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hiAndrewQuinnon Good Tools Are Invisible

A "customizable" tool for any task sufficiently complicated to be someone else's profession inevitably results in a tiny micro-economy of configuration engineers who specialize in customizing the tool to be just so.

But the crazy thing is this is still a better solution in the majority of cases than not offering extensibility at all. It turns out buying one piece of enterprise software for $250,000 and hiring one specialist in it for $150,000 per year has historically been a better deal than dumping millions into building it yourself. The gains in efficiency for the fifty $400,000 per year doctors, and 500 $100,000/ye nurses, etc who use it are still worth it.

hiAndrewQuinnon Herdr: One terminal to rule them all

https://zmx.sh/

for the lazy.

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

You could probably take a competitor closing in on a patent and destabilize them by taking just enough of their R&D and feeding it though an LLM to reach a motivated conclusion, then publishing that transcript. I wonder if we'll see an increase in corporate espionage as a result of this powerful new tactic evolving.

hiAndrewQuinnon Show HN: QUALITY.md – open format/specification, agent skill, and CLI

I'm less interested in this than in what people are willing to aggressively trade off against in order to get the stuff they truly care about.

For example, readability. Where are the developers out there saying "I am very willing to sacrifice a lot of readability to get even a small improvement on e.g. abstraction cleanliness", and sticking with it?

Or "performance can take a huge hit at the cost of being dead easy to read and reason about". Coming up with a list of abstractly good-sounding qualities is just prosocial signaling without knowing what you're willing to sacrifice. There should be a FUCKIT.md that enumerates these.

hiAndrewQuinnon Stroustrup's Rule (2024)

>At the beginning of a language's life, everybody's a beginner. Over time the ratio of experts to beginners changes, and this leads to more focus on "expert-friendly" features, like terser syntax.

Hence why so many shell classics are so short. You don't type R-I-P-G-R-E-P, you type R-G and get on with it, which itself probably evolved from something like the author's own `alias eg="grep -r"` pattern back in the day (that's me spitballing, I don't have proof of that claim).

hiAndrewQuinnon Ask HN: What do SRE do at your company?

That makes sense to me, honestly. It's probably easier to take a SWE with good CS fundamentals and mold them into an SRE than the other way around. It also means more optionality if the SWE turns out not to take to the role.

hiAndrewQuinnon AI in mathematics is forcing big questions

hell yeah brother let's do it

hiAndrewQuinnon AI in mathematics is forcing big questions

"Mathematics isn't about proving the statement! It's about the collection of substatements which lead to the proof of the statement."

"Okay, so what determines what is and is not allowed in the collection?"

"Whether the given substatement is true or not, of course."

Like this is obviously silly, right. In your view you could have two guys both trying to prove or disprove that the area of the unit circle is 3, and yet only the guy doing it with some vision of nobility where he's building up to this grand theory of approximations is the one actually doing "real" mathematics. The guy who's doing it just because he thinks it's neat and would like an answer to the problem itself doesn't count, and you suspect he couldn't even exist.

hiAndrewQuinnon AI in mathematics is forcing big questions

I don't think that's the point. I think the point is to prove the statement. The techniques and abstractions are a means to an end; making them the point is being seduced by the beauty of the weapon.

hiAndrewQuinnon AI in mathematics is forcing big questions

Imo, the proved theorem is the API. And that's really all it has to be.

If there are other lemmas, etc buried inside that 200k blob that can be factored out and proved and used themselves, so much the better. But denying a machine-valid proof just because it's incomprehensible with what a human being considers a reasonable effort made to unpack it just seems odd to me. I see no reason not to accept the vibe coded blob if Lean says it's kosher except anthropocentrism.

hiAndrewQuinnon Show HN: Turn native language audio into flashcards and shadowing practice

Very nice work. I'm going for a different thing, but my audio2anki tool [1] is about as streamlined as I could make it to turn a YouTube URL I want to learn into a stack of Anki flashcards, purely locally.

[1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki

hiAndrewQuinnon 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

Don't forget XTX Markets in Kajaani! At least last I heard. Free heating for an entire city in exchange for being allowed to build out a data center is a pretty good deal.

hiAndrewQuinnon My Mathematical Regression

The trick to making these problems intuitive is to mentally rewrite them into a "how many permutations of this string are possible?" problem. Consider the 2 * 3 case.

    ...
    ...

One way you might get there is

    Right, right, right, down, down

Then you can rewrite this as

    RRRDD

You will always need 3 R's, and you will always need 2 D's. So how many unique strings can be made with this?

Well let's actually consider the degenerate cases.

    ABCDE

there are 5 places A can go, then 4 left B can go, then 3 left C can go, and so on, until we get 5! = 120 possible permutations of ABCDE. If you replace the B with another A to get

    AACDE

now there are only 60 permutations, because half of the original 120 only differed by where the A and the B were relative to one another. By that same logic,

    AACCE

has only 30 combinations, and

    AACCC

has only 10 (seeing why it's 10 and not 20 is actually the trickiest part imo, it's because there are 3! ways to arrange CDE, but only 1 to arrange CCC).

AACCC is isomorphic to RRDDD, which is how we get 10 possible paths to solve the 2*3 grid. We can check this with the binomial theorem: ((2+3) choose 3) = 10.

What's nice about this step by step approach is that it generalizes not just to non-square grids, but to multiple dimensions as well! Imagine trying to get from the top of a 3 by 3 by 3 Rubik's cube to the bottom, how do you do that? Well how many ways are there to rewrite

AAABBBCCC

? The logic above would suggest 9! / (3! 3! 3!) = 1,680 unique paths. And you can just derive it by starting from the degenerate case and figuring out how to slice things up!

hiAndrewQuinnon Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

The False Claims Act is one of my favorite things in the world, hands down. Who would have guessed that paying whistleblowers a fraction of the proceeds for high stakes financial crime would be so effective? Well, aside from every economist and financier who ever lived, I mean.

hiAndrewQuinnon The European Social Stack

Depending on how hardcore enforcement of the upcoming Cybersecurity Resilience Act is, that might(?) push EU products very slightly towards this luxury pricing power on the margin.

But on the whole I think you're dreaming, Ray. I can't imagine a single case of a successful luxury software product. (Apple is premium mediocre at best, doesn't count.)

hiAndrewQuinnon The computer science degree isn’t dead

For those looking for one practical way to do this in the US, I can share my story.

In the US I waited until I was 24 years old to transfer to a 4 year university, because my parents were somewhat well off and utterly unwilling to help with my student loans when push came to shove - even though my financial aid was calculated based on their income and assets. At 24, I was reclassified as an "independent student", and my financial aid was now calculated solely on my (nonexistent) assets. The dynamic entirely flipped and I got to go full time, and even live in a dorm and stuff.

Between 18 and 24, then, one has roughly six years to get a 2 year community college degree out of the way for relative pennies on the dollar. That's a lot of time! Federal loans can pay for all or nearly all of this, but CCs are generally cheap enough that even on minimum wage one can generally budget the ~$100-200 per month it takes to take one or two classes per semester. (I wouldn't actually recommend paying out of pocket if you can avoid it, because your quality of life suffers far more from a $200 extra per month when you are making minimum wage vs when you are making six figures, but to each their own.)

If you fear you won't be able to transfer to a 4 year university for whatever reason, there are 2 year degrees which provide on-ramps to paid work; my original degree was going to be like that until I switched plans to the transfer approach.

The time I spent in a 4 year university weren't entirely covered by grants of course, but it was many multiples cheaper than it would have been had I insisted on going right out the gate. I don't think I would have been approved for the six figures of loans I would have needed with that plan with such unwilling parents. I walked away with low figures total in debt, which is much more manageable, and has a much higher ROI than e.g. $30,000 of a house mortgage. I actually somehow ended up holding less student debt than most college degree holders I have met here in Finland, where tuition is free and loans are intended to pay for everything else (housing, etc).

hiAndrewQuinnon I Won't Buy You a Coffee

What? I'm an American living in the EU, and 4 euros is a little under 5 dollars right now. Last I checked that's still one Costco rotisserie chicken. You should definitely be able to pick up a couple Miller High Lifes for 5 dollars as well if you don't live in like, Times Square or wherever.

hiAndrewQuinnon Ask HN: Favorite text heavy blogs that are a joy to read?

Gwern's website changed my life at least 12 years ago by introducing me to spaced repetition, which solved my greatest bottleneck at the time: very smart and totally unable to remember anything in the moment to actually apply those smarts to. I'm glad I got the opportunity to finally remunerate him some very small amount after he set up a Patreon or what have you around the time of that Dwarkesh podcast. There are like at least a dozen other works on there that were formative for me too, very highly recommended.

hiAndrewQuinnon WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

Can't run bare metal Linux at work, can run WSL on Windows. That's probably 80+% of use cases.

hiAndrewQuinnon I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education yet, which basically argues for a revolution in the other direction - get rid of almost all schooling because almost none of it passes a sane cost benefit analysis. It's very well researched, and the author has a long track record of being happy when he moves people even marginally towards his views.

The praise here for Direct Instruction is akin in many ways to a lot of the research Caplan draws on, especially his findings that generally, most work related knowledge is built at work, by actually performing the job.

https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...

hiAndrewQuinnon GitHub bans security researcher who posted zero-day Windows exploits

2026-09-11, save the date folks. That's when all companies selling products with digital elements in the EU have to have a reporting pipeline for actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe incidents.

hiAndrewQuinnon Can we have the day off?

First sensible take I've seen in this thread. People especially seem to forget the consequences of #1: The company where everyone is working 0.5 days a week will almost certainly get outcompeted, very quickly, by the company where everyone is working 5 days a week. In fact company #2 can probably precompute company #1 even if they have much lower quality staff on average.

hiAndrewQuinnon Show HN: Git-based front-end interface for Hugo

Very cool, fills a niche. Could you put a link to the demo right in the README.md? It's hard to click through on mobile

hiAndrewQuinnon Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics

In fact, most 2 digit numbers not divisible by 2, 3, or 5 are prime. [1] The only one that's likely to ruin your day is 7 * 13 == 91, but that's self-defeating because after you think about it long enough 91 falls victim to [2].

[1] https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/most-2-digit-numbers-not-d...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox

hiAndrewQuinnon Ask HN: How do small teams securely share env files?

`sops` and `age` are about as barebones as you can get if you want to have something to check into a repo, I suppose. Most CI/CD runners have secret storage you can use to make this a nonissue as well.

hiAndrewQuinnon Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

Hidden telemetry was my big concern, yes; the abort thing wasn't caught as a security thing by DeepSeek V4 Flash but it was mentioned by Claude 4.7 Opus (I wanted to compare and contrast here), and Flash brought it up later when I asked it about performance tuning.

`cargo add` tip is very helpful, I had a hunch this happened in my own Rust project and I think you just filled in the missing piece for me there.

hiAndrewQuinnon Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

Taking notes and comparing this against my own (non coding agent) Rust TUI project, thank you! I'm new to Rust so this is a helpful baseline.

hiAndrewQuinnon Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

The codebase was small enough that I handed it over to DeepSeek v4 Flash in Pi to skim through for any risky business, and I didn't find anything concerning. Nice work.

hiAndrewQuinnon If AI writes your code, why use Python?

Oh, that's fair.

hiAndrewQuinnon If AI writes your code, why use Python?

Many are saying this! https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/llms-make-perl-great-again...