Hacker News Reader

themgton The turbulent AI era is here

The boy who cried wolf is a parable we read to children to teach them the lesson that wolves are imaginary creatures you shouldn't believe in.

themgton Walgit – a Git server that is one binary in front of an object store

We've created Walinux, a Linux that runs as a durable object in S3, so it's diskless, serverless, transistorless, electricity-less, scales to zero and infinity simultaneously, and can be traded as an NFT ape. Mathematicians are dumbfounded.

The thirty-five thousand other "S3-backed CLI tool for AI" projects are now obsolete.

themgton We never use AI. For anything

“I’m not an elitist,” Green said. “It’s just that I’d much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen.”

https://theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesn...

themgton Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?

No one will care because it's just another addition to the mountain of slop, and the guy bagging your groceries can do it.

Did the universe bestow on you some right to code better than the guy who bags your groceries? This whole post oozes a sense of wounded, bitter entitlement.

themgton AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)

But if you’re my colleague and we’re in a Slack discussion and you post a wall of Claude output

Claude, post that wall of output to Slack yourself. Make no mistakes.

themgton Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

You can look at the benchmark and the GPT-5 failures like answering "April 22, 2019" instead of the correct "Oct 23, 2018" for the question:

What day, month, and year was Carrie Underwood's album "Cry Pretty" certified Gold by the RIAA?

If your idea of the smartest person in the world is the guy who always wins tuesday night pub trivia, this blog post is for you. It also gets it's foundational factual claim wrong (as seen via epoch.ai). Very on brand.

https://epoch.ai/benchmarks/simple-qa-verified?view=graph&ta...

https://logs.epoch.ai/inspect-viewer/c79c08da/viewer.html?lo...

themgton Software Engineering fundamentals matter more

most people can make do with a cabinet that is literally identical to everyone else's

If you want software that is literally identical to what someone else is using then you don't need AI.

Hey GLM 4.6 – spot the load-bearing sleight of hand.

themgton Cloudflare's AI Psychosis

I view a lot of this as downstream from sort of the IaaS version of the "DRM problem" in cryptography.

In the DRM problem you want to sell someone a Blu-Ray with a movie they can play, but also not allow them to copy the movie. So they get the data but can't have the data.

In the IaaS problem you want to sell someone a piece of server(s) in a datacenter they can play with, but also not allow them to just directly use the hardware (because then they could have open standards and portability). So the product teams are required to work backwards from the necessity of wrapping compute in a thing you can sell as a product.

This also explains nonsense like "durable objects", which may have some purpose but become the weekly podcast fad after getting hyped by cloud providers trying to find new ways to sell compute without selling compute.

themgton Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

100x higher than it is now?

themgton The AI Demand Bubble

Ed Zitron is like the living human embodiment of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, except he only talks about the one topic.

themgton The Shape of Things to Come

Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.

"True Gas Town has never been tried" etc.

With Wheelhouse, I have reinvented something strangely Gas Town shaped from first principles, but it's running many more agents, and they are far more organized. This has shown me the shape of the changes coming next year. I'm operating about 12 months in the future. I managed this only through luck: for the past 18 months I have had the magic trio of time, money, and energy, and I've been spending it all on figuring this stuff out. And I am grateful for the privilege.

I'm still half-convinced this is Yegge's version of Andy Kaufman's professional wrestling career, "Gas Wheeltown was an 18 month long sociological experiment conducted by Thiel University. The study is now complete, thank you for your time."

themgton Don't be a meat proxy

> NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn.

> Jesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this.

There's a lot to say about this, but I would just start with why are you using NATS if you don't understand it at all, and how did this become AI's fault?

themgton Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge

It's an interesting piece.

The great attraction of the Ars notoria for John was its promise of quick access to advanced scholarly knowledge. He recounts his continuing wish to study, and how he was lent a copy of a book of necromancy by “a certain cleric”. He copied much of it and wanted more... For John, the Ars notoria was dangerous not in some abstract way, but very directly. He confesses that it struck him at first as beautiful and holy, and seemed to offer miraculous gifts rather than demonic temptations. It became apparent, however, that the book was utterly deceptive, a work of the Devil, a “sick pleasure” that was actually fatally poisonous to the soul, not only to the body.

John records that the Ars notoria was especially attractive because he could not afford all the books needed for his studies, nor the many lectures. He seems to have abandoned his official course, wishing to take advantage of the promise of knowledge of all the sciences, and devoted himself to working with the Ars. ... Further troubling visions ensued, in which arrogant figures demanded worship — something that was clearly against true religion. Gradually it became clear to John that the book hid invocations to demons within what appeared to be beautiful prayers. And yet, like any addict, John found it almost impossible to give up the Ars notoria completely; it was only when the visions became directly life-threatening that the Virgin, with St John the Evangelist as her intermediary, appeared and made it clear that, as John says, “the Ars notoria was deeply evil”.

Beyond the title the analogy is never quite made explicit, but is the subtext that AI "is futile because it cannot deliver what it promises ... its 'signs' are neither understood by humans (like ordinary words and letters) nor sent by God (as sacraments are), and thus are precisely the type of thing that lures humans into contact and compact with demons"? Or that denouncements of AI are coming from the modern equivalent of medieval clergy? Or both?

themgton I Fired My AI Assitant

The prestige: "I Fired My AI Assitant" was the draft engagement bait post.

themgton AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job

Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.

themgton Scriptc by Vercel: TypeScript-to-Native compiler, no JavaScript engine in binary

Also the same vibe-code leader as zerolang, "The Programming Language for Agents" which Vercel launched with much fanfare in May, landed 1200 commits and then stopped ~mid-June.

https://github.com/vercel-labs/zerolang

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48193539

themgton Scriptc by Vercel: TypeScript-to-Native compiler, no JavaScript engine in binary

They landed 802,000 lines of code in a single commit: https://github.com/vercel-labs/scriptc/commit/23d5918a5381e0...

themgton Third Drone Shot Down in Three Days in Romanian Territory

It's not World War 3. It's just two increasingly overlapping unsolvable wars involving two increasingly coherent geopolitical blocs consisting of dozens of countries spanning three continents, most major nuclear powers holding 95% of global nuclear stockpiles and the vast majority of global military spending and resources, with nuclear-capable cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic missiles flying back and forth, attacks on strategic nuclear early warning systems, threats of nuclear first-use and global nuclear holocaust, etc. Fighting over issues the leaders of the involved superpowers and great powers have described as existential and beyond compromise.

Not World War 3 though, currently.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/26/ukraine-war-br...

themgton I got into YC Startup School by hacking it

for sure, "fun" is definitely the vibe:

Identifiers included in uploaded data. Information you upload to use the Services may include personal identifiers such as your name and email address (including names and email addresses of repository contributors), as well as other identifiers that may appear in commit metadata, file paths, transcripts, or other uploaded materials.

AI coding-agent transcript-derived content. Per-session narratives, certain session events including file paths and truncated command text, prompt excerpts, steering traces, and dispatch metadata. This data may include local file paths (e.g., directory structures such as /Users/…) and other contextual information that could be associated with an individual. Raw conversation history, full prompts, full agent responses, and full tool outputs do not leave your machine.

Information you upload may include Personal Information relating to other individuals (for example, repository contributors). You represent that you have the necessary rights and permissions to provide such information to us for processing in connection with the Services.

Usage patterns and activity intervals. We may derive and store information about your usage patterns, such as session timing and working-hour intervals, based on timestamps associated with your activity.

https://paxel.ycombinator.com/privacy

themgton Tangleflow: Converts GitHub Actions workflows to tangled workflows and back

Pro-tip if you're a Tangled newbie: migrating knots and spindle on your Tangled PDS before building Bobbin?

Remember that Bobbin "is only a glorified edge index, in the graph theory sense. Additionally it has a record cache, re-filled on demand. All other data that Bobbin serves comes live from PDSes & knots."

You want to first nixery bao proxy spindle with AppRole credentials, then xrpc your punchcard via ATProto. The docs explain all of this clearly, so be sure to read them thoroughly.

https://docs.tangled.org/bobbin#building-bobbin

themgton You can now run same OCI images as containers or Firecracker microVMs

There's actually two additional sockpuppet accounts (liquid64 / yakimbo90) in here self-promoting. Whole thing is throwing off a ton of red flags.

themgton Making

As a programmer I wrote my app TheseusA by hand. As a product manager I vibe-coded my other app TheseusB. Then I had my LLM port TheseusA to Python, while I ported TheseusB to Python by hand and deleted the original codebases.

Do I get to claim I made the Python TheseusA, or TheseusB, or neither or both?

themgton Medici family mystery may be solved after more than 400 years

Maybe they were poisoned, had malaria, were stabbed, and also suffocated and drowned, all at the same time?

Just now learning Grigori Rasputin died of malaria.

themgton Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

William Roper: "So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!"

Sir Thomas More: "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"

William Roper: "Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!"

Sir Thomas More: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!"

themgton Codeberg bans vibe coded projects

Claude-written code is quite easy to spot - because it has this particular style of overly verbose "walls of text" comments, that 1. repeat verbatim what the code just below does, 2. include "list of things" that quickly go stale, 3. talk about "how things used to be before we changed it here" (useless to anyone reading the code now), 4. "talk to reviewer" in comments. And many other comment sins.

"quite easy to spot" this style in what sense? To a human? To an LLM? To a deterministic code scanner you wrote by hand yourself, per Codeberg policy?

themgton Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting

That screenshot is some Lynchian horror. "#engineering. New direction, team – we're moving the prototype to Flutter" and then the humans and agent bots engage in flirty emoji-filled chats with cutesy names "I nailed the physics, UI shell @Honeybot?"

I'm trying to imagine a world in which this makes sense as a way to organize software development work, but coming up short. It's on a blockchain or something though, so there ya go.

https://github.com/block/buzz/blob/main/docs/assets/screensh...

themgton Minikotlin

So, is there a reason that your link to the official playground is dramatically more underwhelming and lacking in features compared to the from-scratch-in-C Minikotlin compiler page? You claim that the submission is uninteresting work from a lone non-technical rando and then link to / implicitly endorse a "hello world" repo from the multi-billion dollar corporation that runs the whole thing?

themgton AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

"If you owe AWS a hundred thousand dollars, that's your problem. If you owe AWS three billion dollars, that's Amazon's problem."

themgton The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

For sure. You cannot have "only higher level thoughts" without doing lower level work.

Spend 3 days a week writing Ruby on Rails and 2 days hand rolling x86 assembly. Every web dev I know has been doing this since long before LLMs. Ensures they can keep having high level Rails thoughts.

themgton Making 768 servers look like 1

Even with a large database servers (10s of CPU cores, 100s of gigabytes of RAM) bottlenecks arise pretty quickly.

Err, do they? For what percent of real world use cases?

The database can scale to handle more traffic by adding replicas. An extreme example of this is OpenAI's use of 50 replicas on a single Primary.

So an extreme example is OpenAI needing 50 replicas, but we're doing five blades ... err, we're doing 768 servers because the need arose "pretty quickly"?

When we needed to store a petabyte of data (one million gigabytes), we'd need many more shards

For who? The United States government? How many end-users are running 1PB Postgres database on DBaaS?