Hacker News: wry_discontent

New comment by wry_discontent in "How Is Music Possible"

wry_discontent — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 18:26:15 +0000

It can feel like that sometimes.

It's weird cause there's this whole set of things (favorite bands/live shows/albums/etc) that most people are really into and care a lot about and it's a big absence in my life.

New comment by wry_discontent in "How is music possible"

wry_discontent — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:33:27 +0000

This was really interesting to read as a person who doesn't experience music deeply.

New comment by wry_discontent in "The Feminist Was a Spy"

wry_discontent — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 13:32:51 +0000

Yes, I think it's a big deal if you worked for a big evil organization on purpose.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Ask HN: Where Is AGI?"

wry_discontent — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:48:10 +0000

And you'll keep hearing that, because it's a marketing term.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"

wry_discontent — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:55:51 +0000

How I interpreted their thoughts on "loops" and "graphs" etc, is that they 1. have unlimited token allowances, and 2. are working on problems where the solution itself can be described by code.

It reminds me of property based testing. I really liked the idea when I heard about it, but most of what I work on does not tend to behave in a way that can be easily described mathematically like that.

Maybe I'm just not clever enough to do it.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Anger, Anxiety and Agency"

wry_discontent — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:27:03 +0000

What the hell am I supposed to be excited about? Endless slop? Career change from intellectually stimulating creation to bland gatekeeping?

There is nothing fun about programming anymore. The joy is completely gone. I would switch careers if I could make money elsewhere.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"

wry_discontent — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:28:47 +0000

They work on research problems you can define a clear solution criteria for.

The kinds of business software I work on don't have those characteristics. If I needed something like a utils library, I think I could easily have Claude write the whole thing and not read the code.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Clojure 1.13 adds support for checked keys"

wry_discontent — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:29:43 +0000

You get over it really quickly once you start actually using it. I find it basically impossible to read Clojure outside the editor in any meaningful sense.

New comment by wry_discontent in "My favorite keyboards"

wry_discontent — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 18:45:01 +0000

Huge fan of the Voyager with home-row-mods.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children"

wry_discontent — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:36 +0000

This seems totally reasonable. It is designed to be addictive, and they definitely target folks under 18. The article specifically mentions teens.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Anthropic acquires Bun"

wry_discontent — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:39:27 +0000

The tools produce mediocre, usually working in the most technical sense of the word, and most developers are pretty shit at writing code that doesn't suck (myself included).

I think it's safe to say that people singularly focused on the business value of software are going to produce acceptable slop with AI.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Writing a good Claude.md"

wry_discontent — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:14:40 +0000

That makes sense given that it's trained on real world developers.

New comment by wry_discontent in "I don't care how well your "AI" works"

wry_discontent — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 18:11:37 +0000

I've always heard this sentiment, but I've also never met one of these newly skilled job applicants who could do anything resembling the job.

I've done a lot of interviews, and inevitably, most of the devs I interview can't pass a trivial interview (like implement fizzbuzz). The ones who can do a decent job are usually folks we have to compete for.

New comment by wry_discontent in "What I learned about creativity from a man painting on a treadmill (2024)"

wry_discontent — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 23:56:47 +0000

This is great. One of the things I say to my wife all the time, which is taken from a Kurt Vonnegut quote, is that "I don't have to be good at my hobbies".

New comment by wry_discontent in "An overly aggressive mock can work fine, but break much later"

wry_discontent — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:57:43 +0000

It's my preference to a point. I think you can over-do it. I've worked in systems that didn't use it and worked just fine. I would bet most folks err on the side of too little, unless they have some kind of framework doing the heavy lifting.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Things I don't like in configuration languages"

wry_discontent — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 20:04:20 +0000

    Here will be a list of ... things I don't like about them.

I did not see a list of things not to like. Just a set of vague thoughtless complaints.

New comment by wry_discontent in "An overly aggressive mock can work fine, but break much later"

wry_discontent — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:21:03 +0000

I see a lot of times people (read: me) are lazy and make a mock that does not have anywhere near the behavior of the original. It's more like a very partial stub. I will mock an api with 20 possible calls with the 2 that I use. Unsurprisingly, this mock is closely tied to the current implementation.

New comment by wry_discontent in "An overly aggressive mock can work fine, but break much later"

wry_discontent — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:13:57 +0000

This sounds great until one of your other functions calls that function.

You're just describing dependency injection, but if you say that, people won't want to listen cause doing that all the time sucks.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

wry_discontent — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 21:08:23 +0000

I've been working on a web framework in Clojure. There are already a few others, but they're, in my opinion, too focused on the Clojure community, and are much harder to sell to people I know who might otherwise use Clojure. I wanted something that was more like a Rails or a Phoenix or a Next.js. We'll see if it goes anywhere.

New comment by wry_discontent in "AI is Dunning-Kruger as a service"

wry_discontent — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 23:07:14 +0000

I would say this does not work in any nontrivial way from what I've seen.

Even basic scripts and UI components are fucked up all the time.