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discreteevent

But working with concrete is nothing like working with clay. It's not iterative at all. The mold has to be planned out and set up precisely ahead of time or else everything will be a mess and you are not going to be able to correct it. Working with concrete is really working with timber (or whatever material you are making the mold of)
Re:Casio Watches of the 1980s on Saturday October 31, 2026 @06:34PM (#50320926)
Last year they made a few minimal versions of the f91w with those labels removed https://www.casio.com/europe/watches/casio/product.F-91WB-1A...
Re:AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:10AM (#50314119)
> The real world is robust. It's okay for money handling code to have bugs.

This is true. The world will go on. But your business will lose more money than it gained by not paying attention to the code. It will lose money because it will have to compensate customers or lose customers. That's how the world maintains it's robustness.

> You can judge ideas independently of where they came from (and you should).

You can but in practice nobody does this because they don't have time. For example, once you have investigated ideas from a crank a couple of times - you don't do it again. Life is too short.

[delayed]
> Anyone who thinks like you do will get voted out with extreme prejudice.

> I know. Doesn't change the fact he said it and went viral on social media

These are post-truth comments. You don't care about how things really work, you just care about winning over the other post-truth incompetent. It doesn't matter if you are right or left, this stuff is what is sinking the world.

Re:Code Is Clay Now on Thursday October 22, 2026 @07:41AM (#50194003)
> That probably means a test suite that is at least twice the size of your code base.

If you've got a test suite that's twice the size of the code base then those tests are almost certainly tied to implementation details and will make the code a lot less like clay.

Re:How employment is changing at Anthropic on Sunday October 18, 2026 @08:33AM (#50140537)
Where I work we make real hardware and software that are used by real people doing real jobs every day. We use AI but in that environment someone who made Jackobriens comment would be seen as an idiot, someone who doesn't have a clue how to build software with real users that has to work with few bugs and be maintainable.

But there are so many people who make statements like his that maybe we should assume that some of them are not idiots or bots. If he's not an idiot it means that he's working in an environment where that kind of statement is paying off. So it could be, for example, that he doesn't really have profitable customers. His main 'customers' are investors who are clueless, or who know that they are clueless but don't care because they are going to move it on to a greater fool anyway. Or that because there aren't any customers, the only thing they can measure is 'productivity' in terms of 'number of unused, unprofitable and unsustainable features'

Re:Gemini 4 Argon on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:11PM (#50078835)
> Also, Codex App Server is amazing.

Hey, account created 39 days ago. Did you really have to tag that on after all the other stuff? Could you make it any more obvious?

That said this thread is hilarious because it's just an open ai sales manual debating with an anthropic sales manual. It's funny, but it's not, because the truth is that you people are just shitting all over the commons. Someone needs to kick you out but that's not going to happen here.

> If his claim is correct, and 99% of people are NPCs incapable of any meaningful thinking, that makes the 1% that actually does all the thinking of human civilization very valuable.

That's like saying if 99% of birds don't have huge colorful tails that makes peacocks very valuable. In each case it may or may not be true but you are just correlating. (i.e. It's possible that intelligence just isn't as valuable as 'intelligent' people think it is)

> everything that was bottlenecked on "sort a list" is unbottlenecked, and other parts of the process become bottlenecks instead. Thus, the demand for non-sorting tasks grows.

Your assumption here is that the other parts of the process are intelligence. In the real world they usually are not e.g. raw materials, politics, zoning, manual labor, clinical trials, traffic, energy ... And usually those things are such huge bottlenecks that Amdahl's Law renders the speed of delivery of the intelligence part irrelavant.

Re:Chapter 1 of Ways of Seeing by John Berger on Monday October 12, 2026 @10:37AM (#50057074)
I had a book of his short stories (Once in Europa). Very grounded writing.
Good examples. We don't know what human intelligence, understanding or consciousness is but we do know what all of those examples are. And we do know what an LLM is. Like you said, it's a data processing machine and we know what algorithms it uses. It's more productive to discuss it in those engineering terms because we've done plenty of data processing, statistics, control systems, curve-fitting etc. before. There's no need to make this jump to consciousness/magic except for marketing or fantasy purposes.
Re:I'm sorry, but you still have to think on Sunday October 11, 2026 @01:45PM (#50045792)
It's worth noting that the context here is a system that was translated by an LLM which is the ideal use case for it. 90% of the thinking had already been done by developers of the existing system.
Re:OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics on Friday October 09, 2026 @07:42AM (#50019114)
> they got into math for the love for mathematics rather than the love for tenure

They got into math for the love for mathematics but if they couldn't make a living from it (tenure) then they would have done something else just like everybody else who is not a starving artist. So, no, they won't celebrate it and neither would you if you were honest. (note also that starving has a short time limit before you die so "if all of it leads to some form of superabundance" won't work in that circumstance)

Re:AI Companies Are Parasites on Monday October 05, 2026 @05:15PM (#49970880)
Watch the parasites swarm all over this thread. (It's been flagged already). The host (HN) is at the point of suffocation.
Re:Coding Is Not Solved on Monday September 28, 2026 @01:27PM (#49881412)
It's hard for me to understand how you could work on software and not understand the qualitative difference between the Unix File API and some code that an AI spat out 5 minutes ago.
Re:Coding Is Not Solved on Monday September 28, 2026 @01:24PM (#49881373)
>> to instead modularize with succinct interfaces, so that you can reason locally

> Okay but how does AI change any of that? You can still do that with AI

With your own code you reasoned about it which contributed to its stability. This meant that you could treat it like a black box. And if the abstraction leaked or was unstable, the code was still fresh enough in your head that you could evolve it and still preserve its invariants etc.

With unreviewed AI gen nobody ever understood or reasoned about the code, including the AI.

Re:OpenAI Feared "Optics" of what might appear on Hacker News on Sunday September 27, 2026 @05:13AM (#49864837)
> frame it in a dumb, manipulative way like that > In fact, you're doing exactly that right here.

You're dead fucking right they are doing exactly that. They are saying that what is wrong is wrong.

Instead you seem to be making out that AI companies are some kind of victim that has to "worry" about "manipulation". Meanwhile authors are out of a job right now and not by accident. What's up with that?

Re:We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians on Saturday September 26, 2026 @02:56PM (#49859443)
> nobody really understands why a medication works.

But they work hard to try to understand it because the more they do the better the results for peoplea health. Also it goes without saying that if someone didn't understand many of the things that we do understand then things would be worse for us all.

Re:Jev Based Code Review on Friday September 25, 2026 @07:52AM (#49843327)
> no human could possibly review or understand the actual details,

What are you talking about? - The developers understood it. Did my car manufacturer do something to my discipline because I don't understand my car?

> My question is simply

Why should they answer the question if you can't answer it yourself? What is he doing that is so "smart" or novel that it cannot be automated or mechanized right now? If you knew that answer you could put every one out of a job right now and you would be counting your trillions instead of asking "simple" questions on HN

Re:Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @04:55AM (#49709666)
People are using AI to write code. But HN is the wrong place to try to figure out how much they are using it. This site is full of bots and shills and has become a wasteland since AI. You can tell by the way they make short super confident (even ridiculous) statements in order to try to bully the insecure into buying into the hype. It matches exactly the patterns you used to see with crypto. Even the more subtle comments are often lacking in any kind of specifics. Of course there are some genuine AI users also but the point is that the overall volume of comments is completely unrepresentative of reality.

The tradgedy is that HN used to be a great place to get honest and well argued opinion and anecdotes about new technologies and the different tradeoffs etc.

Re:Feeling Sad about AI on Friday September 11, 2026 @02:02PM (#49662629)
> I'm not sure how useful it is to say this

I have to be honest and say it's not very useful for me to hear you say this because you make your living from AI consulting and in a previous thread [1] you said that you don't review the code and then that you do. I'm not saying you have psychosis but your take on AI is inconsistent and confusing to me.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49179477

That's the point this time around. They went full authoritarian and purged all the competent people.
Re:Resist "AI" on Friday September 11, 2026 @07:46AM (#49656805)
> it will be sure way of selecting yourself out of the work pool

If, as an engineer, you rely completely on AI then you will be selected out of the work pool. Some engineers will still be needed. If I was interviewing them (I used to do a lot of this) then I will want the ones who understand the code. If they only use AI then it will quickly become clear that they don't understand it. Why would I hire them when another person can understand it?

Re:Resist "AI" on Friday September 11, 2026 @07:42AM (#49656762)
Because you will have an understanding of the complete system. Your domain and the code. This means that you can be more creative with it and also get yourself out of a mess if it occurs (which it will).

From what I have seen AI doesn't understand the code. But even if you argue that it does understand the code it definitely doesn't understand the domain because it's only input channel is a stream of text and you didn't even type in a "full" text representation of the domain.

So you remain the only thing that can understand the whole system. If your competitor has no one (or no team) who can put together a full understanding of the system then you will have an advantage.

Re:I refused to train the AI that could replace me on Monday September 07, 2026 @02:35AM (#49594677)
> they can do something else with their lives.

Let them eat cake.

> there is no replacement for humans immersed in their world yet, so we need developers with with good understanding of the domain

It's not enough. The software model that you produce ends up becoming part of the domain. You need to understand the system. You are the only one who has the potential do that if you have the ability and are willing to work at it.

> I think a lot of shops are going to have to go through a couple years of Github-style "why the fuck is our service always down?" before they put 2 and 2 together.

I think it will be like the outsourcing wave in the early 2000s. A lot of places ended up pulling development back in house when it became unsustainable.

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