Hacker News: williamdclt

New comment by williamdclt in "Authorization terminology is a mess: Let's fix it"

williamdclt — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:46:32 +0000

Not particularly an OOPer, but regardless tou're only making it less clear I'm afraid! "objects" and "methods" instead of what?

I'll make an educated guess that you mean "objects and methods" instead of "subject and action" or "noun and verb" respectively. But it's really the "utter" and "transfer" terminology that I have no idea what it might mean

New comment by williamdclt in "Authorization terminology is a mess: Let's fix it"

williamdclt — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 09:41:23 +0000

I have more experience with authorization than most engineers, even engineers who have some experience with authn/authz, and I have no idea what that "subject can utter the action" or "transfer of nouns and verbs to perform the utterances" could mean

New comment by williamdclt in "Muse Spark 1.3"

williamdclt — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:53:01 +0000

> They almost always cycle from left to right

Try searching "bike" in google image :)

Most bike images are from the right side, as that's where the mechanism is (gears, chain etc), so not surprising that LLMs reproduce this

New comment by williamdclt in "Casio F-B100W-1A"

williamdclt — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 09:43:40 +0000

I'd guess that the very large majority of people don't know that americans use 12h time, no. Why would they?

New comment by williamdclt in "Casio F-B100W-1A"

williamdclt — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 09:42:31 +0000

I'm skeptical. Switching between time formats when you're used to it requires 0 cognitive effort, and certainly doesn't warrant a button. Eg in France, people use 24h time for display but talk in either 12h or 24h time depending on personal preference, so you might look at "17:00" and say "5" without even thinking about it, it's just a different name for 17.

New comment by williamdclt in "PostgreSQL for Everything"

williamdclt — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:27:26 +0000

I've not interacted with mysql a whole lot, but when i did I was regularly surprised that it didn't have stuff I was missing from Postgres. Off the top of my mind:

- Query planner is much worse (just yesterday I had to USE INDEX to sped up a query by 300x, I'm near-certain postgres would just have gotten it right) - Indexes are much more limited: no GIST, no GIN - No transactional lock (`pg_advisory_xact_lock` in postgres). This one was very surprising, it's a really useful thing and I had to implement it myself as a lock table

New comment by williamdclt in "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"

williamdclt — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:42:52 +0000

> I have a long-held feeling with Trump that his most ardent haters don't hate his specific policies, merely that he's so gauche about it, that he has no class.

A bit of an extraordinary belief to hold, to be honest

New comment by williamdclt in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

williamdclt — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:33:53 +0000

the vast majority of people have not taken Marketing 101, and it'd be strange to expect them to have. I know you're not literally talking about a Marketing 101 course, but the point is the same

New comment by williamdclt in "Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf"

williamdclt — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:26:48 +0000

habits, no. But difficult argument to make that lab-grown meat requires _less_ of a "moral value realignment" than plant-based food?

New comment by williamdclt in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

williamdclt — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:26:32 +0000

what a strange comment! It's totally fine, you do whatever you want, but it sounds like "I used to be an alcoholic drinking two 12-packs a day, now I don't even care about beer: I just have 6 a day and that's not because I want to be drunk but just because I feel like it". Like, sure it's quantitatively better but... it's not really qualitatively very different is it

New comment by williamdclt in "Beef and dairy drive 41% of biodiversity damage linked to global farmland"

williamdclt — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:26:44 +0000

Our ecosystem dying is also pretty suboptimal.

New comment by williamdclt in "Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering"

williamdclt — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:31:54 +0000

I think it's far from being this simple. What you're describing is productivity on a greenfield project, but what's really interesting is productivity when working on an existing large codebase, with existing conventions, architecture decisions (or lack of)... How easy is it to do a product pivot, to rearchitect for performance, etc etc etc.

New comment by williamdclt in "France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls"

williamdclt — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:28:12 +0000

not the same as scam, but how is it not spam?

New comment by williamdclt in "'Pervert glasses': Backlash against Meta's smart glasses grows"

williamdclt — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:29:52 +0000

> its even more disheartening that most people's reactions to just about anything these days is dread about how it'll make their lives worse without fail.

Maybe because most (tech) things do make most people's live worse without fail (such as these glasses being available)? I don't see how you can blame people for a very rational reaction here

New comment by williamdclt in "Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo"

williamdclt — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:48:54 +0000

> will produce extraordinary improvements in prosperity

Who says that? Who is doing _anything_ for AI to result in (even non-extraordinary) improvements in prosperity for the average citizen? I'm hearing a lot about AI reducing need for human labour, but literally nothing about doing anything to transition into a post-labour society. Absolute madness.

So far it's all very standard (if scaled up) wealth concentration, and not even a pretense of it trickling down.

New comment by williamdclt in "Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI"

williamdclt — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:28:55 +0000

I wouldn't say "magically", it's what happens with me and every other engineer I know: we're all detecting bugs and yet we're all writing them too. Not saying that LLMs work the same as humans, but saying it's not a logical fallacy.

New comment by williamdclt in "The Glass Famine"

williamdclt — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:59:59 +0000

still isn't for most purposes, and most people are still more comfortable with yards than meters for day-to-day stuff (friends are often looking at me blankly when I give a distance in meters)

New comment by williamdclt in "Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago"

williamdclt — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:59:47 +0000

How did they appear upstream?

New comment by williamdclt in "Should you wash your solar panels?"

williamdclt — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:26:25 +0000

> "Is it clean and tidy right now" is a decent proxy for "Has this been properly taken care of in the past"

I don't think so, esp at selling time, I definitely expect that the owner has just made it look pristine. But the opposite is definitely true: if you can't even bother making it look clean and tidy when trying to sell, I'm pretty sure you've not taken care of it in the past!

New comment by williamdclt in "The Birth of the American 12-string Guitar (2013)"

williamdclt — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:22:16 +0000

It's self-consistent: those who say that a chord must have at least 3 notes also say that power chords are not technically chords