HN user

pnathan

11,772 karma

Hi!

Some facts:

- Living and working in Spokane, WA (formerly Seattle )

- Write code, talk to people

- I sit at the intersection of SRE and SWE.

- Email: paul@nathan.house

Please feel 100% free to email me out of the blue. I really do love meeting new people, and try to respond to everyone I can - if I didn't respond, it's not because I didn't want the email, it's because I'm swamped.

- I usually take 1-3 days to respond to comments. This is conscious - deliberation and a cool head gives an immediate thinking bonus.

Some other notes:

- http://articulate-lisp.com Common Lisp for new users!

- I've been programming since the mid-90s

- Has grad degree, M.S. in Computer Science.

- PL geek: experiences in... assemblies, bash, c++, c#, common lisp, golang, haskell, java, objective c, ocaml, perl, prolog, python, rust, scala

- Portfolio/open source work: https://github.com/pnathan

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[ my public key: https://keybase.io/pnathan; my proof: https://keybase.io/pnathan/sigs/thq2TfZ0ss836xvC6arGWYCzkZAjXYoRVrljegtzf2s ]

Posts24
Comments4,022
View on HN
www.npmjs.com 6y ago

Lodash – Prototype Pollution – NPM audit now failing

pnathan
1pts0
digital.lib.washington.edu 8y ago

Interface: Contexualizing the work place of software design in Seattle

pnathan
2pts0
www.sec.gov 9y ago

SEC remarks on SAFEs investment vehicles

pnathan
2pts0
www.raptorengineering.com 9y ago

Help fund FLOSS lights out server management software

pnathan
2pts0
arstechnica.co.uk 10y ago

Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”

pnathan
6pts0
qz.com 10y ago

Nairobi’s traditional openness to newcomers is making it a global cuisine hub

pnathan
2pts0
www.wsj.com 11y ago

How Many Team-Building Hiking Trips Can Your Marriage Take?

pnathan
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: “Business” framework around a SaaS

pnathan
5pts4
valentines2014.upside-down-research.com 12y ago

Show HN: Valentines 2014 Custom OSX app

pnathan
1pts1
www.washingtonpost.com 12y ago

Bitcoin Needs a Central Banker

pnathan
1pts0
finance.yahoo.com 12y ago

Report of Square discussing IPO possibilities

pnathan
1pts0
www.amazon.com 12y ago

The Circle - Dave Eggers

pnathan
4pts1
www.theregister.co.uk 12y ago

Calling yourself a hacker implies you lose 4th amendment rights

pnathan
4pts0
incubator.apache.org 12y ago

Apache Drill

pnathan
2pts0
online.wsj.com 12y ago

Where the Jobs Are and How to Get One

pnathan
2pts1
www.wired.com 12y ago

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete (2008)

pnathan
3pts0
lcinexile.blogspot.com 12y ago

On Dancing Chickens

pnathan
1pts0
articulate-lisp.com 13y ago

HOWTOs for a Common Lisp environment

pnathan
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 13y ago

Ask HN: Ethical analytics tech/company?

pnathan
2pts2
www.salon.com 13y ago

Bring Back the 40-hour work week (March 2012)

pnathan
304pts237
online.wsj.com 14y ago

Who's the Boss? There Isn't One

pnathan
8pts0
theinstitute.ieee.org 14y ago

Software licensing requirements being worked on.

pnathan
1pts0
www.bloomberg.com 14y ago

Editorial: Innovate Without Mercy Is the Lesson of RIM’s BlackBerry

pnathan
1pts0
timesofindia.indiatimes.com 15y ago

India considering adding new type of patent

pnathan
3pts1

(1) personally very annoying. I have been using fable to try to collect cutting edge math in one area and work on a hopefully new result with lean verification.

(2) I am really tired of the AI community trying to threaten everyone with grey goo and finding out the hype doesn't land comfy with others. It's a freaking text generator, not god in a pocket.

Data is missing on this chart.

It's my experience that opus 4, and then, particularly, 4.5, in Claude code, are head and shoulders above the competition.

I wrote an agentic coder years ago and it yielded trash. (Tried to make it do then what kiro does today).

The models are better. Now, caveat - I don't use anything but opus for coding - Sonnet doesn't do the trick. My experience with Codex and Gemini is that their top models are as good as Sonnet for coding...

I am experimenting at a very early stage with using Verus in Rust to generate proveably correct Rust. I let the AI bang on the proof and trust the proof assistant to confirm it.

There is another route with Lean where Rust generates the Lean and there is proof done there but I haven't chased that down fully.

I think formal verification is a big win in the LLM era.

I'd have to see more to have a final thought.

As presented, Gollum is badly off, I reckon - missing the books textual description. The flowers are out of line.

The dragon scene is wonderful and captures the situation.

The dwarves are a bit dopy looking but I think could cohere with the early introduction in the Hobbit.

I'm looking forward to when I can run a tolerably useful model locally. Next time I buy a desktop one of its core purposes will be to run models for 24/7 work.

a lot of AI assisted development goes into project management and system design.

I have been tolerably successful. However, I have almost 30 years of coding experience, and have the judgement on how big a component should be - when I push that myself _or_ with AI, things go hairy.

ymmv.

Claude code's code review is _sufficient_ imo.

still need HITL, but the human is shifted right and can do other things rather than grinding through fiddly details.

30 years ago, it was safe to go to vendor XY page and download his latest version and it was more or less waterproof.

You _are_ joking, right? I distinctly remember all sorts of dubious freewarez sites with slightly modified installers. 1997-2000 era. And anti-virus was a thing in MS-DOS even.

I - senior - can patch an application in an unknown language and framework with the AI. I know enough to tell it to stop the wildly stupid ideas.

But I don't learn. That's not what I'm trying to do- I'm trying to fix the bug. Hmm.

I'm pretty sure AI is going to lead us to a deskilling crash.

Food for thought.

Commercial law nuts and bolts is very algorithmic often.

Criminal law is often fundamentally subjective, incorporating questions of intent and remorse.

AI the hype beast product and the club for workers is a plague that I frankly hate.

AI the manual algorithm to generate code and analyze images is quite an interesting underlying tech.

There was an attitude at a University about 20 years ago when I was an undergrad, around, hmm, stochastic learning algorithms. And the attitude was, "we don't care why or how it works - we want to make the outcome happen".

I found it intellectually reprehensible then, and now.

The number of junior roles I have seen my companies open in the past 8 years - and I've been at a few different shops - is less than he fingers I have. And this is _before_ the AI-copolypse.

Management has generally become persuaded that juniors are not worth hiring. My current shop is a bit more thoughtful on this which is good. But. The desire for senior+ is out of line. Particularly when companies want to pay junior rates. =}

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Dear author,

I don't know any period in the past 20 years where entry level jobs were properly allocated outside of FAANG. I have always advised talking to Microsoft, as my perspective is that they have the best entry level pipeline.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can afford to stay in it" is an old stock traders proverb. And I believe it applies the AI fad. I do not believe that the dreams of actually replacing humans will work out generally. But it will be a painful experience for the employees and the prospective employees.

Yeah - I know in US law some terms are simply unenforceable and void. Much of the FOSS movement is designed around US contract law. There are issues with some US licenses being enforceable under other legal regimes - I was chatting a decade or so ago with a Russian who understood the...GPL(? I don't remember exactly) to be invalid in Russia and so it had to be bundled in some fashion to be usable.

Or to put another way, a license (a contract) is a tuple (terms, jurisdiction), and the juridical evaluation process will take both into account.

I would be curious if that is how Japanese courts would view it. They may not consider that a valid way. Or they might. But different jurisdictions vary.

Roc Camera 9 months ago

Nikon is building in authenticity tooling at the camera & sensor level with its latest cameras. Z6iii I believe was the first.

The solution here is the Government regulating and managing the situation. It has been recognized for a century - if not more - that the onus is on the State.

The FDA, FTC, EPA, etc should be involved here.

I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.

This is my general perspective with history books - most mass market history books simplify the complexity dramatically. You have to get into books with piles of citations before the complexity & nuance level starts to approximate something perhaps like a correct take.

This gets more and more painful the more 'hot' the topic is.