Hacker News: usernametaken29

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0"

usernametaken29 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:24:38 +0000

Mac without brew just wouldn’t be Mac. Huge respect!

New comment by usernametaken29 in "A greyscale iPhone setup that works in everyday life"

usernametaken29 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:06:39 +0000

This is awesome, hope it helps me squash my YouTube addiction

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Building agents without harness engineering"

usernametaken29 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:25:50 +0000

But effectively they’re deferring harness engineering onto another developer?? I don’t understand how this is different than any other library, ever

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents"

usernametaken29 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:10:56 +0000

> This isn't for the person using Git. This is for someone trying to build a tool that wants to use parts of Git, which is different.

I’m going out on a limb here but I’ll say that you are over engineering for the wrong problems. I’ve done it before, I tried libgit for some use case. At the end of the day it really is much simpler to use git. If you don’t want git at runtime use something like the git-gradle-properties plugin or the likes for your build system of choice. I really can’t think of a super duper use case where forking processes is a massive enough issue that I’d want to instead port over all of git to another language. Git for the most parts also offers a wide variety of export formats such that you get machine readable output too. If you really really need to fiddle with its internals, git pack lets you browse through the index fairly well. Again, my humble opinion, but you’re trying to solve the wrong problems

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Surprise, Pay $1000"

usernametaken29 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:54:16 +0000

This reminds me of OpenAI which allows you to overcommit on prepaid tokens and then tries to force you into paying overpaid charges. Only they really can’t. You can’t make someone pay for a service they didn’t agree to with billing that doesn’t exist. I wish OpenAI best of luck with their shenanigans

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents"

usernametaken29 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:32:35 +0000

I’m all for memory safety and such but honestly what’s the use case for this? Showing off agentic development? In 10+ years git has never failed on a memory overflow or else. Sometimes software is “good as is” and I’m pretty confident git classifies as such. I’ve also never really hit the limitations of git, even with teams of 20+ developers and lots of binary artefacts. You got to really stretch git limitations, in which case you might need to move away from git, and a rust rewrite will not help in any way whatsoever. So again … why?

New comment by usernametaken29 in "macOS Container Machines"

usernametaken29 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:25:06 +0000

My first thought as well, docker desktop overhead is pretty bad, would be awesome to see this land natively in DD. By my estimate this could happen, seeing as Docker has historically tried to improve performance but quickly had to accept platform limitations… would only be natural to settle DD over to containers

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)"

usernametaken29 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:15:22 +0000

It’s not the only language but it’s notorious for having the worst equality operator to the point where you are not even supposed to use == because it’s that awful

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)"

usernametaken29 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:54:07 +0000

“false” === true because it’s not an empty string. It’s the same now that it used to be 10 years ago. The PHP equality operator is a meme, not even a joke

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Human-Like Neural Nets by Catapulting"

usernametaken29 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:16:20 +0000

In a nutshell this is what statistical learning theory says. For any dataset there is an optimum given a prediction task. It follows from entropy. As the commenter pointed out “evolution has this backed in”. There once was a research direction of evolutionary distribution estimation algorithms but basically we know nothing about evolution, and scaling ede to multidimensional data is much harder than optimising objectives and trying to squeeze the inductive bias. For all it’s worth I think much of the current AI research is focused entirely on the wrong questions. Can machines learn? Sure, inductive bias FORCES them to learn. Given basically unlimited data can computers pick appropriate inductive biases to do anything useful, “survive” if you want to call it that… probably not, at least no one has really asked these questions for a couple of decades

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Human-Like Neural Nets by Catapulting"

usernametaken29 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 05:49:21 +0000

> Human brains do this by deep double descent-style overparameterization, and adopting a scaling strategy of extremely high-learning-rate training of extremely overparameterized models on small diverse highly-filtered datasets.

That’s an extremely steep claim with no source other than vibes. Last time I checked my biology notes, model parameters are neurons, and they cost a ton of energy to maintain. Your hypothesis is really far removed from any actual neuroscience. Also, where are those filtered datasets coming from? Do you think genetics hands them to us? There’s about zero evidence for this claim as well. I like new concepts for ML research but please do not make up theories of human cognition when you clearly have no idea about it.

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world"

usernametaken29 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 05:30:45 +0000

I for one am not protesting because I know that this is bullshit marketing nonsense. Look at reliability metrics of OpenAI, they’re terrible. Everyone knew a long way ahead that it’s a scam, now they’re cranking up pricing and trying to rug pull. There will be a lot of developers who will come out very well once the stock tanks. That’s my two cents

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)"

usernametaken29 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:25:35 +0000

Your assumption that minds come in all shapes and sizes is wrong. Read up on embodied cognition. If anything at all, AI are true aliens, unlike known minds.

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Is Python Becoming Pinyin?"

usernametaken29 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:39:25 +0000

Indeed, wrong word

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Is Python Becoming Pinyin?"

usernametaken29 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:37:17 +0000

Code isn’t just execution, code is also abstraction. You need to be able to understand requirement => unit of work. Unless you’re an uber geek this mostly isn’t the case and reading and retaining any amount of assembly will be practically impossible. In a wishful world you could simply have a bunch of markdown specifications that are executed as machine code. But specifications are by design usually ambiguous, and so you need to build some level of abstraction to be able to accommodate and still understand that. That’s what code does, or should do

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Is Python Becoming Pinyin?"

usernametaken29 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:32:57 +0000

The problem with Rust is that, AI aside, the learning curve is steep. Even senior engineers need to wrap their head around Rust for several weeks. You can pick up Go or Java in an afternoon. It’s fast, it mostly makes sense. Unless you do very specific low level things I don’t particularly see Rust becoming the de facto norm for the vast amount of enterprise code

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Is Python Becoming Pinyin?"

usernametaken29 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:23:20 +0000

It’s funny because I consider myself a Python veteran - about a decade or so of Python, and I had exactly the same thought. 99% of my code now is Java. It’s much less pleasant but the “enterprise nobs” just work. Static types, fast with Graal, awesome threading, and the quality of tooling are great - those are all areas that Python severely lacks in and has no interest expanding into, because it is a “fast prototype language”. That fast prototyping can now be done in annoying but stable languages like Java or Go or Rust (or NET or Swift). So that cuts a massive leg from Python. Who will bother to maintain the ecosystem if a lot of senior folks are leaving in doves? No idea honestly

New comment by usernametaken29 in "Social Animus"

usernametaken29 — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:23:04 +0000

Overall I also thought the post is mostly confusing?

New comment by usernametaken29 in "The real cost of owning a home"

usernametaken29 — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:20:18 +0000

One thing the author does not think about is end of life depreciation. When you retire and drain your investment funds they very quickly will disappear and stop producing value, especially at any sustained rate. A house has none of these issues. Costs are relatively constant. Rent on the other hand. Well. Anyone who rents knows the cost goes up and will keep going up, if not simply for increased utilities. Another way of course is to die quickly once you retire but then what’s the point of savings anyway?

New comment by usernametaken29 in "What it takes to transpose a matrix"

usernametaken29 — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:26:33 +0000

The thing about linear algebra that strikes me as funny is that I faintly remember every instructor I ever have met says it is easy. Just learn the matrix cookbook and you’ll be good. At last, when you actually implement it, the ideas are simple in theory but in practice you’ll run into quadratic runtime almost all the time and it’s really hard to do well on CPUs. So is linear algebra hard? Maybe not on paper but in reality it’s really fucking difficult to get it to do what you want precisely and quickly