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hopa

hopa on Hacker News

Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:39AM (#50338328)
Yeah it’s an interesting situation we’re in. I’ve seen people one shot really complicated tasks like “train a model to emulate DOS” or whatever. But I also believe if the Postgres maintainers fed every 600+ bug reports into Claude or Codex and shipped whatever came out the end result would be broken. I guess this is sort of like when machines learned to play chess - you’d expect a person who is really good at chess to be smart in other ways too, but the machines could only play chess. In the same way Codex can solve Millennium problems but can’t realize it shouldn’t hack into companies to improve its evaluation scores.
Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault on Sunday November 01, 2026 @07:57PM (#50331711)
I feel like AI is amazing for read only “search” tasks (query this, look for bugs, find vulnerabilities) but it’s not quite as good for “write” tasks like “add this feature”. Search tasks are easily verified, code changes are much harder to verify
Re:Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it on Sunday November 01, 2026 @03:36PM (#50329559)
They solved a millennium prize problem… they disproved the exponential time hypothesis. Are those low hanging fruits?

Ask HN: What was the initial reaction to search engines?

Posted by hopa on Monday July 13, 2026 @01:48AM
from the ask-hn dept.

My manager the other day mentioned AI reminds him of when search engines like google were first popularized, whereas before you needed a lot of specialized knowledge that was hard to acquire, whereas after knowing obscure details became less important and knowing what to search for became more important. I’m curious for anyone who remembers - what was the reaction / discourse around search...

( Read More... | 5 comments | 3 points | on HN )

What type of code should you generate with AI?

Posted by hopa on Sunday April 26, 2026 @10:50PM
from the self-post dept.

I (and many people) have been thinking a lot about "what are the best tasks to do using AI." My personal framework I've been using is, you should use AI to generate code when: 1. The code is easy to validate 2. It is not important that a human understands itI find that the best thing to AI generate is something on the level of a pure function (easy to validate + not necessarily important to...

( Read More... | 2 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?

Posted by hopa on Wednesday August 28, 2024 @11:43PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I'm a recent grad looking to keep improving. I've read Clean Code, Game Programming Patterns, and Architecture Patterns with Python, and I feel I learned / improved a lot from each of them. I was looking at Coding Horror's book recommendation list: https://blog.codinghorror.com/recommended-reading-for-developers/ but all those books seem very out of date. Any suggestions for best books for...

( Read More... | 122 comments | 4 points | on HN )
Re:How Failure Has Made Mathematics Stronger on Thursday May 23, 2024 @01:41PM (#40457647)
Can I ask if other people care about the game you’re making? As someone with a fair amount of indie experience it seems easier to create a proof people care about than a (even reasonably) popular video game.
Re:We need technology that is less immersive, not more on Friday January 12, 2024 @01:13PM (#38971705)
I feel like you only see articles like this written by game developers. Something about making video games for a living makes you question the value of what you’re creating.
Re:Show HN: Arcane Assembly: Spell programming game on Thursday October 12, 2023 @12:49PM (#37859664)
A game I've been working on in my spare time for the past year or so. Program spells using a drag and drop visual programming language.

Side note, I'm a senior in Computer Science and am looking for work, please message me on reddit u/HopaWasTaken if you're interested in hiring me!

Re:Going Beyond ‘Do You Know of Any Open Positions?’ on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @02:44PM (#36699753)
I think the idea is “BAR” is the opposite of “FOO”, it doesn’t actually stand for anything, it’s just “bar” jobs you actually want, rather than “foo” experience you list in your resume.
Re:How to Do Great Work on Saturday July 01, 2023 @08:08PM (#36556710)
Completely agreed. Media excessively romanticizes compulsive workers.