Hacker News Reader

ernon Flight disruption warning as Airbus requests modifications to 6k planes

The relief second officer basically pulled up when the stall protection had been disabled and by the time the other pilot and captain realized what was happening it was too late to save the plane.

There is a design flaw though: the sidesticks in modern Airbus planes are independent, so the other pilot didn’t get any tactile feedback when the second officer was pulling back.

ernon If a pilot ejects, what is the autopilot programmed to do? (2018)

By "publicize" I meant making sure the consequences were well known within the fighter pilot community.

ernon If a pilot ejects, what is the autopilot programmed to do? (2018)

Making sure that the consequences are well-publicized also has the useful side-effect of making sure that ejection is regarded as a last resort.

ernon Using AI to negotiate a $195k hospital bill down to $33k

This is the exact sort of performative garbage that LLMs are great for. I had to do an electrical install, but the installer felt that the code required additional work (I don't think he was trying to rip us off, he sincerely believed it, since it's a volume business model).

I got ChatGPT to come up with some plausible interpretations of the electrical code that allowed the install to continue, including citations. I don't know how accurate it all was, but I sent the argument off to the installer, and he came back and did the work the next day. Even if it gets audited, the chances of the auditor picking apart the arguments are probably slim to none. He has plausible deniability.

This is also why schools and colleges are struggling. No one expected superficially "high quality" work from average and poor students, and now that they have to carefully evaluate everyone's work, they've been caught with their pants down.

Someday superficial AIs will talk to other superficial AIs and they'll deadlock, requiring humans back into the mix. Until then, it's a useful way to do bureaucratic judo.

ernon A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool

I get a feeling that there are a lot of people trying to minimize this incident for some reason.

ernon Things managers do that leaders never would

This “manager” vs “leader” thing is slightly overdone in general.

A manager who doesn’t lead will end up the issues raised in the article.

A leader who can’t manage will face administrative chaos.

ernon React is winning by default and slowing innovation

Angular was bigger than react until 2018/19-ish in the enterprisey places I worked at.

ernon React is winning by default and slowing innovation

Maybe I'm stupid, but as I recall, React hooks were quite complicated. It's been a few years since I wrote production front-end code, but it felt like some kind of high IQ/elitist barrier.

ernon The staff ate it later

I've seen clips on Reddit where animals are harmed for engagement. Usually "nature is brutal" type clips, where one animal kills another.

I mean nature is brutal, but typing down an animal to be consumed by another isn't natural.

Anyway, I don't think movies and TV are the main source of animal cruelty anymore.

ernon What could have been

I have 4 cameras, a home security system, a remotely monitored smoke detector, a smart plug, 4 leak sensors, smart bulbs, a car whose location and state of charge I can track remotely, a smart garage door opener, a smart doorbell, and 7 smart speakers.

I think IoT was more than just hype.

ernon Allianz Life says 'majority' of customers' personal data stolen in cyberattack

I don't know how the social engineering happened, beyond what's mentioned in the article as a possibility (calling helpdesks). But there's a ton of corporate information that's widely available for exploitation.

LinkedIn, for example is a goldmine for social engineering, and there's no way to secure a profile from being viewed by logged-in users, even if they are unconnected.

I'm surprised more employers don't closely audit their employees profiles.

ernon Major rule about cooking meat turns out to be wrong

I think that's because it's been heavily monetized (YouTube, social media in general, books, products).

ernon My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures

I liked Claude Code when I used it initially to document a legacy codebase. The developer who maintains the system reviewed the documentation, and said it was spot-on.

But the other day I asked it to help add boundary logging to another legacy codebase and it produced some horrible, duplicated and redundant code. I see these huge Claude instruction files people share on social media, and I have to wonder...

Not sure if they're rationing "the smarts" or performance is highly variable.

ernon America’s incarceration rate is in decline

I think lead is nasty stuff, but if it was the single cause of high crime, surely we'd see a similar effect in other domains, like a rebound effect on IQs (another thing lead was blamed for)?

Instead the Flynn Effect seems to have been strongest during the era of high lead, and it's tailing-off now.

ernon The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

Good one....I put it into Claude with a prompt to not change the meaning but make it more normal

ernon Plain Vanilla Web

Frameworks can help in many cases, especially for complex or high-scale apps. But in simple CRUD apps, particularly in consulting environments, they often add more complexity than value.

I've seen this play out repeatedly. A company needs a basic CRUD system. Consultancy A brings in designers who produce “wireframes” (usually full-featured eye candy) and UX-centric “journeys.” To justify its bloated fees, the consultancy builds something super-slick using frameworks to match the designs. But once the budget runs out, the customer struggles to maintain it. Eventually, the app becomes unmanageable.

So the consultancy sends in a designer again to produce new mockups and “journeys.” The cycle repeats, this time with another framework.

ernon Plain Vanilla Web

I agree. Having seem enormous amounts of effort wasted on implementing fancy web apps by Digital-first consultancies (they reject BAs, but substitute designers) in the B2B space, I think there does need to be more education for the people who procure this stuff (especially in government) who get ripped off routinely.

ernon A 'Trump Card Visa' Is Already Showing Up in Immigration Forms

Australia effectively scrapped this sort of visa in 2024 because it wasn't bringing the expected benefits. The UK did a similar thing because of it being exploited by oligarchs. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68052626)

ernon How the Water System Works

If decent water testing kits were widely available...or even water analyzers on the outlets, more people might be more confident drinking tap water. But I suppose there isn't much incentive to push people in that direction.

ernon Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

I suspect it's that they build excellent ICE vehicles, and were quick to go to hybrids but missed the rise of EVs. Everything we're seeing is a rearguard action to protect their ICE business.

ernon I should have loved biology too

The use of latin doesn't help either. "Cytoplasmic net" (or better yet "plasma net") is a lot easier to understand, visualise and remember than "endplasmic reticulum".

ernon I should have loved biology too

Absolutely, I do appreciate that addition — I definitely had teachers like that.

It’s probably why, when I got to university and tackled subjects like probability theory, discrete math, and theoretical CS, I did extremely well — they weren’t reliant on the shaky algebra and trig foundation I had from school. Once the focus shifted to logic and conceptual thinking, without the baggage of poorly taught fundamentals, everything clicked

ernon I should have loved biology too

I can really relate to your experience, even though mine was from a parent's perspective rather than as a teacher. I found a similar thing when tutoring one of my children in trigonometry. The way the material was being presented in school didn't click with him, but astonishingly, despite having studied it decades ago both at school and university, explaining it to him, it finally made sense to me. The unit circle definition of a tangent is a thing of beauty. I had the time to get my child to appreciate it as well, because of the extra time I had to spend with him, whereas the teacher had to hit curriculum benchmarks.

I also think this is where things like intergenerational math-phobia come from: parents who don't grasp core concepts and are scared off, and can't help their own children, creating an ongoing cycle.

ernon 'Immediate red flags': questions raised over 'expert' much quoted in UK press

Vogue, Metro, Cosmopolitan, the i newspaper, the Express, Hello!, the Telegraph, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail and the Sun

Many of those media outlets are known for being low quality, with the exception possibly of the Telegraph.

I feel like readers should be able to think critically about their news sources, and expect and discount low quality content from tabloids, rather than blindly believing everything that's fed to them, either by gatekeepers in the traditional media, or on social media.

ernon The Post-Developer Era

I think the crux of this post is spot-on: we’re nowhere near a “post-developer” era. LLMs are great accelerators, but they still need a competent human in the loop.

That said, I do think he understates how much the value of certain developer skills is shifting. For example, pixel-perfect CSS or esoteric algorithmic showmanship used to signal craftsmanship — now they’re rapidly becoming commoditized. With today’s tools, I’d rather paste a screenshot into an LLM and tweak the output than spend hours on handcrafted layouts for a single corporate device.

ernon Playing in the Creek

I see AI like the reading glasses I’ll soon need — not because I can’t think clearly, but because it helps cut through things faster when my brain’s juggling too much.

A few years ago, I’d have quietly filed this kind of article under “too hard” or passed a log analysis request from the CIO down the line. Now? I get AI to draft the query, check it, run it, and move on. It’s not about thinking less — it’s about clearing the clutter so I can focus where it counts.

ernon Playing in the Creek

Maybe I’m not smart enough, or too tired to decode these metaphors, so I plugged the essay into ChatGPT and got a clear explanation from 4o.

ernon Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

I tested that prompt with multiple chatGPT models, Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Deepseek and all mentioned the red queen. Just saying.

ernon Interviewing a software engineer who prepared with AI

You’re assuming that the person interviewing you can distinguish between those eye movements. That’s a big assumption.

ernon How Kerala got rich

They’re welfare states, with three classes of residents. A slave-like underclass, disenfranchised expats, and citizens who get paid off by their royal families with generous benefits. Maybe the closest analogy is Ancient Rome?