HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

leecommamichael

536 karma · joined February 20, 2021

Independent Researcher

If I believe in your mission, I am open to engineering work. I prefer systems languages and deeply technical/mathy problems, but I'll write Typescript with minimal complaining for a good cause.

submissionscomments
leecommamichael··on AI is destroying my CS degree
Retain? You're full of it. You can't possibly make that argument. There's absolutely no data to support it.
leecommamichael··on Copper – A minimal low-level programming language with OOP and generics
Seems like Dart with indentation instead of braces.
leecommamichael··on Edit an SQLite database in your browser
I will not be giving *you* my data, hahaha.
leecommamichael··on ElementaryUI – Swift, in the Browser
Fun project, an aside; Apple please fix the Swift compiler. It is so slow. It is so very slow.
leecommamichael··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
How could we distinguish between a hack and a purchase covered up as a hack?
leecommamichael··on Four Months of Zig
We’re talking about libraries here. I prefer Odin’s library for my own uses because it ends up making lots of things tidy. In either language you can have it your way.
leecommamichael··on I still teach OpenGL ES 3.0
The way I’m interpreting their post is, you could far more easily teach things like introductory projective geometry without a GPU.
leecommamichael··on Ask HN: Does anyone else just want to disconnect from everything?
Been there, I unplugged a little bit here and there and it helped. You’re feeling something large which may only need a minor adjustment.
leecommamichael··on Sergey Brin says Google's AI models are reaching recursive self-improvement
ok
leecommamichael··on Arena Allocators in C
I don’t use code-highlighting and terseness can enable expressiveness.
leecommamichael··on Now that information is free, what's a college campus for?
I graduated from high school around 2010. Information has been free my entire life. My college campus connected me with people who were in a similar place in life. We were trying to find a place we could contribute, and were uncertain about the future. Uncertain of how we fit in. Instructor quality varied, as I'm sure it always does, but even the weaker professors were seen as our leaders in that uncertain time. They all coached us to listen to ourselves, and to suit our strengths. I felt a presence on my college campuses.
leecommamichael··on AI is a tool and using it well takes skill
We still have yet to find what is possible without a career's worth of experience doing it all by-hand.
leecommamichael··on AI is a tool and using it well takes skill
People preached the wrong imperative before "or get left behind." Turns out they really meant "get in now and re-evaluate everything you think you know every month in perpetuity or get left behind." I'll be here typing the code until the dust settles, and do my thinking then.
leecommamichael··on AI is a tool and using it well takes skill
> Its probable that AI will roll out much faster than humans can develop that skill of using it in a way that increases not decreases human knowledge over time.

Why is it probable? Does it even need to continue to be rolled out for that damage to be possible? Two genuine questions which I know none of us really have the answers to.

leecommamichael··on AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software
> true, but what if you just don't

A question being experimented on by what seems to be an alarming share of professionals who use social media. We'll see. I suspect it will depend on the context. If you weren't going to review a change anyway, and wanted the outcome, the team committing it won't perceive a negative outcome, whether it has been had or not. But hey, they'll be "using AI," and so will be compliant.

leecommamichael··on Grieving the Loss of Details
Hey, interesting take, could you cite some specifics on the LLM and experiment you’re referring to?
leecommamichael··on Time Travel in Braid (2015)
Yes.
leecommamichael··on Reasons to Dislike AI Coding
Because the community had changed and people feel lonely.
leecommamichael··on One Month Without AI
You might consider that comparison more deeply.
leecommamichael··on One Month Without AI
Ok
leecommamichael··on Sublime Text Build 4213
For me? I already have Sublime Text installed, it works great, and has never not worked great.
leecommamichael··on Simple Is Not Small
I was surprised that the author didn’t translate the piped representation of the first program to a procedural program with explicit calls to subprocedures. It’s bigger, but it’s dead-simple and easy to slip instructions in the middle of.
leecommamichael··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
I'm having a very hard time finding mention of token-generation speed.
leecommamichael··on Hit anything. Discover how it rings
Everything's a drum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2T7oLbmvx4
leecommamichael··on NetBSD and my life (2005)
How could there even be an xkcd which is so applicable? Wow.
leecommamichael··on To become a better writer, read as much as you can
In addition to this, I think one gets even more from reading after having tried to write. There's a unique feedback loop that starts happening once you start creating.
leecommamichael··on NetBSD and my life (2005)
> This also lead to more arguments with the wife (which leads to a decrease in other things... ;)

I love the subtlety of the dual-use closing-parenthesis here.

leecommamichael··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
It's interesting how this plays out with C/C++. There's not really a package manager, and so the host system has to have vetted packages. It moves the burden on to the system maintainer.
leecommamichael··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
Ultimately I think devs need to think about their dependencies and decide which ones get pinned and a serious review before pulling. If the thing has got binaries, it gets a serious review. If it does anything with cryptography, it gets a serious review... etc.

I don't think automatic updating is a good idea at all. It's just the honor-system, and trust is a security flaw.

leecommamichael··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
Thanks for the thorough reply. I personally haven't experienced brittleness/unfriendliness, but I have only written around 10k lines of Go. Not exactly a power user, but I like to think I understand it.

> If you’ve added the package to your imported then odds are your next step is going to build it. Thus negating any benefit.

I actually think this is the benefit! I don't need to go to a website to see what changed, I can just have a look at the code. The best dependencies have a changelog. Ideally I can look at a diff.

> I think you’re being too charitable here. I think Russ Cox just didn’t want a package manager because C doesn’t have one. But ended up relenting after everyone nagged the Go team for years afterwards.

That's entirely possible.

> So how do you know if a Go package has been compromised when the only source of truth is the compromised origin?

Fair point, and probably worse in this future we're in now that NIST is drowning in CVEs and has turned away from some share of them.

Page 1 of 10Next →