Hacker News: zaphar

New comment by zaphar in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

zaphar — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:04:46 +0000

Web developers are not magically worse at this than native devs. See: much of the windows OS lately. The performance of a web view app is more to do with the quality of the devs than the platform it's built on.

New comment by zaphar in "Lines of code got a better publicist"

zaphar — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:01:18 +0000

I'm aware. I worked on that specific project (assuming we are talking about the same one) back in the day. :-)

There are certainly very large applications in that repo in the hundreds of millions of lines of code. But comparing the entire repo to single applications is not an apt comparison.

New comment by zaphar in "Lines of code got a better publicist"

zaphar — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:27:51 +0000

That's a monorepo with hundreds if not thousands of different applications. It's not even close to an apples to apples comparison.

New comment by zaphar in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

zaphar — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:49:21 +0000

yes

New comment by zaphar in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

zaphar — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:25:57 +0000

I think it's more that I was putting emphasis on a different piece of the puzzled than you and less that we disagreed.

New comment by zaphar in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

zaphar — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:23:43 +0000

This framing I agree with.

New comment by zaphar in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

zaphar — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:22:35 +0000

They have been able to "so far". This isn't to say that we shouldn't learn from them how to push the failure date as far into the future as you can. I just don't think you can truly make something incorruptible.

New comment by zaphar in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

zaphar — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:49:20 +0000

Like a lot of things, bad actors only have to get you to fail the test of succession once while the company has to succeed at it every time. Time is not on any companies side here and the longer it goes the more failing that test of succession starts to look like a law of nature.

New comment by zaphar in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

zaphar — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:46:05 +0000

The structure requires maintenance and that is done by an individual or individuals. The real reasons a good company stays good is because the leadership stays good. When the leadership begins to disengage or leaves or changes in some way then the structure will begin to break down. You can't fix it with a "better" structure. It will decay over time unless someone is actively maintaining it.

New comment by zaphar in "I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it"

zaphar — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:11:56 +0000

The correct solution for most users of Claude is to refuse to do things like: `performing logins, handling credentials on behalf of the user, etc`. It is not to find a way to hand your agent the keys to the kingdom.

Guiding them toward solutions like building a tool that your agent can use safely and and then have the agent use that is what most people should be doing. If you are a security researcher then there are reasonable reasons to do that but they are doing the arguably good thing for the average user here.

New comment by zaphar in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

zaphar — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:04:51 +0000

Sure. But I'm also not going to assume they will just because this they seem to sort of mimic it now.

New comment by zaphar in "The ways we contain Claude across products"

zaphar — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:13:44 +0000

They also survive because they invest those resources in some amount of mitigation ahead of time. They don't survive when they don't scale their mitigations along with the business.

New comment by zaphar in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

zaphar — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:08:20 +0000

No they didn't? I use these continuously and it's pretty obvious to me that they do not at the level of a human except in the most surface level ways. Human's as compared to an LLM remain a special category. We have not in fact cracked human level intelligence.

New comment by zaphar in "Shopify outage [resolved]"

zaphar — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:34:40 +0000

I am admittedly not an expert here but this does not at all sound like something that Apple can force Shopify to do. I was under the impression that when Apple does something like this it's primarily because the seller was positioning themselves as an official Apple reseller in some way which they do pretty aggressively police. Did Shopify give you any more details on why they believed they had to delist you?

New comment by zaphar in "Three Ways to Get Paid (2018)"

zaphar — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:32:29 +0000

What does mapping your externalities have to do with honesty? Is this a poor attempt to suggest that no one can actually be honest because no one has a full understanding of the entire universe? Because that's just a lazy excuse for not trying to be honest and not really worth being in the debate.

New comment by zaphar in "Three Ways to Get Paid (2018)"

zaphar — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:49:54 +0000

It's not really a rule of thumb that "Tell others the truth, tell yourself the truth" means you have to barely scrape by. Plenty of people make good money that way.

New comment by zaphar in "Stop Ruining It"

zaphar — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:05:42 +0000

Feels to opposite to me. GPT-1 would have exploded the word count to about 10x and made it sound way more breathlessly influencer coded. GPT-1 would have written something that was 180 degrees opposite of what the post is communicating.

Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?

New comment by zaphar in "Strace-ui, Bonsai_term, and the TUI renaissance"

zaphar — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:33:43 +0000

   The article shows off an strace TUI, and it's not like I can't see the benefits of making strace output more browsable. What I don't understand is why that must happen inside a terminal window where (for instance) all text must have the same font and size.

It doesn't technically have to. But if you want to do it in a different location than the terminal window and have it be cross-platform and easy to develop for your options are limited. There are not really very many text-first UI frameworks out there that are cross platform. It's similar I think to the way that the browser has become the dominant GUI platform for development. The Terminal standards are fast becoming the dominant platform for Text First Interfaces.

New comment by zaphar in "FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive"

zaphar — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:19:42 +0000

You are asserting an insinuation that 538 never made. That is the disconnect here.

New comment by zaphar in "AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills"

zaphar — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:18:40 +0000

Anyone who claims to know the correct strategy to be best positioned for the future is lying or misinformed. The most you can reasonably say is that for the moment an LLM in the hand of an non-expert or naive user is unlikely to produce high quality results or create an absurd boost in productivity. We can make reasoned decisions now and continue to monitor things.

It would be just as unwise to ignore the progression of LLM agents as it would be to over-index on them.