Hacker News: zaphar

New comment by zaphar in "Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions"

zaphar — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:49:03 +0000

As far as I know the model will do nothing if not prompted. So it can't be the case that he gave it no prompt or instructions. There had to be some kind of seed prompt.

New comment by zaphar in "Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others"

zaphar — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:09:32 +0000

Also not replicated that I can see.

New comment by zaphar in "Sheets: Terminal based spreadsheet tool"

zaphar — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:11:45 +0000

This is cool. I built a similar thing for myself a while back: https://github.com/zaphar/sheetsui

New comment by zaphar in "German police name alleged leaders of GandCrab and REvil ransomware groups"

zaphar — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:08:32 +0000

You are certainly free to make up your own definitions for words and speak a dialect that is niche but you will not be effectively communicating when you do. By commonly understood definition criminality is a matter of law.

New comment by zaphar in "German police name alleged leaders of GandCrab and REvil ransomware groups"

zaphar — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:06:14 +0000

Is it your position that privacy is a right regardless of any action you take? Many rights are dependent on circumstance and in tension with other rights. In this case I think you can make the case that their right to privacy is lost.

New comment by zaphar in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

zaphar — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:31:28 +0000

The antidote to a power imbalance is to recognize that there is no power imbalance and go about your life that way.

Pretending there is one lands you in an imaginary trap. Build a society where we recognize that and you build a society where the imaginary trap disappears.

New comment by zaphar in "Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw"

zaphar — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:26:02 +0000

They did? What do you think that email to the user was about?

New comment by zaphar in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

zaphar — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:58:40 +0000

The corporation did not do this to her. It was a two party agreement. She bears just as much blame for the agreement as the corporation. She entered into it willingly. And that does and should have consequences.

Morally speaking I think the company is reprehensible. But nor do I think contact law should be changed because of it.

New comment by zaphar in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

zaphar — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:43:39 +0000

There is nuance here though. Taking a step back and learning from an experience is something to be celebrated.

New comment by zaphar in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

zaphar — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 12:11:13 +0000

I understand how people can get into these fatalist outlooks from experience. I just refuse to lock myself into them. And because I've refused to do so, every once in a while I have success and make the work environment just that little bit better. So I'll keep doing it.

New comment by zaphar in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

zaphar — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:44:23 +0000

I am absolutely certain the world isn't just. I'm also absolutely certain the world can't get just unless you let people suffer consequences for their decisions. It's the only way people can world.

New comment by zaphar in "C++26: The Oxford Variadic Comma"

zaphar — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 23:32:03 +0000

There is a single standard committee though. There is really nothing stopping them from shipping tooling that can do the conversions for people. The number of vendors isn't really the problem here. The problem is that the committee shifts that responsibility onto the vendors of the compiler rather than owning it themselves.

New comment by zaphar in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

zaphar — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 23:00:57 +0000

There is an alternative way make the necessary point here.. Let it go through with comments to the effect that you can not attest to the quality or efficacy of the code and let the organization suffer the consequences of this foray into LLM usage. If they can't use these tools responsibly and are unwilling to listen to the people who can, then they deserve to hit the inevitable quality wall Where endless passes through the AI still can't deliver working software and their token budget goes through the ceiling attempting to make it work.

New comment by zaphar in "Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself"

zaphar — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:05:01 +0000

I'm every bit as immersed in this as you are. I've been developing my own custom claude code plugins that allow me to delegate more and more the agents. But the one thing the agent is not reliably doing for me is making sound architectural choices and maintaining long term business context and how it intersects with those architectural choices.

I tried teaching all of that in system prompts and documentation and it blows the context window to an unusable size. As such the things that as a high level experienced senior engineer I have been expected to do pre-agents I am still expected to do.

If you are eliminating those people from your business then I don't know that I can ever trust the software your company produces and thus how I could ever trust you.

New comment by zaphar in "Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself"

zaphar — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:35:22 +0000

So what you are a saying is that you removed the people who can make the decisions that keep your software maintainable and kept the people who will slowly over time cause your software to become less maintainable? I'm not sure that tradeoff is a a good one.

New comment by zaphar in "OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation"

zaphar — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:28:34 +0000

OpenAI and quite honestly the others think they are in a race to AGI not the bottom. That's why they aren't concerning themselves with moats or cost. This is quite simply a massive bet that we've already cracked AGI and the rest is just funding the engineering to make it happen.

I personally think we haven't cracked AGI yet but it doesn't change their calculus.

New comment by zaphar in "Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available"

zaphar — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:51:59 +0000

There are a number of features and teamsizes that they provide where you have to pay money. Most company users are going to end up paying them money. But also their emphasis on P2P connections means their costs are quite low. It doesn't add much overhead to have the smallish number of personal users out there. They've talked about how having the free tier helps to force them keep those costs down in useful ways.

New comment by zaphar in "LLMs could be, but shouldn't be compilers"

zaphar — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:17:53 +0000

You can get deterministic output if just turn the temperature all the way down. The problem is that you usually get really bad results, deterministically. It turns out the randomness helps in finding solutions.

New comment by zaphar in "I made my own Git"

zaphar — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:38:56 +0000

I have almost exactly this in my own caddyfile :-D The order of the items in the regex is a little different but mostly the same items. I just pulled them from my web access logs over time and update it every once in a while.

New comment by zaphar in "I made my own Git"

zaphar — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:37:15 +0000

Git storage is just a merkle tree. It's a technology that's been around forever and was simultaneously chosen by more than one vcs technology around the same time. It's incredibly effective so it makes sense that it would get used.