Hacker News: trescenzi

New comment by trescenzi in "New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker"

trescenzi — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:25:56 +0000

I was replying to the comment not necessarily the article. The _not new_ was in reference to college grads not always having an easy time. That being said looking at the cited data I don't really know if I agree with the conclusion.

https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...

While it is new, since 1990, that recent college grads are doing worse than all workers it's not the case that the degree is no longer a buffer. If you compare Young Workers(7.5%) to Recent College Grads(5.6%), i.e. the same age range, or All Workers(4.3%) to All College Grads(3.1%) as of today there's still a buffer.

Edit: They point this out later in the piece themselves

New comment by trescenzi in "New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker"

trescenzi — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:50:56 +0000

This isn’t really new. When I graduated in 2013 the barista with a college degree was a trope for a reason. Maybe 50% of my graduating CS class had a CS job within 6 months of graduating. Friends with other degrees spent years trying to find something in their field.

New comment by trescenzi in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

trescenzi — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 01:17:05 +0000

> There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake.

> There is nothing that a priori constrains token prediction from the domain of consciousness.

We don’t know either of these are true or false though. We simply don’t know. There is no agreed upon definition of consciousness, aside from maybe _the having of qualia_, so arguing that some can or cannot be conscious a priori can’t be done.

New comment by trescenzi in "Gleam v1.17.0"

trescenzi — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 23:55:26 +0000

Every time I read one of these I’m impressed by the language server work. Gleam’s DX is so good.

New comment by trescenzi in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

trescenzi — Sun, 17 May 2026 02:12:33 +0000

It's also a game people play in person as well. It's the same as the Halo version except you tag each other instead of shooting. It's really fun to play in big open areas with large teams.

The newest AI boom pitch: Host a mini data center at your home

trescenzi — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:07:54 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/the-newest-ai-boom-pitch-host-a-mini-data-center-at-your-home/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48121408

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by trescenzi in "Lilush – LuaJIT static runtime and shell"

trescenzi — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:14:29 +0000

This is what culture is right? Different sorts of people are attracted to different sorts of things and so the culture that builds around those things is somewhat self reinforcing. Lua's culture mirrors its core and attracts people who like simple extensible solutions to problems. This looks like a pretty compelling simple extensible tool. Hopefully the development continues and doesn't drop off like Luapower. I do wish it had first class fennel support but that's really easy to add.

New comment by trescenzi in "The A.I. Disruption Is Here, and It's Not Terrible"

trescenzi — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:28:50 +0000

> What if software suddenly wanted to ship? What if all of that immense bureaucracy, the endless processes, the mind-boggling range of costs that you need to make the computer compute, just goes poof?

This is the piece of the puzzle I have yet to see. Claude is perfectly capable of writing code but that doesn’t clear up the bureaucracy. I suspect this is where a lot of little 1 to 10 person companies will have an edge. But that’s always been true. The test will be if the small companies can scale without issue or if they never have to.

New comment by trescenzi in "10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?"

trescenzi — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:25:13 +0000

I find this line of thinking so hard to follow. I happen to have worked at FactSet and when I was there we were stuck supporting chromium 18 because it was embedded in the version of the workstation that a partner had signed a contract which prevented them from needing to upgrade the base install. SASS is of course to some extent about functionality. Maybe it will make sense for larger customers to duplicate functionality themselves using AI. I very much doubt we’re anywhere near being able to prompt Claude and get FactSet out but fine we can grant that. The reason SASS is so valuable though is because it allows firms to pass off the costs and risk of maintenance behind SLAs. Why would you want to bring that risk in-house when you can essentially buy insurance against software errors by paying a SASS company?

New comment by trescenzi in "Coding agents have replaced every framework I used"

trescenzi — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:28:51 +0000

As someone who’s built a lot of frontend frameworks this isn’t what I’ve found. Instead I’ve found that you end up with the middle ground choice which while effective is no better than the externally maintained library of choice. The reason to build your own framework is so it’s tailor suited to your use cases. The architecting required to do that LLMs can help with but you have to guide them and to guide them you need expertise.

New comment by trescenzi in "Big Tech's AI Push Is Costing More Than the Moon Landing"

trescenzi — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 14:56:48 +0000

The moon landing led to a huge amount of infrastructure and inventions which now power the modern world. The moon landing was the marketing moment. The buildout of space tech and creation of industry was the actual goal.

New comment by trescenzi in "Stay Away from My Trash"

trescenzi — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:24:10 +0000

Yea I think the author is wrong as well. I have a similar skill but the key difference is the instructions are just to fix typos. Why would the author not just use Claude as the plumbing and retain his old nonsense issues is beyond me.

New comment by trescenzi in "Claude Opus 4.6"

trescenzi — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:25:12 +0000

I literally hit a claude code bug today, tried to use claude desktop to debug it which didn't help and it offered to open a bug report for me. So yes 100%. Some of the titles also make it pretty clear they are auto submitted. This is my favorite which was around the top when I was creating my bug report 3 hours ago and is now 3 pages back lol.

> Unable to process - no bug report provided. Please share the issue details you'd like me to convert into a GitHub issue title

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/23459

New comment by trescenzi in "Lessons from 14 years at Google"

trescenzi — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 16:50:56 +0000

> At scale, even your bugs have users.

First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turning on their computers, and spending the next 10min chatting and drinking coffee the software was ready before they’d even stood up from their desk!

The moral of the story, and the quote, isn’t that you shouldn’t improve things. Instead it’s a reminder that the software you’re building doesn’t exist in a PRD or a test suite. It’s a system that people will interact with out there in the world. Habits with form, workarounds will be developed, bugs will be leaned for actual use cases.

This makes it critically important that you, the software engineer, understand the purpose and real world usage of your software. Your job isn’t to complete tickets that fulfill a list of asks from your product manager. Your job is to build software that solves users problems.

New comment by trescenzi in "Why Does A.I. Write Like That?"

trescenzi — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 13:25:09 +0000

I wish they’d, dare I say, delved deeper into the bit about Nigerian English. My understanding is that’s where a lot of labeling happens. Now I wonder if that explains the idiosyncrasies not the size of the Nigerian English corpus online as the article suggests. If it was the latter I’d expect more “do the needful” and other Indian English idiosyncrasies.

New comment by trescenzi in "Iran begins cloud seeding operations as drought bites"

trescenzi — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 16:27:46 +0000

I occasionally see headlines like this and imagine them as part of an opening montage in a movie setting the scene for why society is dystopian/collapsed. Not that I have anything against cloud seeding, more that individually "X climate mitigation effort begins" headlines seem small and isolated but when taken together they start to become foreboding. We're not there yet but that's the point. Only when looking back will it become clear that taken in their totality we'll have a little map that shows us how we ended up somewhere.

New comment by trescenzi in "The internet is no longer a safe haven"

trescenzi — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 16:22:31 +0000

There was an article just yesterday which detailed doing this as not in order to ban but in order to waste time. You can also zip bomb people which is entertaining but probably not super effective.

https://herman.bearblog.dev/messing-with-bots/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935729

New comment by trescenzi in "Framework Making Printers"

trescenzi — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 13:11:56 +0000

These are really interesting to read in order. The LLM output at the end of each shows how they've gotten better and stayed the same. Output is all formulaic just following slightly different formulas. I shall excitedly wait another year to see what is possible in 2026 and if everyone is right by 2027 the LLM will be the author of the piece including human written content for padding at the end.

(Also yes my Brother printer has worked great over the past 10 years. I even had to buy new toner and have replaced it with a third party toner twice so far.)

New comment by trescenzi in "A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom"

trescenzi — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 12:24:42 +0000

> We used to share memes about pounding away at the keyboard at 11:57, anxiously rushing to complete our work on time. These moments were not fun, exactly, but they did draw students together in a shared academic experience.

This reminds me of type 1 vs type 2 fun. Type 1 fun is fun in the moment; drinks with friends. Type 2 isn’t fun in the moment but is fun in retrospect. Generally people choose type 1 if given a choice but type 2 I find is the most rewarding. It’s what you’ll talk about with your friends at the bar. I know it’s very much old man, well I guess this high schooler is too, yelling at clouds but I do worry what the elimination of challenge does to our ability to learn and form relationships. I’d expect there to be a sweet spot. Obviously too much challenge and people shut down.

New comment by trescenzi in "The Bitter Lesson Is Misunderstood"

trescenzi — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 12:22:29 +0000

I get what you mean, that’s why the basically is there. Most, kangaroos and some lemurs in your list being the exception, do not move around primarily as bipeds. The ability to walk on two legs occasionally is different than genuinely having two legs and two arms.