Hacker News: waldrews

New comment by waldrews in "RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard"

waldrews — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:17:52 +0000

Aargh, aggressively blinking visual horror website.

New comment by waldrews in "Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown"

waldrews — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:16:52 +0000

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..."

New comment by waldrews in "Show HN: A Lisp where each function call runs a Docker container"

waldrews — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:13:21 +0000

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....

New comment by waldrews in "The Codex App"

waldrews — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:36:12 +0000

And they're pretty much the only example of an embedded browser architecture actually performing tolerably and integrating well with the native environment.

New comment by waldrews in "JVIC: New web-based Commodore VIC 20 emulator"

waldrews — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:09:52 +0000

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.

New comment by waldrews in "AI Usage Policy"

waldrews — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:00:19 +0000

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.

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.

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.

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.

New comment by waldrews in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"

waldrews — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 04:28:34 +0000

There's a ridiculous amount of tech in the DNA and cellular machinery of a single bacterium.

New comment by waldrews in "Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?"

waldrews — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:54:47 +0000

My whole cat is, what, a couple gigs of DNA?

New comment by waldrews in "That viral Reddit post about food delivery apps was an AI scam"

waldrews — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:59:38 +0000

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.

New comment by waldrews in "That viral Reddit post about food delivery apps was an AI scam"

waldrews — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 03:21:40 +0000

The threshold isn't 50% because the distribution of human and AI written cases isn't naturally 50-50. So a coin flip will underperform always guessing the more frequent class. Where it gets interesting is if the base is unknown or variable over time or between application domains. Like, since AI written text is being generated faster than the human kind, soon guessing AI every time will be 99% accurate. That doesn't mean such a detector is useful.

Ask HN: Who's given up on getting hired? (January 2026)

waldrews — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 03:57:56 +0000

In the spirit of the monthly "Who's hiring?" and "Who wants to be hired?" threads...

If, in this market, you're no longer expecting to be hired for a tech/programming role, tell us what you're working on on your own, what technologies you're interested in/are following, and any interesting plans for alternative careers or what you're planning to do with your time.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472655

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

New comment by waldrews in "James Moylan, engineer behind arrow signaling which side to refuel a car, dies"

waldrews — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 05:53:54 +0000

Why didn't they just ask ChatGPT?

Oh wait.

New comment by waldrews in "2025: The Year in LLMs"

waldrews — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 06:59:00 +0000

I'm being hyperbolic of course, but I'm a little dismissive of the progress that happened since the days of BBS's and car based cell phones - we just got more connectivity, more capacity, more content, bigger/faster. Likewise, my attitude toward machine learning before 2023 is a smug 'heh, these computer scientists are doing undisciplined statistics at scale, how nice for them.' Then all of a sudden the machines woke up and started arguing with me, coherently, even about niche topics I have a PhD in. I can appreciate in retrospect how much of the machine learning progress ultimately went into that, but, like fusion, the magic payoff was supposed to be decades away and always remain decades away. This wasn't supposed to happen in my lifetime. 2025 progress isn't the 2023 shock, but this was the year LLM's-as-programmers (and LLM's-as-mathematicians, and...) went from 'isn't that cute, the machine is trying' to 'an expert with enough time would make better choices than the machine did,' and that makes for a different world. More so than, going from a Commodore Vic 20 with 4k of RAM and a modem to the latest Macbook.

New comment by waldrews in "2025: The Year in LLMs"

waldrews — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 01:03:16 +0000

Remember, back in the day, when a year of progress was like, oh, they voted to add some syntactic sugar to Java...

New comment by waldrews in "Exe.dev"

waldrews — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 01:28:31 +0000

Might be a good place for yunohost/coolify style services, especially if you have multiple separate entities - though probably tricky to do inbound mail because of IP allocation?

New comment by waldrews in "Rue: Higher level than Rust, lower level than Go"

waldrews — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 06:01:55 +0000

It's amazing how often C# (or more broadly CLR/JVM) is the pragmatic answer, even when you feel uncool using it.

New comment by waldrews in "Rue: Higher level than Rust, lower level than Go"

waldrews — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:58:41 +0000

What the world needs is a more expressive language than Go, that interops with Go's compilation model and libraries.

New comment by waldrews in "We Need to Die"

waldrews — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 21:06:32 +0000

You might start questioning meaning of life with a billion year time budget. A million years seems reasonable to cover the range of things you could anticipate wanting to learn or experience. A few thousand years, no, that's not enough, you have to start cutting corners, you can barely even visit nearby worlds and only cover a few intellectual disciplines.

New comment by waldrews in "Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean Theorem"

waldrews — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 19:18:42 +0000

Garfield was in many ways the most personally appealing and brilliant of the American presidents, rising from poverty and obscurity by being absurdly talented across many fields and eloquent.

He was assassinated early and barely got to serve. The story of his life, the shooting, and the subsequent medical drama (featuring even a cameo by Alexander Graham Bell improvising a diagnostic device) are so epic you have to wonder if time travelers are messing with us.

His legacy was the nonpartisan professional civil service, a key part of his agenda that his successor felt obligated to carry out, an accomplishment that recently came under particularly heavy attack.

Netflix just came out with the miniseries about him, 'Death by Lightning,' based on the book 'Destiny of the Republic.' His earlier life is featured prominently in '1861: The Civil War Awakening' by Adam Goodheart. There are a few great C-SPAN/Book TV videos by some of the authors that tell the story concisely and convey why some of us are so fascinated by that history.

New comment by waldrews in "Lenses in Julia"

waldrews — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 15:20:39 +0000

Now if only the Julia community didn't keep insisting on ligatures and impossible-to-look-up Unicode symbols - the hollow semicolon for compose right to left, seriously?