Hacker News: thisoneisreal

New comment by thisoneisreal in "The Real Luxuries In Life"

thisoneisreal — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 20:35:44 +0000

My favorite book about this is "The Happiness Trap," because it makes the simple point that we didn't evolve to be happy all of the time. It makes a really good case for learning to live with the range of emotions and suggests ways of creating a contented/good/whatever life with what you've got.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Maybe we shouldn't be reviewing all this code"

thisoneisreal — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:53:56 +0000

The person "watching" should be actively engaging and helping to build the "theory of the program" (in the Naur sense) through questions and conversations. If they're just sitting there silently they aren't doing the practice. (Also, I prefer to work with both developers having a keyboard and mouse. You still should have one person driving, but the other person can jump in and directly make changes instead of having to use the other person as a puppet.)

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems"

thisoneisreal — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:47:15 +0000

Alfred North Whitehead talks about the notion of "Importance" as fundamental to the human (and all other living things) way of being. Living creatures first and foremost select information that is important to them from the broader environment, and then make decisions and take actions. (Of course at a physiological level it's much more complicated than this, but it's a sound philosophical description of how living things work.) LLMs lack this entirely. They have no selective filter because they weren't designed to have one (interesting question if you could even do that) and they're not evolved beings with a survival imperative. When they enter a self-conscious or other-conscious mode like you're describing, they just emit text that looks like the thoughts of a self-or-other-conscious person. They can't direct a stream of attention or hold a concept in the forefront relative to other concepts or (to your main point) think about what matters to the other person/being because they don't experience "matters." All they can do is emulate the verbal output of beings that actually experience these things, and given that I don't find it surprising they get trapped in loops over trivial things.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking"

thisoneisreal — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 04:53:05 +0000

It was created by a journalist and a cop, who both had long careers in Baltimore before working on the show. Not surprising how realistic it is. (Also a beautiful work of art beyond the realism.) If you find the show interesting, David Simon's book "Homicide" is a great read.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Why DNA damage from smoking and UV rays cause cancer in some but not others"

thisoneisreal — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:37:39 +0000

Check out mineral based sunscreens, I have sensitive skin and I find them infinitely more tolerable.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment"

thisoneisreal — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:24:09 +0000

One thought I had is that you could use FPGAs to get hardware performance but maintain the ability to dynamically update. I don't know enough about hardware to consider trying such a thing but I'm curious if that could be made practical and economical somehow.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Why Vanilla JavaScript"

thisoneisreal — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 03:41:49 +0000

Can you explain more about how the front end aspect works? I'm not clear how the front end code could by TypeScript without a build step, unless I'm misreading.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "The revenge of the philosophy majors"

thisoneisreal — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 18:38:15 +0000

Even before LLMs I used to joke with my traditional SE coworkers that "philosophy is very practical." On nearly every project we'd have to talk to stakeholders and ask questions like, "But when you say X, what do you mean?" Establishing definitions, relationships between concepts, etc etc turns out to be really important when you're encoding ideas into a block of silicon. (Yes I know other fields do versions of the same thing too.)

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging"

thisoneisreal — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 16:06:35 +0000

One thing I've never seen discussed on this topic (possible I just missed it, I only read popular accounts) is whether speaking multiple languages is a proxy for higher sociability / stronger social ties. That's a known dimension that improves health and aging and I wonder if just being able or interested in speaking with a broader swath of people is what helps more than the cognitive demands of switching.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams"

thisoneisreal — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 03:11:32 +0000

You're ignoring the core analogy. The author's point is that someone (or something) can be verbose and articulate about a topic without having any real knowledge or experience of it. I can talk at length about war because I've seen Saving Private Ryan and read a hundred books on the topic, but do I really understand what it's like to be shot at, or to watch my friend die? No, I don't. My cousin's husband does, though, because he experienced both of those things.

The author is saying that that difference matters, that it isn't just a philosophical point but is actually a fundamental aspect of this new technology. I can spit out a bunch of words about war, and so can an LLM, but our understanding of war is limited to textual representations of it. Thomas Hobbes made this exact point centuries ago when he said, "Words are the wise man's counters but the money of fools."

As a complete aside, I don't agree that "Good Will Hunting" is a power fantasy. The whole point of the movie is that that power was illusory, and that it has nothing to do with what really matters in life.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Ask HN: Where is our profession (programmer) going?"

thisoneisreal — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 03:56:33 +0000

It's a really fun philosophical exercise to ask what it means for them to be "wrong." My perspective is that they are fantastic at association and generalization (of language and symbols in particular), but whether they're identifying the associations you care about or generalizing to the level of abstraction you're aiming for is a complete crapshoot. If you aren't checking and correcting them, and discarding the misfires, you will end up with a very pretty Tower of Babel.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "AI's Affordability Crisis"

thisoneisreal — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 22:12:09 +0000

I think I've done a good job straddling the delivery/maintainability line thus far. In the near future I'm likely going to have to downshift into smaller, higher quality changes and refactors, but I've been careful to keep an eye on the output and make sure the functions are reasonably scoped, documented, and understandable. I don't anticipate any issues maintaining what I've produced so far, but it could easily get out of hand as more concepts get mixed in.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "AI's Affordability Crisis"

thisoneisreal — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 23:23:39 +0000

I hesitate to say this because I think the AI hype is generally overdone, but I was contemplating the other day how much I would recommend my employer spend on AI tooling for me based on my salary and it's got to be in the tens of thousands of dollars per year if I'm being honest. I'm a contractor. On my most recent client, I was able to learn a completely new domain and business, design a solution and build a full stack POC (a complicated one with technologies I had never used before) nearly singlehandedly in less than 2 months. That includes all of the onboarding time, getting access to the right people, repositories, databases etc. What made it possible was 1) the AI helped me understand technologies I had never used before, from a 30 year old Java stack to graph databases, 2) it could analyze DDLs and make correct inferences about what tables and columns meant in both business and technical terms, 3) it generated mostly-correct code in multiple languages to achieve what I needed it to do, and 4) it referenced libraries I didn't know existed to accomplish tasks I needed done. I could cycle between these activities and iterate FAR more rapidly than I ever have before. To me this is the thing the AI companies should really be emphasizing. I'm not convinced autonomous agents are really working out, but I'm 1000% sold on their ability to empower developers. And I say this as a pretty skeptical late adopter who only knows the most basic AI tooling.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior"

thisoneisreal — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:43:40 +0000

I mean in the Big 5 personality model sense. Someone who is neurotic is sensitive, more prone to negative emotions including fear. Someone who is low in neuroticism is less fearful and sensitive on average. So for example you could put two people in the situation of being about to jump out of a plane and one would feel terrified for their life while the other would feel only mild apprehension.

EDIT: People are a complex blends of emotions and motivations, so you're certainly right that can be another explanation for the same observable behavior. I really liked the comment about adrenaline junkies too. My point was only that on average it's low-sensitivity people who engage in those sorts of activities. Scaredy cats like myself stay home and read a good book.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior"

thisoneisreal — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 02:42:51 +0000

I agree it's counterintuitive, but it makes sense when I think about how, for example, it's the least neurotic people who do high-risk activities like base jumping or mountain climbing. Fear drives you away from threatening things, lack of fear allows you to move toward them more comfortably.

New comment by thisoneisreal in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

thisoneisreal — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:45:02 +0000

This is one of those classic "sounds dumb / doesn't play well on TV but is actually smarter than most of the other people babbling about it" things. Nassim Taleb has written for example about how maddening it is to watch world-class economists who are also just sort of awkward and a little nerdy go on TV and "lose" to blowhards who don't actually know what the hell they're talking about but appear confident and look good on camera. Thankfully in Rumsfeld's case I think as time has gone on it's become a pretty respected statement about risk even if people still occasionally find the phrasing a bit amusing.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Building from zero after addiction, prison, and a felony"

thisoneisreal — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:15:15 +0000

I grew up solidly middle class, even went to a good private school. A couple of my friends got ripped off by an addict that ran in our social circle who had the same background. They couldn't find the person, but they were so angry that they looked up the parents' address and went to confront them, assuming they'd be like bad people or something or had failed to raise their kid right. Instead both parents were incredibly mild and apologetic, and basically said, "We don't know what happened to our child and where it all went wrong." My friends felt very ashamed, apologized and left them in peace. It's a really tragic thing, and it's not just a cliche that it can happen to anyone.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Programming Still Sucks"

thisoneisreal — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:38:30 +0000

Thanks for following up, really interesting and appreciate you sharing.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

thisoneisreal — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:24:36 +0000

I found it very useful running a TDD workflow the other day. It created a test plan, generated tests, documented them, implemented and modified existing code, and added structured logging. It also identified really good refactor candidates and explained them to me after I noted a core design issue in the code we were modifying. This wasn't autonomous: I spent some time correcting it and sending it in new directions. Still, it was a pretty nice feeling to not have to go manually configure Logback (it one shotted a nice basic config), not have to write a bunch of repetitive test setup code, etc. It even pulled in a newer JUnit feature that I didn't know about that was perfect for what I was doing. Definitely not the silver bullet a lot of people are trying to sell, but still a very powerful tool.

New comment by thisoneisreal in "Programming Still Sucks"

thisoneisreal — Thu, 07 May 2026 03:52:56 +0000

How did you get into that line of work? Sounds really interesting.