Hacker News: youknownothing

New comment by youknownothing in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

youknownothing — Tue, 12 May 2026 01:58:14 +0000

People who think that "software engineering" and "writing code" are the same thing will indeed be out of a job. People who understand the difference will continue to thrive.

Thinking that software engineers can be replaced by AI is like thinking that mathematicians can be replaced by calculators.

New comment by youknownothing in "All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)"

youknownothing — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:24:07 +0000

To be fair, considering that there are minerals in the Moon that don't exist on Earth, it's normal that the human body experiments an allergic reaction to a set of substances that it hasn't ever been exposed to during thousands of years of evolution.

New comment by youknownothing in "A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”"

youknownothing — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:48:50 +0000

Isn't this going to break a lot of React Router navigation? Are they going to manually check every website to see if their manipulation of the history is legit or spammy?

New comment by youknownothing in "Lean proved this program correct; then I found a bug"

youknownothing — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 01:50:47 +0000

I'll probably get a lot of hate mail for this but here goes nothing... Despite what many people like to claim, you cannot prove that a program has no bugs. That means proving the absence of bugs, and you cannot prove a negative. The best thing you can do is fail to find a bug, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

Before everyone starts blabbing about formal verification, etc., consider this: how do you know that you didn't make a mistake in your formal verification? IOW, how do you know your formal verification is bug-free? Answer: you don't. Or if you try to formally verify your formal verification then you're just translating the problem to a new layer. It's just a chain of proofs that is always ultimately based on an unproven one, which invalidates the whole chain.

You can get asymptotically close to zero-bug proof, but you can never get there 100% of the way.

New comment by youknownothing in "Installing every* Firefox extension"

youknownothing — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 02:27:40 +0000

Is this the digital version of Supersize Me?

New comment by youknownothing in "EFF is leaving X"

youknownothing — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:49:40 +0000

I must confess this is an odd decision. It's true that the drop in engagement is abismal (97% reduction is ouch). However, given that they're still posting in other sites, what's the marginal cost of keeping X in the equation? Presumably they're using some aggregator where you compose the post once and it gets automatically posted to BlueSky, Mastodon, Thread, etc., what's the cost of keeping X?

New comment by youknownothing in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

youknownothing — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:36:16 +0000

YES! I get the point of mobility and all that but I wish someone would give a ticket to some of those a-holes. Honestly, town halls have been looking the other way for far too long on this matter.

New comment by youknownothing in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

youknownothing — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:57:29 +0000

Thank you, I'm a cyclist too and I always try to respect pedestrians' space, and it really pisses me off when people don't. In many cities cycling on pavement is not allowed, yet some cyclists do it... which I'd be fine with, provided they understand that they're doing something they're not supposed to be doing and that they have no priority. But when they're invading pedestrian space like that AND ring the bell as if people were supposed to be making way for them, I literally want to throw a stick in their wheels.

New comment by youknownothing in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

youknownothing — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:51:22 +0000

I like the mindset, it reminds me of "Your code as a crime scene" by Adam Tornhill: https://www.adamtornhill.com/articles/crimescene/codeascrime...

Also, very tangentially, to the notion of the Developer's Legacy Index: https://www.javaadvent.com/2021/12/using-jgit-to-analyse-the...

New comment by youknownothing in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

youknownothing — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:02:30 +0000

I don't think this has anything to do with dogfooding. As the author says, dogfooding is about consuming your own product. You can consume Claude Code and still be a reasonable engineer. It's difficult to tell what's actually happening without an insider view but, IMHO, this is just the typical go-fever of start-up thinking: produce loads of functionality as quickly as possible and don't think about quality. It was try before AI, and it will be true after AI.

Also, to those who say "this is proof that code quality doesn't matter any more", let's have this chat 5 years from now when they're crumbling under the weight of their own technical debt :)

New comment by youknownothing in "After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)"

youknownothing — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:50:13 +0000

"I never saw most of the offending ads because of my adblocker"

interesting that someone looking to make some (modest) money with AdSense is blocking ads...

New comment by youknownothing in "The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE"

youknownothing — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:57:21 +0000

yeah, that too, good point.

New comment by youknownothing in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

youknownothing — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:56:27 +0000

This is unnecessarily incendiary, didn't get passed the first paragraph because this is so misleading:

> Oracle [...] has filed thousands of petitions for H-1B visas in the past two fiscal years, even as it lays off thousands of American workers

Oracle is laying off workers of _all_ nationalities, not just Americans. I know people at Oracle with H1B visas that were laid off. Trying to paint it as if they're replacing Americans with foreigners is just unnecessary fear mongering.

New comment by youknownothing in "Extra usage credit for Claude to celebrate usage bundles launch (Pro, Max, Team)"

youknownothing — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:51:02 +0000

maybe they've changed the page since you checked but there are two requirements, the second one being: - You’ve enabled extra usage

If you haven't, then you don't get the credit.

New comment by youknownothing in "The FAA’s flight restriction for drones is an attempt to criminalize filming ICE"

youknownothing — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:49:30 +0000

IANAL but mens rea is a serious consideration here. A prosecutor would have to prove that you have knowingly and wilfully committed the crime in order to be convicted, so unmarked cars are in practice out of scope.

I think the main implication is that you won't be able to use any drone recordings for legal action against ICE unless you can prove that you recorded from further than 3,000 feet (one hell of a camera) or that you did it "accidentally", e.g. I was just filming my friends and ICE agents suddenly busted out of an unmarked car that happened to be within the frame. Even then, you'd have to stop recording pretty soon because at that point they could argue that it becomes wilful recording.

New comment by youknownothing in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

youknownothing — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:38:38 +0000

I don't know how you connected one thing over the other... that's a leap pretty in line with your username :)

New comment by youknownothing in "No one is happy with NASA's new idea for private space stations"

youknownothing — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:54:43 +0000

Well, I'm happy about NASA's idea for private space stations. Maybe I'm not happy with the timing, but I definitely think that this is the future. If you make space stations a valid, self-sustaining industry, that frees up budget for NASA to pursue other non-economically viable missions like going to the Moon and to Mars. It's like someone else's comment about the space shuttle: I was sad to see it go, and maybe it was premature, but private space transport is a more economical way of reaching space.

New comment by youknownothing in "LG's new 1Hz display is the secret behind a new laptop's battery life"

youknownothing — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:48:29 +0000

I'm guessing that for this to work you need to be able to selectively refresh parts of the screen at different rates? a 1Hz refresh rate would be rubbish just to follow the mouse cursor, so at least that part of the screen needs to refresh faster. However, it does make sense for the parts of the screen that are mostly static. Looking at my screen as I type this, the only part that needs a high-refresh rate is the text-box where I'm typing (I can type several keys per second so I wouldn't want a refresh rate of 1 Hz). However, the rest of the screen is not changing at all so a slow refresh is perfectly fine.

New comment by youknownothing in "Go hard on agents, not on your filesystem"

youknownothing — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:41:02 +0000

This is a great time for Apple to relaunch their Time Machine devices, have a history of everything in your file system because sooner or later some AI is going to delete it...

New comment by youknownothing in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

youknownothing — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:38:53 +0000

I think the problem stems from the fact that we have a number of implicit parameters in our heads that allow us to evaluate pros and cons but, unless we communicate those parameters explicitly, the AI cannot take them into account. We ask it to be "objective" but, more and more, I'm of the opinion that there isn't such a thing as objectivity, what we call objectivity is just shared subjectivity; since the AI doesn't know whose shared subjectivity we fall under, it cannot be really objetive.

I tend to use one of these tricks if not both:

- Formulate questions as open-ended as possible, without trying to hint at what your preference is. - Exploit the sycophantic behaviour in your favour. Use two sessions, in one of them you say that X is your idea and want arguments to defend it. In the other one you say that X is a colleague's idea (one you dislike) and that you need arguments to turn it down. Then it's up to you to evaluate and combine the responses.