04:09 +0000

AFAIK Wifi Direct has quite wide hardware support -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Direct. But few people know about it?

New comment by theteapot in "MongoDB Server Security Update, December 2025"

theteapot — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 03:42:25 +0000

Might not be how it appears. The CVE number can be reserved by the org and then "published" with only minimal info, then later update with full details. Looking at the meta data that's probably what happened here (not entirely sure what the update was though):

    {
    "cveId": "CVE-2025-14847",
    "assignerOrgId": "a39b4221-9bd0-4244-95fc-f3e2e07f1deb",
    "state": "PUBLISHED",
    "assignerShortName": "mongodb",
    "dateReserved": "2025-12-17T18:56:21.301Z",
    "datePublished": "2025-12-19T11:00:22.465Z",
    "dateUpdated": "2025-12-29T23:20:23.813Z"
    }

New comment by theteapot in "LLMs Are Not Fun"

theteapot — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 19:49:21 +0000

Cool, I get to call my Youtube, TikTok addiction my "intellectual crack" now. Only fair.

New comment by theteapot in "Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service"

theteapot — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 11:22:08 +0000

I concur the question, "Who would have an incentive to spend resources on DDoS'ing Codeberg?" is a bit convoluted in mixing incentive and resources. But it's still, exactly, threat analysis, just not very useful threat analysis.

New comment by theteapot in "Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service"

theteapot — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 10:01:09 +0000

Actually I think that's roughly how threat analysis works though.