Hacker News: youknownothing

New comment by youknownothing in "Scars mark Britain's economy 10 years after Brexit vote"

youknownothing — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 01:05:34 +0000

Anecdotical evidence is not just useless, it's deceiving. I only know one person who voted for Brexit, and it's a low-40s Scottish lawyer who lives in South West London (the posh part). And he's still alive. It doesn't mean anything.

New comment by youknownothing in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

youknownothing — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 01:03:33 +0000

laughs in ironic

Grassroots AI: Beyond the Moonshot

youknownothing — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:58:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cosotateam.com/post/grassroots-ai-beyond-the-moonshot

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660985

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by youknownothing in "Scars mark Britain's economy 10 years after Brexit vote"

youknownothing — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:19:05 +0000

Are you saying that 52% of British people are retired?

New comment by youknownothing in "Claude Tag"

youknownothing — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:18:19 +0000

It's surviving *for now*. This pace isn't sustainable, they know it, but they need to pretend until the IPO. That's when they'll start worrying about quality. The pace of feature creation is going to decrease the moment they float.

New comment by youknownothing in "AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less"

youknownothing — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:46:32 +0000

Remember Facebook's original motto: Go fast and break things. That's where the speed is coming from.

Anthropic's speed of development is about 20% AI and 80% technical debt. We all could be faster if we stopped trying to build things right.

Once Anthropic floats, I predict a screeching halt in feature development to fix all the technical debt that they're accumulating.

New comment by youknownothing in "AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less"

youknownothing — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:41:41 +0000

"We treated code as permanent because the labor to produce it was the bottleneck."

I don't think that's true. We treated code as permanent because we considered code to be the source of truth. Computers don't run documents, computers run code. If the requirements document contradicted the code, then the default was to assume that the requirements document was wrong.

You can't separate code from spec because the code is the spec.

New comment by youknownothing in "Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models"

youknownothing — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 02:50:24 +0000

Am I the only one who thinks this is just another carefully orchestrated publicity stunt? like all the noise they made about Mythos that turned out to be a big nothingburger?

The AI bubble is beginning to show signs of being about to burst (or at least deflate), so they need new sources of hype. Nothing calls for interest as the threat of a ban.

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.