Hacker News: wry_discontent

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.

New comment by wry_discontent in "New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair"

wry_discontent — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 21:53:17 +0000

I've been using NoBS toothpaste tabs for a couple years which are nano-hydroxyapatite. I find them effective. No issues at my dentist.

In fact, a year ago, they wanted to put in a filling for a minor cavity, but I wanted to put it off and by the time I went back they said it was gone.

edit: I also like the tabs because they're easy to travel with.

New comment by wry_discontent in "What people mean when they say "I hate AI""

wry_discontent — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 19:17:31 +0000

I mean I hate low effort slop that's pushed from every vaguely technical source and tells me it's great. It's very clearly junk.

I think what people hate is the sense of quality degradation. Everything feels cheap. Everything feels like it's meant to be consumed in the next 20 seconds, and then forgotten about. People want stuff that doesn't suck.

New comment by wry_discontent in "What if hard work felt easier?"

wry_discontent — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 19:14:03 +0000

This seems naive to me.

There are plenty of things I work hard on because I like them, but there are also lots of things I have to work hard on because they need to get done.

I have similar feelings about Ikigai, the overlap of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Those things don't really overlap for me.

New comment by wry_discontent in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

wry_discontent — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 18:43:06 +0000

Isn't that begging the question? If you just accept the presupposition that intelligence is tightly coupled to consciousness, then all that makes perfect sense to me. But I don't see why I should accept that. It isn't obvious to me, and it doesn't match my own experience of being conscious.

Totally possible that we're talking past each other.

New comment by wry_discontent in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

wry_discontent — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 18:40:32 +0000

But that's not an answer. Why should intelligence and not some other quality be coupled to consciousness? In my experience, consciousness (by which I'm specifically talking about qualia/experience/awarenesss) doesn't at all seem tightly coupled to intelligence. Certainly not in a way that seems obvious to me.

New comment by wry_discontent in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

wry_discontent — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 19:32:10 +0000

What makes you think consciousness is tightly coupled to intelligence?

New comment by wry_discontent in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

wry_discontent — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 19:30:22 +0000

"brain as computer" is just the latest iteration of a line of thinking that goes back forever. Whatever we kinda understand and interact with, that's what we are and what the brain is. Chemicals, electricity, clocks, steam engines, fire, earth; they're all analogies that help us learn but don't necessarily reflect an underlying reality.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Some Smalltalk about Ruby Loops"

wry_discontent — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 14:44:33 +0000

I have found that chaining things in Smalltalk get immensely painful after just a couple elements. Unlike most other languages, I find myself reaching for silly little var names for lots of different things I would normally just let flow.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Clojure Zippers (2021)"

wry_discontent — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 23:01:50 +0000

I've used zippers a couple times.

Once for navigating a collection of deeply nested routes in a webapp, and once for navigating deeply nested xml to grab very particular data.

Both times it was pretty pleasant and nice to use.

I wouldn't reach for them in most normal situations cause they're more complicated to get right than simple looping (or `clojure.walk/prewalk`), but if you have large semi-predictable data structures, you can do cool stuff with zippers.

New comment by wry_discontent in "Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial"

wry_discontent — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 15:30:48 +0000

If you use Emacs, there's a mode similar to magit that's under active development: https://github.com/bolivier/jj-mode.el