Hacker News Reader

michaelchisarion Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure

The hard lesson is that quality will be the new moat.

For decades, velocity, time to market and features all drove the industry. But AI puts speed in everyone's hands.

But quality is still hard. Maybe harder than ever.

michaelchisarion Maybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All

I enjoyed it.

michaelchisarion Maybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All

Are we talking about Mark Whitacre? He was a piece of work. His whistleblowing was legitimate but the massive embezzlement was also legitimate.

The Soderbergh film The Informant! starring Matt Damen is about that story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-in7L8AmU4

michaelchisarion The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening

| few people would have predicted that the real wall in LLMs would end up being humans' capacity to verify the output

That was the dominant concern in the circles I’m in, so it’s worrisome it’s being treated as rare.

michaelchisarion Ideas aren't getting harder to find, anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward

On the contrary, AI has sucked all the air out of the room. There are still a hundred thousand normal consumer apps waiting to be built, but nobody's building (or funding) them anymore, they're all off chasing this new thing.

michaelchisarion Programming Isn't Special

For the curious, Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin are a good place to start for answering these questions.

michaelchisarion Forever Junior: The Skills AI Can't Develop for You

They're referring to supply chain attacks. Taking over open source libraries through social engineering and adding hidden malicious code. Becoming increasingly common.

michaelchisarion Forever junior: Skills AI can't develop for you

My side projects are all hand coded for this reason. There's no pressure to ship fast, so why not take the time?

michaelchisarion Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)

Location: New York, NY

Remote: Yes (open to frequent travel, PST preferred) or NYC hybrid.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: SQL, Go, React/Typescript (plus AWS, Figma, and plenty more)

Resume/CV: https://michael.chisari.us/resume.pdf

Email: michael@chisari.us

Software Engineer / Founding Engineer

Not actively looking but always open to explore opportunities. Prefer startups, greenfield projects and true innovation. Generalist with deep experience that learns and moves quickly.

michaelchisarion Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red

Performance and efficiency have been neglected as everyone threw every available GPU and trillions of dollars trying (and failing) to create AGI. Though the results have been impressive.

But good enough for pennies in an instant is very useful.

michaelchisarion 2DWillNeverDie

I recently played the Final Fantasy XVI Demake.

https://xvibit.itch.io/xvibit

It had a charm the full game was missing. It reminded me of a puppet show and how large something so low fidelity can feel when filled out by imagination.

michaelchisarion I think you should almost never use AI to write

Most of us have worked our whole lives to be writers in some domain: Code, documentation, specifications, product requirements, corporate communication, etc.

If we don't want to be writers, then we have to be editors. And editing is an entirely different job and it's not an easy one. In many ways it's harder.

Especially when LLMs love writing novels when all we need is a short story or less.

michaelchisarion Htmx 4.0

I call it the GOSH stack (Go Sqlite Htmx) but HUGS is good too.

michaelchisarion The Teaser Period: Why the AI Boom Is Hitting a Reset Wall

There's a third possibility between works and doesn't work:

Works but not quite good enough to make the case against commoditization.

If open source or on-device AI gets good enough for 80% of consumers, then this stops being a consumer product and the only real market is people who need the high-end models. If those models are slow and expensive, certain tasks like scientific and math research can tolerate slowness, but they run up against the costs. If they're expensive, the tech industry can afford them but runs up against their inefficiencies.

We need to talk about how well these improving models work in multiple dimensions: Accuracy, performance and cost. All three have to improve considerably before the debate dies down.

michaelchisarion HTML Can Do That

The View Transition API makes this even more viable.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/View_Transi...

https://view-transitions.chrome.dev

Best part about it is how gracefully it degrades.

michaelchisarion Choose Boring Technology (2015)

PHP has had a lot of conventions so the training data is all over the place. Ruby is a nightmare in that regard. Can't speak to Elixir but I'm surprised to hear someone say LLMs producing good code in either language.

On the other hand, Go code from 2012 and Go code from 2026 looks virtually the same. Conventions are respected, go fmt is the one single formatter, "use the stdlib" is a popular mantra and the code is readable by design.

If I were to codegen a project I wouldn't use anything but Go at this point.

michaelchisarion Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)

Location: New York, NY

Remote: Yes (open to frequent travel, PST preferred) or NYC hybrid.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: SQL, Go, React/Typescript (plus AWS, Figma, and plenty more)

Resume/CV: https://michael.chisari.us/resume.pdf

Email: michael@chisari.us

Software Engineer / Founding Engineer

Not actively looking but always open to explore opportunities. Prefer startups, greenfield projects and true innovation. Generalist with deep experience that learns and moves quickly.

michaelchisarion LLMs reward expertise

Same way you get strong in an age of heavy machinery: Lift heavy weights yourself.

Skills will have to be built through artificial constraints. Pen & paper, reading books, not using AI, etc.

michaelchisarion I don't recommend Tailwind CSS

And @scope does this for all of css.

michaelchisarion Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

It reinforces how to "learn AI" is to first master the problem domain.

I can use AI for coding after decades of coding. I can't use it for theoretical physics because I can't evaluate the responses.

michaelchisarion Why I am not going to buy a computer

"If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort"

https://tombedor.dev/human-attention-and-human-effort/

michaelchisarion LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps

Never once had a problem with an LG because I've never given it internet access. A trustworthy set top box handles everything instead. Concerned that might not be an option in the future.

michaelchisarion How I use HTMX with Go

I've found that my whole design philosophy has to change to work with HTMX. That's not a dig, it may even be a good thing, but it's a significant shift. The designs become much more native to the web and much less inspired by mobile apps.

michaelchisarion Mechanistic interpretability researchers applying causality theory to LLMs

"In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

"Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658"

- On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges

michaelchisarion Mechanistic interpretability researchers applying causality theory to LLMs

The papers linked in the article discuss the mechanical operations that simulate reasoning. Intelligence is data efficiency and I don't see a strong argument that reasoning can exist if it requires a world's worth of data.

That doesn't mean that simulated reasoning isn't useful, it's wildly useful. But a thing is not its simulation.

michaelchisarion Mechanistic interpretability researchers applying causality theory to LLMs

Do we see actual signs of reasoning or is it anthropomorphism? We have an innate tendency to do so as humans.

michaelchisarion Modern decor may be straining people's brains

The first point is solid. The loss of craftsmanship means that the labor cost of those who remain has skyrocketed. That's an irony of devaluing labor is that those who hold on to their craft end up in very high demand.

That said, you overestimate how much "colonizer" discourse informs the average suburban home or modern office environment. That discourse isn't even particularly dominant amongst the left (often clowned as "third-worldist", reductionist or class denialism).

The average leftists apartment or home has more in common with your great-grandfather's house than stark, modern minimalism.

michaelchisarion Modern decor may be straining people's brains

If you've ever been in an home owned for generations, filled with books and knickknacks and heirlooms and family photos, despite the clutter it all feels comforting in a way that modern decor doesn't.

The article doesn't touch much on why modern decor emerged as it did. It's a market response where everyone needs to (or feels the need to) pick up and move at a moment's notice. Companies are either expanding or like to think they'll be expanding soon. People move jobs so often that they have a hard time feeling settled where they are, so they design for that possibility. The modern aesthetic is one of planned impermanence.

michaelchisarion Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful

And quality is the new differentiator when everyone can generate slop.

michaelchisarion AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules

Obviously. Yet on balance, the ones that can't be kept secret may not be significant.

I'm not making a judgement on what the ideal situation is, more so explaining why the referenced study could have come to its conclusion.