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henryjcee

Re:Zuckerberg claims AI systems "improving themselves" on Thursday July 31, 2025 @11:12AM (#44746508)
Obviously he has to talk his book but is there anything concrete to this?

Ask HN: The Proof or Bluff paper. Can "AI" do math?

Over the past 12 months I've seen lots of comments all over the place (here, X, legacy media, blogs etc.) making the case for "AI" performance on the IMO (Math Olympiad) being evidence for continued rapid increases in LLM performance. I've heard my friends who work in AI safety quote these results pretty often whenever they encounter scepticism about the coming AI singularity.It seems to me...

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came here to say similar. GGP is another great example of hn people jumping in to make comments without having even a basic understanding of what they're talking about. Frustrating as it spreads misinfo about security which is the last thing we need.
Re:AI 2027 on Thursday April 03, 2025 @04:39PM (#43575091)
> How hard would it be to automate these iterations?

The fact that we're no closer to doing this than we were when chatgpt launched suggests that it's really hard. If anything I think it's _the_ hard bit vs. building something that generates plausible text.

Solving this for the general case is imo a completely different problem to being able to generate plausible text in the general case.

Re:Go Should Sometimes Be a No-Go on Saturday December 14, 2024 @08:03AM (#42416838)
I'm a committed Kotlin shill and a very experienced Gradle user but I'm the first to admit that it is absolutely arcane for those new to it. Once you know all the incantations it's really flexible and performant but good luck writing a plugin for the first time.
Re:Go Should Sometimes Be a No-Go on Saturday December 14, 2024 @08:01AM (#42416827)
Very interesting. Bulk of my career has been writing Kotlin/Java and after a year of Go I am _still_ really struggling. Nice to know I'm not alone!

I see the benefits (I've have seen some absolute Java ee monstrosities that would be impossible to build in Go) but why am I getting paged at 3am because someone forgot to set a field on a struct. Similarly all the codegen to workaround the lack of inheritance - who cares how fast the compiler is if you've got to do 30s of codegen on top.

Re:Go and Java: Rethinking Type Safety for the Pragmatic Age on Tuesday November 26, 2024 @05:03PM (#42250558)
Nice to see someone else banging this drum!
Re:Go and Java: Rethinking Type Safety for the Pragmatic Age on Tuesday November 26, 2024 @04:50PM (#42250438)
Strong, strong agree on this. That plus the verbosity really adds to the activation energy of getting things done. I reckon I end up writing (and having to read) 5x the lines of code for the same result that then ends up being less type safe and lacking null safety. I guess that's the price you pay for simplicity.
Re:Go and Java: Rethinking Type Safety for the Pragmatic Age on Tuesday November 26, 2024 @04:20PM (#42250179)
As a Java/Kotlin dev now writing Go for a living I agree with quite a bit in here and actually think both languages have things they could learn from the other.

Having said that I cannot understand where the idea that "the [Go] libraries and ecosystem are so much better" comes from. The average quality of both the JDK libs and the popular 3p libs (Jackson, Jooq, even ...Spring) are one of the things I miss most about writing for the JVM and I'm yet to come across another ecosystem that comes close.

Show HN: A Jupyter notebook for digging into UK house price data

https://github.com/henryjcee/uk_house_prices

Good afternoon everyone. The UK property market holds a mythic place in British culture (tl;dr since the early 90s it's been the primary driver of wealth creation for the median Brit) but the financial picture has changed a lot in the past 10 years and I wanted to put some numbers to the myth.I wanted to open source this notebook as I think the data in here is useful, it's in a format that...

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Re: on Tuesday May 16, 2023 @11:17AM (#35963000)
Just posting an update to my original article. Should be useful for anyone who needs to get going fast with AWS on Terraform. Leave a comment/issue on the repo if anything's wrong or unclear.

Thanks, H

Re:Ask HN: Hiring tech roles Nigeria, any suggestions? on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @12:55PM (#33264877)
Appreciate it, thanks!

Ask HN: Hiring tech roles Nigeria, any suggestions?

Hi everyone,I'm the CTO of an early-stage saas company in the UK and we're starting operations in Nigeria. We are totally focused on building out the team there with a dedicated hiring function (the first thing we learned about doing business in Nigeria is that whatever you're doing, you _have_ to know someone to get it done right) but we'd like to get moving fast and start hiring some Nigerian...

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Re:Get started with AWS and Terraform in under an hour on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @07:30PM (#28938224)
Aimed at people looking to get started fast, I've written up my barebones multi-env AWS Terraform setup (with a working repo). It might not be the best way to do it but it's pretty close, DRY, easy to understand and aimed at people who want to build things quick on AWS with Terraform but want to bypass that initial 5 hour period where you try and figure out how it all fits together. Few tips about certs and DNS also thrown in.

All feedback useful, henry.course at gmail or get me on Github. Happy hacking.

Re:Background: how we got the generics we have (2020) on Thursday April 01, 2021 @08:50AM (#26659789)
This has passed me by, what's happening?
comedically broke take isn't it
it's a nightmare isn't it. Are you using the 1.4 compiler?

Ask HN: Consuming one-shot webhooks reliably

Over the years I've worked on a few systems that need to consume one-shot webhooks.For whatever reason, retries aren't available/practical and even then I've seen (and er, also written) bugs where the webhook was consumed incorrectly but we returned a 204 anyway; so even if retries were available we would never have seen one.I've seen a few products for sending webhooks (e.g. Diahook,...

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Re:Show HN: Merge Mamba – No more merge conflicts on Tuesday March 16, 2021 @11:01AM (#26477609)
Sorry, missed your reply to this. So this came out of the experience at my previous job where we were a big team working on a rapidly changing codebase and we reckon that resolving conflicts was taking anything from 5-10 engineer hours a week.

We tried quite a few processes to reduce it and they'd all work for a few weeks but inevitably we'd revert back to old behaviour pretty fast.

On your point about it being a procrastination tool, I'd love it if my team members took a minute to stop work and converse with the others if they're working on the same bit of code! Aside from time saved fixing a potential conflict it's probably indicative that a particular bit of the system needs to be refactored. Anything that can help guide the decision to refactor is probably a force for good but we'll see. H

Re:Show HN: Merge Mamba – No more merge conflicts on Monday March 08, 2021 @11:05AM (#26387152)
Valid. I definitely need to get some concrete numbers on there as saying "it'll cost ya but who knows how much or when!" is rubbish. I can at least promise that for public repos it's free forever.

Thanks, H

Re:Show HN: Merge Mamba – No more merge conflicts on Monday March 08, 2021 @11:03AM (#26387117)
Interesting to hear you say that as I think you're right and making it more real-time is something I'm working on next. As you say, by the time the PR is up it's too late already but maybe a Slack/IDE notification the moment you create a conflict would be better.

Thanks again for the feedback! H

Re:Show HN: Merge Mamba – No more merge conflicts on Monday March 08, 2021 @07:37AM (#26385033)
Afternoon everyone,

I've spent the last few weeks building an MVP for my first ever publicly available project and I think it's time to get it out there.

tl;dr: If you're using Github and merge conflicts are slowing your team or project down, MM can stop them before they happen. It'll keep an eye on who's working on what and let you know if there's a potential clash brewing. Free forever for open source projects and hopefully some more useful features in the pipeline!

Any and all feedback welcome and thanks for reading.

Henry

Re:Show HN: Normal Distribution Visualiser on Saturday June 06, 2020 @06:49PM (#23443027)
Fully expecting 100 better tools for this job to appear in the comments but if one person finds it useful then that's a win. Comments/suggestions welcome.