News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

rjbwork

Sorry, the commons are the exclusive domain of private corporate profit, not for humans to occupy.
Re:Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @06:43AM (#50271475)
Shoot yourself in the head or cut your wrists with a knife?

Those are your choices. Choose freely!

Re:The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @03:28AM (#50255679)
I think it takes MORE attention and thought. I feel like a rope being pulled tight and fraying in the middle. Working with these things is very addictive and interesting but it is cognitively exhausting long term, even if invigorating in the short term.
Re:Type Server Protocol on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @03:08AM (#50255552)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

We've known for a very long time that shitty things can become very successful in this field and why.

Re:Anthropic S-1 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @12:02AM (#50254587)
Which I did. Most obvious opportunity for a trailing stop order of my entire time trading, lol.
Re:Type Server Protocol on Monday October 26, 2026 @04:30PM (#50250482)
Pretty much every other mainstream language bar JS. I'd say also Ruby because I also do not like a lot of its choices, but there's at least a kind of heady elegance to it in a REPL, though I would never want to work on a production system written in Ruby.

Frankly, I just really prefer statically and strongly typed compiled languages.

I did my last company's first Demo and MVP in Python after running through the Koans at my co-founder's behest and ultimately we decided that the production system would not be done in Python. There are some cool things about it - specifically I do like that annotations are real AOP seams, but the numerous footguns and lack of types and a compiler just make it a very annoying ecosystem to work in for me.

Re:Type Server Protocol on Monday October 26, 2026 @03:25PM (#50249554)
It's such a shame python got such mindshare. It's a disaster of a language and ecosystem that people keep bolting and hacking things that much better thought out languages have had for decades.
Re:We should be more ambitious with the software we build on Sunday October 25, 2026 @12:31PM (#50233356)
Yes this has been one of the killer apps for me. Describing my problems and having it review my code and the academic literature and industry white papers for prior art has been incredible.
Re:France needs to read my paper on Sunday October 25, 2026 @12:19PM (#50233207)
Yeah I agree zoning should be severely relaxed. That's not to say you should be able to build a big box store or chemical factory downtown, but i think a lot more mixed use high-density stuff being allowed where it currently isn't would be good.
Re:No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector on Saturday October 24, 2026 @06:24PM (#50226013)
Yup. So many bozos giving those of us that know our asses from our heads job security far into the future. Yeah it's gonna suck to actually do the work a lot of the time, but the irresponsible generating insane amounts of tech debt that people that know what to do is a tale as old as the outsourcing craze and codeless tools, and frankly, probably COBOL.
Re:No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector on Saturday October 24, 2026 @06:12PM (#50225908)
And I'm sure the business logic has been validated and tested, the hosting and execution medium has been secured, and hooking up to a curated and vetted internal package manager mirror so as not to get hit with 0-days during a shai hulud-esque attack, and of course the executable is being scanned for vulnerabilities, and as the app needs to evolve in the future it will be able to do so with no problems whatsoever.
Re:France needs to read my paper on Friday October 23, 2026 @06:27AM (#50206810)
A land value tax seems like such an obvious solution to so much that ails our societies. Allowing legacy land owners to accrue vast sums of untaxed value due to the economic activity of everyone else in the vicinity of their land creates such perverse incentives.

A great example near me is in midtown Atlanta. For decades there have been empty lots that just sat empty and empty and empty until enough economic growth happened around them that their owners finally sold it for development. Even today, there are empty lots and vacant decrepit buildings in some of the most valuable locations for hundreds of miles because we are not taxing the value of the land these people are accruing.

The president enriching his family to the tune of billions and billions of dollars while flouting every norm and law possible and committing war crimes and murder is equivalent to...someone baring their chest?

> The melodrama about "moral bankruptcy" is performative.

Oh, on that point we could not agree more.

Literally, yes.

Why are you people so obsessed with the genitals of others over the bald-faced corruption of the most powerful nation in the world?

Re:Go Piss, Girl: The plight of the public potty on Sunday October 18, 2026 @06:08AM (#50139620)
>This is good for society.

This is society. Its origins are people banding together to collectivize violence and its legitimate uses in order to protect themselves from the state of nature in which the strong take what they will and the weak suffer what they must.

Re:You could have invented transformers from memory on Saturday October 17, 2026 @12:14PM (#50132361)
You may have some other issue. That stuff renders as mathematical notation.
Re:So long Google, and thanks for all the nudes on Monday September 28, 2026 @05:30PM (#49884674)
Extremely, considering that's exactly what they did.
Re:What even is an OS now? on Saturday September 26, 2026 @12:15AM (#49853149)
> I've been feeling like i need to cram the "AI spirit" into very specifically shaped boxes to actually build robust software tastefully at speed.

This is such incredible verbiage. Thank you for saying something so clearly that I've been saying myself in many other ways. I've been using terms such as "providing structure" and "applying constraints" and "reducing degrees of freedom".

I think very specifically the idea of "taste" is going to be extremely important in these AI-saturated days, and it's really where experienced humans will shine...at least for a while.

>How are they getting away with this level of malpractice???

Their interests intersect with those of most of the richest and most powerful people in the world. They rarely face consequences for bad behavior unless they harm others in the club.

Re:What About Rails? on Friday September 25, 2026 @02:44PM (#49848367)
>The actual code and architecture is where it still lacking IMHO.

My experience is that the more structure and constraints you can place on what the LLM/Agents actually do, the better they perform. If you just let them run wild a la "make me an app that will make a million dollars MRR, no mistakes", you get a clusterfuck. And it gets more clusterfucky the longer it goes on.

>Quite often a senior leadership issue because backing stuff up results in $$$ spent, which makes shareholders unhappy.

This is true. The latter half of your comment is not. At best they have a duty to shareholders. But your assertion would mean every time a company posted a loss and the price went down the execs would be in legal trouble, which is nonsense.

Re:Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @04:24PM (#49732483)
And building the correct structure for your problem/program is still a huge part of the job. If you completely delegate structure, you still get a clusterfuck.

I have found working with LLM's is best when I provide as much structure and constraints as possible, and reduce the degrees of freedom that the LLM can exercise, so that it is forced to fit its logic inside the structural boxes I have laid out.

If you just delegate everything to the LLM to get an absolute morass.

The guy in charge of all of this has eaten road kill and rotting carcasses and he appears to be completely fine. I'm sure there will not be any issues.
Re:How I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer on Sunday August 23, 2026 @05:03PM (#49412610)
Also a staff engineer. This is pretty much exactly what I do.

Often it is a result of suggesting an improvement to some PR for a program or system that someone is doing some work on, and discovering that for whatever reason it doesn't quite work. This tends to lead to a deep dive of really analyzing and understanding the problem and how the piece of the system fits into the overall picture. This analysis often leads to a more structured approach to a problem, placing it in the context of wider industry or CS theory, thus enabling us to leverage prior art and other people who have grappled with similar problems.

it's only activism when it comes from the woke region of cascadia, otherwise it's just sparkling disgruntlement
Re:Good Tools Are Invisible on Friday July 10, 2026 @01:57PM (#48863115)
>He turned sublime into the tool he wanted.

I think this also misses the point. Sublime just is the tool I want. I install it and I use it.

Eventually I may install a handful of add-ons via the baked in package control. But primarily it just is the text editor I want.

Re:A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @09:45AM (#48746701)
I have seen multiple people have their shadowbans reversed after I recognized it had occurred and alerted them.
Re:The Return of Aspect Oriented Programming on Monday June 29, 2026 @01:22PM (#48722125)
Yeah. I've done w/ Fody, PostSharp, HTTP Handlers, ASP.NET Middleware, Castle DynamicProxy/Interceptors, Temporal Interceptors, and various custom framework interceptors.
Re:Techno-libertarians are flocking to the Caribbean on Monday June 15, 2026 @06:44PM (#48548054)
I've spend a total of about 2 months in the Carribean. One of those being an entire month straight.

It's the convenience really, and the fact that nobody is in a hurry. Island time is real. You cannot be demanding. You can't really be upset at service. Most people are there to chill out, even if they are doing a job. Life is just slower.

This is good, IMO. But if you are a hedonically adapted/burned out western metropolis dweller, this culture shock could be distressing.

Re:How to Earn a Billion Dollars on Sunday June 14, 2026 @11:09PM (#48536121)
I'm interested in hearing your reasons, tbqh.

Older »