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djb_hackernews

2,789 karma · joined July 1, 2009

djb DOT email AT gmail.com
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djb_hackernews··on Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI
ok now let's do some math to calculate the current levels of daily intelligence to calculate how much power we need to replace 10% of it with AI. Never mind new use cases or approaching human replacement. My guess is it is a few orders of magnitude more power than we produce today.
djb_hackernews··on GPT‑Live
are these human actors or are is the whole demo AI generated?
djb_hackernews··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
the trend is AI also does the code review. Too many anecdotes and studies showing AI is a better code review that a human and the models are just going to get better.

Whether we get better results if AI reviews Python or Rust I'm not sure. But I suspect Rust will win out as the training data likely has more content around Rust correctness and language usage than Python does.

djb_hackernews··on OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors
Can't the same be said for the AI?
djb_hackernews··on US deploying nearly all stealthy long-range JASSM-ER cruise missiles to Iran war
err, this is an odd response given that this assessment has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked every time it is offered up.
djb_hackernews··on After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
When an SVP asks you to do something in a mass email, it's very much optional. Dave Treadwell is an SVP, his org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people.

My SVP asks me to do things all the time, indirectly. I do probably 5% of them.

djb_hackernews··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
I live in an old house.

The front bump out leaks when we get driving rain. I installed some flashing but that wasn't enough, it's still leaking. So I'm working on that so I can close up the big hole in the ceiling some day.

The prior owners filled in the old coal chute with literal bags of cement sort of artistically placed in the hole in the brick foundation. So I'm trying to figure out what masonry tools and skills I'll need to close it up proper.

I'd like to build my kids a playhouse of some sort, sketching out some designs for that.

djb_hackernews··on Writing code is cheap now
Curious if your mental model is similar or how you see them being different.
djb_hackernews··on Writing code is cheap now
Are you familiar with the cathedral vs the bazaar?
djb_hackernews··on The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)
You have a misunderstanding of what LLMs are good at.
djb_hackernews··on Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction
It's a call to have his ICE goons (armed to the teeth and trained to escalate to violence of course) operate voting stations because of all of the "illegal" voters and for DHS to administer elections instead of leaving it to the states.
djb_hackernews··on Porting 100k lines from TypeScript to Rust using Claude Code in a month
you don't think that's where we are headed?
djb_hackernews··on Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager
I work at a large software company, senior engineers here are essentially technical leads for a team or a subsystem. They are my equals when it comes to level, often getting paid a lot more than me for high performers.

I'm here to help the team make decisions, but I delegate as much of the opinion having to my senior engineers. To have an opinion they need a bunch of inputs, sometimes getting those inputs isn't as natural as the technical inputs, that's where I come in.

Senior engineers are still involved in cross cutting technical concerns but for any work that is bounded by our team I'd be working with them scope out the work as requirements or use cases we give to mid level or early career engineers on the team to disambiguate with the senior engineer as a consult/negotiate.

djb_hackernews··on Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager
I am an EM that manages several senior engineers currently. I find it super common for senior engineers to get promoted mostly on technical merit, we end up thinking the rest "can be coached". Or it's coaching to the next level. Here are some areas I coach them on:

- influencing without authority. Managing up. Leadership.

- getting work prioritized

- providing useful performance feedback (promos etc)

- coaching and giving feedback to early career engineers

- communicating ideas effectively

- developing 1YP+ plans for their areas.

- idk, there are a lot, senior engineers are rarely "complete"

djb_hackernews··on What has Docker become?
for the record, cpuguy83 was in the trenches at docker circa 2013, it was like him a handful of other people working on docker when it went viral, he has an extremely insiders perspective, I'd trust what he says.
djb_hackernews··on Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado
Uh...What?
djb_hackernews··on Condo boards everywhere are unprepared for serious repairs
This topic is interesting. I am on the condo board in a 20 unit association, mostly attached townhomes. The biggest issue is the person in the "owners" unit, the one with the most invested, not playing ball with the other units.

That said if anyone has tips on good condo management companies in the Boston area, let me know!

djb_hackernews··on WHO List of Essential Medicines
Interesting. Are you using it prophylactically? Is this common in The Netherlands?
djb_hackernews··on Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3
Tell that to the lawyers who are paid lots of money to be risk adverse. As others point out, the law operates on precedent, no lawyer wants their decision to be the one that makes their employer a test piece.
djb_hackernews··on GitHub to replace “master” with alternative term to avoid slavery references
I'm going to blow your mind...

The "mastering" process of audio mixing historically starts with the input of "slave" tapes...

djb_hackernews··on Phone Addicts Are the New Drunk Drivers
I just assume someone with a water sports fetish is about to get a dick pic.
djb_hackernews··on Gremlin Free – Run chaos experiments to prevent outages
Is anyone aware of a chaos tool that isn't a SaaS (free or not) and doesn't require using Spinnaker like the current Netflix chaos tool does?
djb_hackernews··on Cubans overwhelmingly ratify new socialist constitution
> Also it's frankly weird how the last capitalist era there is basically enshrined in their culture

No, I think your first list perfectly enshrines the effects of modern day capitalism on modern day Cuba...

> garbage EVERYWHERE, many toilets have to ration toiled paper (!), not to mention, no incentive to clean the bathrooms, many restaurants had bland flavors due to the inability to order specialty food items and spices and only work with the bulk items the government gives you

djb_hackernews··on Stellar Smart Contracts
> and we both release the funds before parting way.

Doesn't that require you to trust that they release the funds? Do smart contracts have a way to dispute an outcome?

djb_hackernews··on Spotify hits 83M paying subscribers, more than double Apple Music’s 40M
I'm a paying customer but can anyone tell me why shuffle play is the default? If i'm listening to an album I typically want to listen to it from start to finish and the extra clicks to do that are annoying. But there must be a reason it is designed like that?
djb_hackernews··on XARs: An efficient system for self-contained executables
Can you expand on that? In my experience nothing about Docker implies a performance impact in terms of size or start time.
djb_hackernews··on The Horrors of Upgrading Etcd Beneath Kubernetes
The clustering story for etcd is pretty lacking in general. The discovery mechanisms are not built for cattle type infrastructure or public clouds. ie it is difficult to bootstrap a cluster on a public cloud without first knowing the network interfaces your nodes will have or it requires you to already have an etcd cluster OR use SRV records. From my experience etcd makes it hard to use auto scaling groups for healing and rolling updates.

From my experience consul seems to have a better clustering story but I'd be curious why etcd won out over other technologies as the k8s datastore of choice.

djb_hackernews··on Ask HN: Girlfriend is being shown ads depending on what we do together. How?
This has a name! Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.
djb_hackernews··on Improved Docker Container Integration with Java 10
It's the same advantages as running anything else in a container, cgroups and namespaces.
djb_hackernews··on Stock Markets Tumble Amid Worries Over Tech Firms and Trade Tensions
> Trump is a skilled negotiator

I think this meme died 6 months ago. If /s, carry on.

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