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orng

274 karma · joined November 30, 2012

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orng··on AI, Vim, and the Illusion of Flow
I agree with most of the points on the article although it doesn't really have much to do with vim (which the author acknowledges).

I too have often compared AI usage to vim in the past months: AI enthusiasts seem to spend most of their time tweaking their setup; creating custom agents, skills, mcp servers, writing custom tools for their agent to use, customizing their harnesses, loops and whatnot. Similar to how us vim users keep updating/rewriting our config. It makes you feel productive while you really aren't and while in the end it might help you better stay within the flow the author talks about it the article the gains are typically very minimal if one is honest with oneself.

orng··on Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)
True. I used to really enjoy playing casual chess as a kid. Analyzing the positions and try to come up with strategies on the fly was a lot of fun. When I realized that "proper" chess was mostly about memorizing positions and plays and sort of have it all pre-computed I lost all interest in playing.
orng··on I don't use LLMs for programming
I agree. The further I have progressed into my career the more I have been focused on the stability, maintainability and "supportability" of the products I work on. Going slower in order to progress faster in the long run. I feel like everyone is disregarding the importance of that at the moment and I feel quite sad about it.
orng··on I don't use LLMs for programming
The current models had lots and lots of hand written code to train on. Now stackoverflow is dead and github is getting filled with AI generated slop so one begins to wonder whether further training will start to show diminishing returns or perhaps even regressions. I am at least a little bit skeptical of any claim that AI will continue to improve at the rate it has thus far.
orng··on Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox
The internet used to be controlled in large by Microsoft. Then it wasn't. It does not have to continue to be controlled by Google in the future. Not using Chromium based browsers is a first step.
orng··on Introducing a terms of use and updated privacy notice for Firefox
In my opinion, if you care about the open web, then you should not be using a Blink (Chromium) based browser like Brave. The less control Google has, the better for the web.
orng··on Fuzzing between the lines in popular barcode software
Only slightly related but on the topic of barcodes and security I'd like to recommend this excellent talk by Felix Lindner, it is quite a few years old but I'd guess stuff like barcode scanners are not the most frequently updated things:

Toying with barcodes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCtdEYnlykA

orng··on Care
I think part of the problem is that there seems to be a widespread sentiment among software developers to prioritize our time above the user's. Ease of development trumps ease of use and features are made to be easy, or rather fast, to build rather than easy to use and performant.

As a young developer I was taught to take the extra time to make things better for the user. Even if it might mean spending two days on a feature rather than a few hours, the cumulative time saved would end up much more than the extra time I spent since users use your software more often than you write it and there are many users. Unfortunately this view is not widespread enough.

orng··on Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
The only insight IQ tests can give you is that anyone who gives them any merit is either a moron or uninformed.
orng··on Show HN: Hacker News Git Blame
I got 10/10 without having any idea who any of the people (except pg) were. The comments always made it possible to link to the companies of the posters somehow. Interesting experiment to try to figure that out but I'm left wondering if I should be familiar with all those people and what they do.
orng··on Show HN: Recompyle – A JavaScript developer-friendly console / debugger
I think you are sort of abusing the github logo above the "Closed Source - for a sustainable business model" text. Most people associate it with open source, it doesn't even make any sense there!
orng··on A failed AI girlfriend product, and my lessons
Although probably intended as a joke, this is perhaps the saddest comment I have read on HN.
orng··on Build your own BitTorrent
Like GP I was also confused and tried looking for a pricing page but failed. Seems like there isn't a link to it from https://app.codecrafters.io/catalog which is the site you go to if you click the big CodeCrafters logo in the top left of the page.

There is a "Subscribe" button which takes you to https://app.codecrafters.io/pay but I wasn't savvy enough to notice it or realize what it was.

Only after starting a course did I begin to suspect that I needed to subscribe since there were a bunch of locks all over. However, it was not clear that the locks actually did anything since I could still click on those links. I guess I would have found out after completing the first step and not being able to progress. This appears to be by design, which strikes me as slightly dishonest.

orng··on Break-a-Scene: Extracting Multiple Concepts from a Single Image
"Give me a printout of Oyster smiling" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maAFcEU6atk

Life imitating art imitating life. Exciting times indeed.

orng··on Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it (2021)
Agreed. And another large part of "media", which didn't exist in the 80s: social media. I think that much of social media has become more blatantly sexual. In the earlier days of Instagram people would post pictures of themselves in scant clothing or somewhat "compromising" positions but always under pretense of something else. It would be accompanied by text in the form of a "thought provoking" quote and/or refer to something in the background of the image. The poster would be trying to say "this is not a picture of my bottom in a small bikini at the beach, it is a picture of the beautiful sunset and I just happen to be in it in a small bikini". People would poke fun at others for posting "thirst traps". Today it is done blatantly and people often refer to their own posts as "thirst traps".

But perhaps the case could be made that this horniness has been taken out of advertisements, which seem a lot more timid today.

orng··on Why your team doesn't need to use pull requests
Where I work we have two code bases. The older of the two in TFS and the newer in git. In TFS we use trunk-based development and in git we do pull requests. I must say that I very much prefer having a formal, tool-protected, review process, doing integrations and testing on a separate branch from the main branch to allowing developers like we do in git to the added ease of being available to commit directly to trunk. Even with CI to run tests upon committed code you never want to leave your mainline branch in a broken state. No matter how fast the feedback is, because you don't really know how fast your developers will be to act on that feedback!
orng··on Tell HN: Missing service – StackOverflow, but with monetary rewards
I miss the earlier days of the internet where the spirit was more about sharing and less about selling, advertising and competing for "likes".
orng··on Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves
They can still follow you, comment, like and retweet your posts. You can block them but if you are popular enough it might be a problem. They also make search a lot worse and the hashtag system for some tags completely useless since all the posts you'll find under that tag are spam posts.
orng··on Turning a side project into an open-source project
I think that adding a (permissive) license is the missing step from this "tutorial". If you want people to use your project you are going to need to give them permission to do so.
orng··on “Bing is bigger than you think,” Microsoft boasts, at 33% of US searches
Search is such an integral part of how we use the internet today and a vast improvement of the link sites and books from 20 years ago.

Competition in this space has never been more important, in particular in light of recent news of censorship from google and various big companies.

Although I personally use DDG I applaud anyone that tries to compete with google and I hope that Microsoft won't give up on Bing.

Edit: typos

orng··on Hacker, Hack Thyself
Is my math failing me or wouldn't 8 digits result in 10^8 possibilities rather than 8^10?
orng··on Don't overuse interfaces
Making methods that you want to be able to mock virtual prevents the compiler from inlining them which can impact performance. I'm sure if that's advisable.
orng··on Vigilantes are working hard to infect IoT devices with the Hajime botnet
Anyone who has played Pandemic 2, or similar games where you control a virus intent on killing all humans, knows that the most effective strategy is to spread as far as possible with as little symptoms as possible before mutating into a killing machine. Apparently Hajime has update capabilities, so perhaps it is too soon to call the creators vigilantes?
orng··on Amazon Echo Look
So now Amazon (or whoever is in control of the device) not only has access to voice recordings of everything that goes on in peoples homes, but also video. What could possibly go wrong?
orng··on A vigilante trying to improve IoT security
Slightly OT, but not too long ago I read that it is not uncommon for viruses to remove other known, competing, malware. Does anyone know if anyone has ever made a virus who's only purpose is to remove other malware? Perhaps the same aggressive approach used by Janit0r is needed to stop the spread of worms, kill off botnets etc.?
orng··on A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator
This reminds me of a story I remember hearing a few times as a child:

During WW2, British, and later, American forces set up base in Iceland. On some of the maps they had created, items of note had been added with symbols. This included lighthouses and there were little lighthouse symbols littered around the coast. However for some reason there also was a lighthouse symbol in the middle of the Icelandic highlands, far from any seashore.

The explanation was that this supposed lighthouse was by the volcano Askja, who's largest crater is called "Víti" (Hell), while the Icelandic word for lighthouse is "viti". Since English doesn't have the accented letter "í", they would have been spelled the same in English.

I could have sworn this was a true story up until now when I tried to find sources for it, but came up empty. In any case it makes for a good story.

orng··on How I Ruined Office Productivity with a Face-Replacing Slack Bot
> So you turned your Python program into a single, statically linked executable? May I ask how you did that?

I think the author's application was written in Go which as I understand it does static linking by default.

However, creating standalone executables from python is called freezing and can be done using various tools[0].

0: http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/shipping/freezing/

orng··on Why Kakoune – The quest for a better code editor
The same happens for me on FF on Android. I tried three times and it crashes each time. A shame, the comments have intrigued me.
orng··on General Elections 2016 in Iceland
>They have rued out working with the Independence party.

Well since they said that they have appeared to cautiously back away from that statement in the days leading up to the election. Today they said they would not join the PP in its coalition.[1]

1. http://www.mbl.is/frettir/kosning/2016/10/30/vill_ekki_samst...

orng··on Show HN: How bloated is your favorite app?
I think "rate" refers to install rate, as in how many users install the app, not install speed.
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