<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: waldrews</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=waldrews</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:07:55 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=waldrews" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>(off topic) why the headache-inducing animated background?  An annoyance for all, and an actual accessibility issue for some.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:55:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49526369</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49526369</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49526369</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "Show HN: How much of Hacker News is about AI?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Every technical topic involves AI now.  Even if it's about why the ancient Greeks didn't turn their steam engines to industrial use - the AI's should be researching the details.  We might as well ask which topics involve humans or use language.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2026 17:15:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49452587</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49452587</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49452587</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "TreasuryDirect: Prepare for ID.me – Your New Way to Log In"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>TreasuryDirect's login and account recovery experience has been notorious for years, both for user experience and for people easily getting locked out for weeks.  It's good they're being careful with this rollout, as it serves both individual and institutional accounts where dollar amounts involved are epic even by bank standards, and rarely checked by hand, so even single account breaches are serious.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:50:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312653</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312653</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312653</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "Mistral OCR 4.1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The VLM's are so good at complex document understanding now.  But you just can't trust them not to invisibly censor sensitive clinical/legal docs, even at the maximally permissive settings.<p>And the deep learning OCR-only models won't censor, but can and do hallucinate.  I've yet to see a 'scan with different approaches and reconcile and say you're not sure if they don't agree' system just work for generic complex documents.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:53:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292321</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292321</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292321</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "Squeak 6.1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The only mainstream-ish language where that still happens?  R.  Too bad, there's a lot more use cases for this sort of thing now - versioning, anything non-persistent agents touch, collaboration, auditable enterprise LOB.  It's 2026, why are we (or our agents) still writing serialization code?  Even if the AI's write the boilerplate, the state management fragility is often a tax/risk.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:37:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247014</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247014</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247014</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>3.5 Flash-Lite seems available in US region, as was 3.5 Flash; but 3.6 Flash looks Global only so far when pinging.  If Google employees are watching, will this issue go away?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:10:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997559</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997559</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48997559</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Very farsighted, after working as a patent clerk, to lay claim on such a foundational technology.  Back in the day, they must've been like, oh, so Mercury blocks the sun at the wrong time, but where's the commercial value - and now every chemical company throughout the universe is about to get a bill every time they make something more complex than hydrogen gas.<p>Meanwhile, Galilean relativity has long gone out of patent, and people on board planes and other vehicles just move around like they were in a stationary reference frame paying no royalties.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Jul 2026 03:08:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48868321</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48868321</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48868321</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Back in my day, a software company of national importance would be considered a big success if acquired for 60 million... Of course, at that point it would have to be profitable, and actually own its key IP...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 03:18:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48565283</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48565283</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48565283</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not quite the same scenario, but it's already plausible to have a situation where every subagent is allowed to spawn multiple subagents, in which case we'd have literally exponential credit consumption growth...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 02 May 2026 02:50:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982856</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982856</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982856</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Startup working on AI Healthcare solutions (plus some random experiments) | REMOTE(US, Pacific time zone)  | Full time and project based<p>Full time engineering role (Remote, US person required; Pacific time zone)<p>Stack: C#, Python, Gemini API on Windows, lots of legacy systems/constrained enterprise environment.  Health systems experience preferred.  Understanding of cost effective, reliable LLM API use.  Should be flexible: do PM-like work with less-technical client domain experts, solve problems end to end, willing to data cleaning and detailed work for client goals and security/compliance gruntwork, even when it's not technically elegant.  Self motivated, willing to understand legacy and undocumented codebases, but also willing to take instructions.<p>Ideal candidate has real (pre-Claude Code) experience, but is ready to do fast iteration in post-AI world, while actually reading what the AI does.  We're ok if your stack is different, if you're both technically mature and up to date on modern fast-turnaround AI-based development.  Probably in the 5+ year experience range.<p>REMOTE anywhere, project based or initially part time: startup generalist hacker, maintain systems and websites, code one-off prototypes.  Should be good enough to code without an AI in a few languages, but an effective AI harness coder.  Can do a small but complete app/project end to end, including basic marketing.  2+ year exp or a new grad with a good portfolio or major project; happy to consider more experienced person.  Good role for someone who's working on their own startup to pick up some side money and experience.  Projects could be anything from game-like apps/novelties to voice tools to utility apps.<p>REMOTE anywhere, project based or initially part time: help on some more experimental mathy projects.  M.S./Ph.D. in statistics, physics or related, with pragmatic programming experience.  Possible projects: gaussian process modeling; designing evaluation metrics; compression; Bayesian tools for radiology imaging.  May be good for a grad student part time.  This is the fun stuff the founder would rather be doing himself if he had the time.<p>REMOTE (US person) Half-time remote admin/chief of staff type: deal with bookkeeping, compliance, communications, social media, phone calls - save us time on everything non-technical.  Should be effective AI user; should have some relevant experience supporting tech business.<p>Please reply with a salary target.  may2026-jobpost@waldrews.anonaddy.com</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 01 May 2026 21:51:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980891</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980891</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980891</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "Do you even need a database?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>File systems are nice if you need to do manual or transparent script-based manipulations.  Like 'oh hey, I just want to duplicate this entry and hand-modify it, and put these others in an archive.'  Or use your OS's access control and network sharing easily with heterogeneous tools accessing the data from multiple machines.  Or if you've got a lot of large blobs that aren't going to get modified in place.<p>What the world needs is a hybrid - database ACID/transaction semantics with the ability to cd/mv/cp file-like objects.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:26:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47782269</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47782269</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47782269</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Aargh, aggressively blinking visual horror website.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:17:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324436</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324436</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324436</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The new workflow will be "AI, I need to view this text file and add some words to it.  Create an app that displays it in a scrollable window, respecting the encoding.  Now move the cursor to the line below the three dashes... no, the other three dashes..."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:16:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157978</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157978</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157978</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "Show HN: A Lisp where each function call runs a Docker container"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>well, sure, that uses a large number of processing cycles for each small operation.  But asking a frontier LLM to evaluate a lisp expression is more or less on the same scale (interesting empirical question whether it's more or less).  And, if we count operations at the brain neuron level it would take to evaluate one mentally....</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:13:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070464</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070464</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070464</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "The Codex App"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And they're pretty much the only example of an embedded browser architecture actually performing tolerably and integrating well with the native environment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:36:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867332</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867332</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867332</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "JVIC: New web-based Commodore VIC 20 emulator"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's one maxed out RAM configuration.  Back in my day, we had 4k RAM, about 3500 bytes usable from BASIC, and that was enough, unless you were rich enough to have a 3k memory expansion cartridge.  But really, if you need that extra 3k, you're just not writing code efficiently enough, right.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:09:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743689</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743689</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743689</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "AI Usage Policy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We're just not going to see any code written entirely without AI except in specialist niches, just as we don't see handwritten assembly and binaries.  So the disclosure part is going to become boilerplate.<p>In the old era, the combination 'it works' + 'it uses a sophisticated language' + 'it integrates with a complex codebase' implied that this was an intentional effort by someone who knew what they were doing, and therefore probably safe to commit.<p>We can no longer make that social assumption.  So then, what can we rely on to signal 'this was thoroughly supervised and reviewed and understood and tested?'  That's going to be hard and subjective.<p>Personal reputations and track records are pedigrees and brands are going to become more important in the industry; and the meritocratic 'code talks no matter where you came from' ethos is at risk.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:00:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737109</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737109</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737109</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's a ridiculous amount of tech in the DNA and cellular machinery of a single bacterium.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2026 04:28:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46612334</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46612334</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46612334</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My whole cat is, what, a couple gigs of DNA?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:54:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46516781</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46516781</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46516781</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by waldrews in "That viral Reddit post about food delivery apps was an AI scam"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yup!  My point is that the 'coin flip baseline' model that's as good as chance isn't actually trivial to create, for an unbalanced and time varying underlying distribution.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:59:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515934</link><dc:creator>waldrews</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515934</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515934</guid></item></channel></rss>