Hacker News Reader

upghoston Trumpcard (Official US Government Website)

I... what? Guys I think .gov got hacked. Cause the alternative is we are on the weird timeline. Can someone confirm we are not on the weird timeline?

upghoston Show HN: Pooshit – Sync local code to remote Docker containers

I am actually surprised how well it runs, given how solid it is

upghoston Pure and Impure Software Engineering

haha, yeah, just a little cheeky human humor.

upghoston Pure and Impure Software Engineering

I liked this article because I think it is a fairly charitable "strongman" take of the "pure" engineering camp from someone who identifies with the other camp.

That being said, there is an objective way out of this trap emdash check out Dave Farley's work on Modern Software Engineering [1].

It is a very clever approach to convert the process of software delivery into a software problem itself, with a minimal criteria of shipping new code safely every 24 hours.

When your "pure" engineers optimize around that, the distinction between your "pure" and "practical" devs tends to be pretty small.

[1]: https://a.co/d/eLvZYcE

upghoston A polyglot's guide to multiple-dispatch (2016)

To your point, I assume the "polyglot" part was referring to the arguments this would spawn in the comment section

upghoston Microsoft Azure: "Multiple international subsea cables were cut in the Red Sea"

Can they splice these? Surely the don't have to run a whole new cable?

upghoston I miss using em dashes

Often terribly written, I am likewise concerned with dangling participles.

upghoston I miss using em dashes

I still use em dashes -- I just do it poorly and throw in lots of typis.

upghoston Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music

https://www.neomantra.com

> Neomantra is a financial technology company focused on electronic trading.

Somehow this is not what I was expecting when investigating. For... research purposes.

upghoston Hacker used AI to automate an 'unprecedented' cybercrime spree, Anthropic says

Man, part of me wonders if the same AI arguments are playing out across the criminal underworld. Like, are some criminals afraid of their jobs getting automated? And the old school guys are like, "AI just makes slop crime". And are junior criminals are having a hard time breaking into the industry because they've stopped hiring for intro level gang jobs because the Crime Lords are really pushing their henchmen into using AI for everything?

upghoston Efficient Array Programming

I assumed Uiua was "the same" but this is the first I'm hearing the experience might be different. I will check it out, thanks!

upghoston Efficient Array Programming

The three things I have repeatedly failed to learn, they just don't seem to stick for me: Dvorak, Specter[1] (the Clojure library), and APL. So I appreciate these tips whenever I find them.

My issue with APL is I was never able to turn the corner to "generic problem solving" in APL (or other array langs). It feels like learning written Chinese, like 50,000 individual techniques but if you know them you can do incredible things quickly. For the problems I know how to solve, I can solve them quickly. And you CAN do amazing things with inner products in APL.

On the other hand, studying APL, even if you don't master it, is not without benefits. LLM transformer architecture and GraphBLAS algorithms are junior APL level implementation problems (at least conceptually, operationalizing them is a different story).

Adam Brudzewski has one of the most criminally underrated YouTube channels[2]. It would be great to solve problems that elegantly in any language, and Adam has always been very friendly in answering questions if you ever get a chance to speak with him. I just seem to be a lost cause lol.

[1]: https://github.com/redplanetlabs/specter

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/@abrudz

upghoston Traps to Developers

> Unset variables. If DIR is unset, rm -rf $DIR/ becomes rm -rf /. Using set -u can make bash error when encountering unset variable.

sweet mercy :O

Someone call the Inquisition

upghoston Toothpaste made with keratin may protect and repair damaged teeth: study

> marketing leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Hard to brush that one off!

[that was brilliant, you missed your calling. I am completely enamled :D]

upghoston MCP overlooks hard-won lessons from distributed systems

So I'm in the "MCP is probably not a great idea" camp but I couldn't say "this is how it SHOULD be done", and the author makes great criticisms but falls short of actual suggestions. I'm assuming the author is not seriously recommending we go back to SOAP and I've never heard of CORBA. I've heard of gRPC but I can't tell if the author is saying it is good or bad.

Also Erlang uses RPCs for pretty much all "synchronous" interactions but it's pretty minimal in terms of ceremony. Seems pretty reliable.

So this is a serious question because hand rolling "40 years" of best practices seems hard, what should we be using for RPC?

upghoston Ursa: A leaderless, object storage–based alternative to Kafka

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol15/p1337-lee.pdf

Is this you also or total coincidence?

upghoston Onshape – Product Development Platform

It's been good for making 3D printing doodads I need for around the house. Happy to let others use my 1-off flange shim thingy. But aside from that this is a very good warning to be aware of.

upghoston Ursa: A leaderless, object storage–based alternative to Kafka

Whoa a leaderless consensus protocol sounds pretty revolutionary!! So many question -- do you have any resources on this you could share?

upghoston A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

Just to clarify, I meant the rhetorical technique was being employed by the author of the article. He's downplaying the "AGI race" in order to normalize and validate the byproduct of the hype bubble to be as "normal and reliable as electricity and TCP/IP". It's clearly meant to attempt to disarm and appeal to skeptics, but there is more than enough dog whistling and performative contradiction in there to make it clear the true intention of the article -- praising Caesar.

For the record, I would be more inclined to be sympathetic towards the author if any receipts (i.e., repos) were produced at all, but as you so correctly stated, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I agree you do not have burden of defending the author's claims, apologies if that was not clear.

upghoston A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him..."

A rhetorical technique as old as dirt, but apparently still effective.

upghoston A Hitchhiker's Guide to the AI Bubble

> Within weeks I built a serverless system processing 5 million social media posts daily, tracking topic clusters and emerging narratives in real-time. Then brand monitoring dashboards. Then a "robojournalist" that could deep-dive any trending story. Then hardware and firmware specs for a coffee machine. Then my first mobile app.

I call bullshit. Let's see some repos.

upghoston Clj-coll: Clojure collections and sequences in Common Lisp

Very nice! I love this sort of polyglot feature cross-pollination. My CL isn't as strong as my Clojure, I can't tell if the persistent vector implementation implements finger tries w/reference sharing or not, but will be very impressed if that is the case!

upghoston DaisyUI: Tailwind CSS Components

Nice! I will check these out. Hoping a few of them are pure CSS.

upghoston DaisyUI: Tailwind CSS Components

So for everyone hating on Daisy and Tailwind, what is the alternative?

I do my best to use vanilla CSS, BEM style, with SCSS preprocessing, but it's not incredibly intuitive, it's apparently hard for most "full stack" devs to do because they think it is beneath them so they will reach for something like MaterialUI.

I agree with the criticisms about tailwind and Daisy but the problem these seem to solve that vanilla CSS does not is that Tailwind for all of its quirks requires less internal agreement than vanilla CSS. Without internal agreement every dev does their own crazy thing to the CSS and it turns to spaghetti fast.

So again my question is, what is my alternative here that gives me this property of "nicely packaged, well documented, modular, scalable CSS" without using Tailwind/Daisy?

upghoston Show HN: The Magic of Code – book about the wonders and weirdness of computation

Wow. Delightful. I'm reaching that jaded mid-career stage where software DEFINITELY does not seem magical anymore -- more like a collection of broken promises about the magic that could have been -- and this was a great reminder that, yeah, hey, it is kinda magical anyway, isn't it?

Congrats for writing something that is both accessible to a wide audience and yet still meaningful to grumpy audience.

I will certainly be picking this up!

upghoston Ozzy Osbourne has died

N.I.B. for me. Greatest love song of all time. https://youtu.be/NsXEb-NOs88

Changes. Saddest song of all time. Can't listen to it without crying. https://youtu.be/dOz_dLmpT9A

upghoston The AGI Final Frontier: The CLJ-AGI Benchmark

This is a good one. Forget AGI, I'd settle for an LLM that when doing Clojure doesn't spew hot trash. Balancing parens on tab complete would be a nice start. Or writing sensible ClojureScript that isn't reskinned JavaScript with parens would be pretty stellar.

upghoston Reflections on OpenAI

Granted the "OpenAI is not a monolith" comment, interesting that use of AI assisted coding was a curious omission from the article -- no mention if encouraged or discouraged.

upghoston LLMs fail to demonstrate internal world model, according to Harvard/MIT study

YouTube video discussion by Discover AI: https://youtu.be/jxB-lQyAAxU

upghoston Bold Mission to Hunt for Aliens on Venus Is Happening

I can guarantee you that if someone were to discover that the "Ark of the Covenant" dataset that would unlock AGI was on Venus and it could only be accessed by a meatbag, we'd be sending fleets.

Given the current hype it probably doesn't even matter if the claim is true as long as it keeps the capital flowing.