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mberning

3,417 karma · joined December 12, 2007

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mberning··on How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)
Great analysis. I think there must be even more going on in the comments section. There are a lot of shenanigans especially on “controversial” topics.
mberning··on The Real Luxuries In Life
Right. What these luminaries mean is being driven to the airport and the flying business class (or on a pj) to your next totally frivolous destination.
mberning··on The Real Luxuries In Life
If you have a family and are not already independently wealthy you will be enjoying very few of those. In my experience.
mberning··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
The corruption is bad enough at the local level. I can’t even fathom how much theft is going on at the state and federal level. It’s one of the more frustrating things to see how much money you are paying into the system for such meager benefits. We can’t even get sidewalks installed in my area, but the township can certainly give a sweetheart tax break to one of their buddies to build a new gas station.
mberning··on Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]
Will have to give this a watch after the kids go to bed. I like a lot of Casey’s views even if I don’t agree with them.
mberning··on What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
I am just having a hard time with all this AI stuff. The other day I got some feedback on one of the products I own. It was a small tweak to an anchor tag to add a title and change the color for just that element. I made the change in the web inspector, showed it to the user, they said yeah that’s good. I walked over to one of my engineers and asked “can you make this change and get it in dev, I just pinged it to you”. No shit they turned around and pasted what I gave them into copilot with claude and asked the agent to do it. Well it actually didn’t do it exactly the way the customer wanted, so it actually took 2 tries with claude. Incredible.
mberning··on Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming
Notability is arguably even more subjective than popularity.
mberning··on Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming
This happened to me back in college. I authored a couple pages for some bands that I was in to, probably spent weeks pulling together history, lineup, albums, eps, etc. only to have them deleted unceremoniously with no recourse. That was my first and last attempt to contribute to wikipedia.
mberning··on Internal Combustion Engine (2021)
If you like this kind of stuff go and look up videos on the Rolls Royce Crecy engine from WWII. Absolutely insane engineering that died due the dawn of jet propulsion.
mberning··on Ending respiratory infections
We had twins after having a singleton during covid. We invested in 4 big hepa air filters and placed one in each bedroom. I think it significantly reduced the amount of illnesses we faced in the first year if the twins life. Lesson learned for us.
mberning··on Ending respiratory infections
For my family of 5 w/ school age children I would say that is a pretty reasonable estimate, maybe even a bit low for us. There are levels of “sick” though and I would say for us most respiratory illnesses are very mild and are a minor annoyance. Where it becomes more menacing is when we have sick kids and sick parents at the same time.
mberning··on Steam Machine launches today
I really don’t get the bellyaching about the price. They are going to sell as many of these as they can make, so there is no sense in subsidizing the price. Maybe in the future they will, especially if Windows continues on it’s current trajectory.
mberning··on Job application asked for my SAT scores
Soon people will be taking proctored IQ tests just to be allowed to submit a resume.
mberning··on Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good
It’s absolutely atrocious in the Fortune 500 tech sector. Multiple times a day I see people debating each other on teams about things they know nothing about and it’s obvious that it is just copilot v copilot. Crazy.
mberning··on Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
I have filled out census forms in the past and it was not a big imposition. During the last census I had supposed census workers showing up at my home multiple times and pushily asking for an in person interview. I told the guy that came initially that I was not interested as I had a full time job, a 5 year old, and newborn twins. He brazenly said “your wife can do it” with zero consideration that she was just cut open weeks prior. A couple weeks later he shows up again at like 7pm pounding on the door right in the middle of the kids bedtime routine. I told him it was a really unwelcome visit and sent him on his way. A couple weeks later a car comes rolling up to the house on a Saturday and the woman driving tells me she is the guys supervisor and they really want the interview. I explained to her the situation, the newborn babies, the previous encounters, etc. she seemed completely undeterred and just went right back to pestering. I told her if anybody from the census came back they should go ahead and bring the sheriff because I’d be calling for trespassing. They finally stopped bothering me.
mberning··on Show HN: GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once
The real estate up for auction is actually insane. My conception of a "HUD home" is completely shattered.
mberning··on Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language
Input: I updated a README

Output: I’m thrilled to share that I’ve just optimized our project’s core documentation to enhance clarity and streamline onboarding for the entire team. Documentation is the backbone of scalable engineering, and I’m committed to ensuring our technical assets reflect the highest standards of excellence.

mberning··on Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?
It is a very mixed bag. I have enjoyed using opus 4.5 and 4.6 to add functionality to existing medium complexity codebases. It’s great for green field scripts and small POCs. I absolutely cannot stand reviewing the mostly insane PRs that other people generate with it.
mberning··on A decade of Docker containers
I remember being pretty skeptical of “dockerizing” applications when it first becamee popular. But I’ve come around to it, if for no other reason than it provided an easily understandable concept which anyone could understand and more importantly use. The onramp to using docker is very gentle.
mberning··on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
Can you imagine if Apple’s software was on the same level as their hardware?
mberning··on Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
It’s been posted many times, I think mostly due to it’s association to Mitchell Hashimoto. It’s left as an exercise the reader to determine why this is important.
mberning··on Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts
The constant, exhausting, and frankly pointless changes to macos is really driving me back to rolling my own desktop on freebsd or linux. At least under that environment nothing changes unless I change it.
mberning··on Shatner is making an album with 35 metal icons
Manowar are such a guilty pleasure of mine. They have a lot of very silly material, but hard to deny that Dark Avenger is anything but absolute art.
mberning··on I Don't Like Magic
They also realize that adding two integers in a higher level language could look quite different when compiled depending on the target hardware, but they still understand what is happening. Contrast that with your average llm user asking it to write a parser or http client from scratch. They have no idea how either of those things work nor do they have any chance at all of constructing one on their own.
mberning··on What Is OAuth?
If you go to most Fortune 500 companies they will have a whole team of people dedicated to running an IdP and doing integrations. Most people on these teams cannot explain oauth, oidc, or saml even though they work with it every single day. It’s that bad.
mberning··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
It’s honestly embarrassing that no leader at apple has enough juice to get this done.
mberning··on The Contagious Taste of Cancer
It doesn’t seem completely out of the question that he could have received a contagious cancer. There are examples in the animal world. I believe Tasmanian devils spread facial tumors through biting. And I have heard dogs have certain transmissible cancers as well.
mberning··on List animals until failure
It accepted tardigrade which I thought was interesting.
mberning··on Light Mode InFFFFFFlation
Interfaces used to be “battle ship grey” which I loved.
mberning··on Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
Total capitulation by Apple.
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