HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

d--b

9,559 karma · joined August 23, 2012

Software developer + wannabe screenwriter.
submissionscomments
d--b··on US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified
Trump doesn't like windfarms since they built some off the coast of his Scottish golf club.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_International_Golf_Club_...

d--b··on If you don't design your career, someone else will (2014)
Here's my two cents: career-driven people are assholes.

You're welcome.

d--b··on I'm just having fun
Who's jyn?
d--b··on Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer
FWIW, AI writes React code much better than I ever could (or would want to know)
d--b··on Ask HN: How do teams remember why infrastructure decisions were made?
Ah I wanted to make a product to solve this problem. I posted here to see if anyone thought it was worth solving, but nobody seemed to care.

The way I wanted to do this is to create dashboards that would serve at the same time as infrastructure diagrams for documentation and live health monitoring.

Right now, most documentation solutions aren't used on a daily basis so become out of date, because people don't think about it when making changes and fixes.

And monitoring solutions only show you charts of things you're supposed to already know. They're very technically-oriented, and not business-logically oriented, if that makes sense. Like they'll tell you that process x is running on machine m, and that it's running out of ram, but nothing will tell you that process y that depends on x's outputs is going to fail as well.

d--b··on Breaking Changes in Python-3.14
What's worse is that Python libraries like pandas do that too.

The more I use Python in a professional environment the less I think it is suited for professional environments.

d--b··on Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop
Cool idea. Imo, Place should take Pick’s slot instead of being outside. There s probably something I didn’t think if that orevents this…
d--b··on Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
Computers allow people to interact with the world while avoiding direct human interactions, which autists tend to have a hard time with.

I don't know if it's true at all...

d--b··on Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice
Right, yes, at least that study proved that some bacteria eat cancerous cells in at least one mammal.

If that particular bacteria doesn't work in humans it may still trigger a search for a bacteria that does.

Still being optimistic about this :)

d--b··on Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles
Not defending the guy, but he's possibly on the autistic spectrum, given he grinds solo on his projects for decades and stuff.

He may perceive his own appetite for programming as being linked to some form of autism. Because, well, computers are not people, so it's nice to avoid people.

Given that there is a proven gender discrepancy in the distribution of autistic disorders, it's not completely absurd to imagine that men could biologically be more attracted to working with computers than women.

d--b··on Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice
If it is the case that there are such treatments (easy to produce, 100% efficacy, no side effect) that cure fairly common deadly disease such as colorectal cancer in mice, and that never make it to human trial, there is something seriously broken about medical research...
d--b··on Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice
From what I saw, there are very few experimental therapies that claim 100% efficacy, no side effect, no patent on complex engineering process to produce the drug.

I agree with GP that it is very notable.

I mean if it works on humans, which is not a stretch, colorectal cancer is done. It's huge.

d--b··on Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
Ok. So you'd like to promote: https://www.legitcontrol.com/ (at least you'll get your link in one comment here, no need to thank me ;-))

A system that somehow allows you to tame AI agents' unruly use of git (is that it?)

I see you did use Show HN, and that didn't work.

What you could have done is email hn@ycombinator.com telling them that your Show HN is not being upvoted. This happens, and usually dang and others mod will take a look and if you're within the guidelines will give it a small boost so it shows up in the main Show HN page. Then you're on your own.

Make sure your catchphrase, or hook is well written, cause most people here will not read past "Make Agents a Safe Collaborator in your App".

Anyways, as others said here. There are no ways to "game" HN. the closest you will manage is what you just did, basically asking for help...

That's the key, ask for help, and people will respond. People are nice, and they are willing to procrastinate their intellect away for free.

d--b··on 'Ghost jobs' are on the rise – and so are calls to ban them
A lot of head hunters will dangle job offers that don’t exist just so they can get info on the company you’re working at - basically they’re trying to keep tab on who’s in charge of hiring, so they can contact them.

There are also those who are paid by your boss just to see if any of their team members is looking to take off.

I don’t think there is anything new here though. These practice have existed for a while, and there’s not much you can do about it.

d--b··on AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'
I find it a little weird that junior devs are considered not good in general.

When I started working, I think I was fairly competent technically, and usually the people I hired were also pretty good straight out of uni.

d--b··on If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?
There are 2 reasons for taxes to exist:

1. To finance the state's activities (mostly defense, social security, education, infrastructure and healthcare)

2. To disincentivize detrimental activities like smoking or fracking.

We should tax tech companies for their off-the-charts energy consumption which is not sustainable environmentally.

But taxing AI because it replaces jobs doesn't make much sense to me as the technology is supposed to produce more stuff for less overall human labour.

If the goal is to avoid concentration of wealth, governments should tax wealthy companies/individuals and redistribute by subsiding activities that are not as revenue generating but play other significant role in society, like reduce dependency on foreign imports or you know cough health cough care cough.

d--b··on “You should never build a CMS”
The markdown didn’t help with anything that CMS couldn’t do. But special sections of pages would render differently based on the yaml configs.

You may think of it as: for each page, the yaml contained the React props to render. I d write the the main components, and the user would inject content through yaml as they saw fit.

d--b··on “You should never build a CMS”
I got them to install MacDown, which is a standalone Markdown editor with side by side editing (text on the left, render on the right), and print a cheat sheet for links and images. Markdown is very easy to write. Nowadays there's probably an opensource wysiwyg editor.

The yaml part was very simple, it was handling the links for the menu entries..

Yes the customers wanted customized functionalities, like different ways to access the same pages, in the same tree.

Like you have Menu Item 1 => SubMenu Item 2 => List Item 3 is the same as Menu Item 3 => SubMenu Item 1 => List Item 5. Very few CMS do this, as the usual is to have a non cyclic tree hierarchy.

Here I had a main hierarchy reflected in the folder structure, and then they could add some links to the menu tree with the yaml files.

The whole thing was very simple. It took me about 16 hours to set up the whole site.

d--b··on “You should never build a CMS”
That was my first try, but many things were missing from Kirby for what the customer wanted.
d--b··on “You should never build a CMS”
Ah, this is fun.

The article is about how people shouldn’t build CMSs because they’re building things that are too simple, missing tons features and not realizing the scope of what they get into.

But one thing that CMSs may want to have is “proper version control”. So what do they do? They are faced with 2 options: using a complete version control system like git, which allows them to do branches and merges and PR reviews and so on. Or they build something simpler internally, with only draft/publish, like they usually do.

But what if 2 marketers are making changes to the same file at the same time? one because the name of a product changed, and one because there is a new christmas sale. Does the version system handle merging? Maybe… maybe not…

The point I am making is that we always make the tradeoffs of buying off-the-shelf complex stuff vs internally built, incomplete buggy but tailor-made solutions.

And CMS is very much a space where customability matters.

BTW, Github Pages is a git-backed “CMS” used by millions of people. It works fine.

d--b··on “You should never build a CMS”
I have built several small websites in the past that were updated by non tech people.

I have tried, believe me, to make CMS work. I really did. But every time the customer came back with “can I do this or that” and inevitably, it fell in a blind corner of the CMS engine I was trying to use.

In the end, I developped something where the structure of the site matched a folder structure, setup a dropbox auto sync, and let the customers write anything they needed using markdown for content and yaml for metadata.

Sure, it didn’t do a hundredth of what the cms did, but it did what the customers needed. it took me less time to build this than to actually install/understand a cms system.

If I did have AI back then, it would have been even faster for me to build that stuff.

At some point, it just helps you get shit done.

d--b··on Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
says the blog with tens of ads and hundreds of trackers
d--b··on Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence
This is hardly readable. What’s this about?
d--b··on Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
The examples are great and these bidirectional calculators are something that people would love to have in traditional spreadsheets.

So much so that Credit Suisse, which basically was running everything on heavily modded Excel, created a full language whose outputs were Excel spreadsheets capable of doing that. That thing called “paradise” was a total monstrosity but showed how much people wanted this.

That said, you really need a way to set which cells are fixed and which cells are allowed to move if you want to move past basic examples.

Most times you know what you want to do. like => if the user modifies that cell, find a solution for those specific ones.

If you can enter that info, then you have a lot more constrains for your solver and will avoid a lot of edge cases where everything goes to 0, and you can check that the calculation entered is indeed reversible or not, or if it could have multiple solutions, and so on.

d--b··on 4 billion if statements (2023)
Don't reinvent the wheel, put them in a SQLite table, and let the sql engine create the tree for you!
d--b··on GPT-5.2
I'm confident that GP is good faithed though. Maybe I am falling for it. Who knows? It doesn't really matter, I just wanted to be nice to the guy. It takes some balls posting as OpenAi employee here, and I wish we heard from them more often, as I am pretty sure all of them lurk around.
d--b··on GPT-5.2
> it’s better at creating spreadsheets

I have a bad feeling about this.

d--b··on Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content
Well the "dumbfucks" comment date back a while. Zuck's always been an asshole.
d--b··on Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content
Do people really think that those seeking an abortion will find it harder because Meta banned a few accounts.

I don't know who's behind this, but they're delusional.

d--b··on Vibe coding is mad depressing
I see it as a reason why we’re going to remain employable for a while.
← PreviousPage 11 of 34Next →