Hacker News Reader

ColinEberhardton Show HN: AI Bubble Monitor

Neat! Really like this, and will be interesting to see how it tracks over time.

My only concern is the scale you have selected as we are already close to 100, are you going to have to allow it to be ‘turned up to 11’ at some point?

ColinEberhardton Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature

As an aside, the Ghostty recently made it mandatory to disclose the use of AI coding tools:

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/8289

ColinEberhardton Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle

Thanks Simon - you asked us to share patterns that work. Coincidentally I just finished writing up this post:

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2025/10/06/delegating-grunt-work...

Using AI Agents to implement UI automation tests - a task that I have always found time-consuming and generally frustrating!

ColinEberhardton Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back

I agree with the overall sentiment here, having written something similar recently:

“LLMs don’t know what they don’t know” https://blog.scottlogic.com/2025/03/06/llms-dont-know-what-t...

But I wouldn’t say it is the only problem with this technology! Rather, it is a subtle issue that most users don’t understand

ColinEberhardton RIP Shunsaku Tamiya, the man who made plastic model kits a global obsession

I had a car from the same era, the Boomerang, similar in style but 4WD:

https://randomcompetitions.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/...

Absolutely loved that car, used it for hours and hours every week. The best 'toy' I ever had (other than my Amiga A500!).

ColinEberhardton Show HN: I made a tool to generate photomosaics with your pictures

Oh wow, so cool to meet someone who used an app I wrote 25 years ago. Great to hear from you and congrats on the prize!

ColinEberhardton Show HN: I made a tool to generate photomosaics with your pictures

Very cool. I actually created a shareware application that rendered Photomosaics 25 years ago! Here is a link to "Mosaic Magic" from the Wayback Engine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010405175706/http://fishsoft.c...

I managed to make a decent amount of spending money from that application during my University years.

One interesting lesson I learnt was about enterprise pricing. I think I charged ~$20 for Mosaic Magic, however, I started to get emails from organisations asking about pricing for commercial use. Nothing on my pricing page suggested that commercial use was prohibited, I guess they just thought $20 was rather cheap. From there-on, I charged $150 for "commercial use". Basically, anyone who thought they should be paying more, did!

Finally, Robert Silvers filed a patent and trademark for Photomosaics in ~2000, and was, for a while aggressively pursuing organisations that he felt was infringing. I assume this has all died down now.

ColinEberhardton Show HN: Ten years of running every day, visualized

That is very cool, thanks for sharing, and congratulations on an epic streak.

I'm also into running visualisation, and created the running report card:

https://run-report.com/

It visualises your year in running, with some fun narrative generated by GPT. Here's my report card:

https://run-report.com/8725202.html

ColinEberhardton Measuring the Impact of AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity [pdf]

TL;DR; they report that AI tools slow down task completion by 19%

ColinEberhardton From AI to Agents to Agencies

until some of the significant flaws of agents are addressed (hallucination, explainability, bias), I'm not really all that interested in extending this model further.

Agentic AI definitely works for software engineering because we have suitable mitigations for its limitations. It is unclear what those mitigations might be in other fields of application.

ColinEberhardton Prompt engineering playbook for programmers

There are so many prompting guides at the moment. Personally I think they are quite unnecessary. If you take the time to use these tools, build familiarity with them and the way they work, the prompt you should use becomes quite obvious.

ColinEberhardton Peer Programming with LLMs, for Senior+ Engineers

Thanks for sharing pmabanugo, a couple of those posts are new to me too. If you’re taking submissions, I’ve been exploring how to make the most of these tools for the past few months, here’s my latest post:

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2025/05/08/new-tools-new-flow-th...

ColinEberhardton Coding agent in 94 lines of Ruby

Great post, thanks for sharing. I wrote something similar a couple of years ago, showing just how simple it is to work with LLMs directly rather than through LangChain, adding tool use etc …

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2023/05/04/langchain-mini.html

It is of course quite out of date now as LLMs have native tool use APIs.

However, it proves a similar point to yours, in most applications 99% of the power is within the LLM. The rest is often just simple plumbing.

ColinEberhardton Embeddings are underrated (2024)

Agreed, embeddings are a very useful tool. Started using them for article recommendations on our blog a few years ago, with a measured increase in engagement:

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2022/02/23/word-embedding-recomm...

ColinEberhardton Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)

I’m working on a simple app that logs Karting activity and data. My son has been karting for a year or so, and there is so much data to collect - times, pressures, sprocket set up, track location, weather and more (about 30 datapoints a session)

Collecting the data helps with recording engine performance, tyre ages, best lap times but is also really useful for recalling how well each setup performed for future reference.

I’m deliberately doing this all in a very low-tech way as my son will be creating a more polished version for a school project. We’re front-running that a bit to give him a good dataset and explore various ideas.

On that note, they do Python in school. For the backend it will be SqlLite and Flask. Any suggestions for the front end tech? This will mostly be forms- and grids-based so nothing sophisticated needed, but some simple client-side logic (e.g. validation, geolocation, simple stop watch) would be good. Ideally this would be python as well. We could use WebAssembly but am wondering if there is a suitable framework that does the is out-of-the-box.

ColinEberhardton Breaking GPT-5 News

And yes, I fell for it - for a couple of minutes!

ColinEberhardton ToS;DR

Great idea - although the website is struggling with comment SPAM https://edit.tosdr.org/points/10493

ColinEberhardton Show HN: My Attempt to Organize the World of AI Dev Tools

Great work - I've been doing something similar, creating a smaller, more curated list here:

https://github.com/ColinEberhardt/awesome-ai-developer-tools

Categorising these tools is quite challenging!

ColinEberhardton LLMs Don't Know What They Don't Know–and That's a Problem

great quote - exactly that

ColinEberhardton LLMs Don't Know What They Don't Know–and That's a Problem

Ah, interesting - I’ve not had much experience with Claude, will give it a go. Thanks.

ColinEberhardton LLMs Don't Know What They Don't Know–and That's a Problem

> That’s my point, I want to skip to the part where we know what LLMs are good for, what they are bad for, and just consider them another tool at our disposal.

Totally agree with that.

ColinEberhardton LLMs Don't Know What They Don't Know–and That's a Problem

No, I’m not surprised either.

In fact, I’m much more surprised at just how capable their are of such a wide range of task, given that they have just ‘learnt from the internet’!

ColinEberhardton LLMs Don't Know What They Don't Know–and That's a Problem

> We use the hammer for nails and the screwdriver for screws

The difference is, the hammers and screwdrivers perform a single task, and have been designed and optimised for that specific task.

LLMs are much more versatile and capable of performing a wide range of tasks. Yet, at the same time, their capabilities are ill defined.

ColinEberhardton NotebookLM's automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

I don’t think this is all that impressive, the generated podcast is pretty shallow - lots of ‘whoa meta’ and the word ‘like’ thrown into every sentence.

Yes, it will generate a middle-of-the-road waffling podcast, but not one with any real depth.

ColinEberhardton BASIC was not just a programming language

I can totally relate to that, and it is why I really got into WebAssembly. It is such a simple concept that you can understand it fully, easy to write by hand, create an emulator, and more. Feels like stepping back in time :-)

ColinEberhardton Build your own WebAssembly Compiler (2019)

Oh wow, really chuffed to see a blog post I wrote 4 years ago back on the front page of HN once again. It was a real rollercoaster, spending ages developing a talk, that I wasn't able to give due to a flight cancellation - then turning it into a blog post that lots of people seemed to like.

Hard work pays off in the end :-)

ColinEberhardton Embeddings: What they are and why they matter

I had exactly the same idea a while back:

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2022/02/23/word-embedding-recomm...

Using embeddings I increased engagement with related articles.

Personally I think embeddings are a powerful tool that are somewhat overlooked. They can be used to navigate between documents (and excerpts) based on similarities - or conversely find unique content.

All without worrying about hallucinations. In other words, they are quite ‘safe’

ColinEberhardton The Problem with LangChain

Thanks for referencing the ‘implementing LangChain in 100 lines of code’ post I wrote a few months back. Really glad it was useful. And yes, I completely agree, much of LangChain is an abstraction that does little more than obfuscate.

ColinEberhardton Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://blog.scottlogic.com/ceberhardt/

Been going for 10+ years now. It’s fun to watch my interested (professional and personal) change.

It all started with WPF then Silverlight (RIP), then diversified into HTML5 (when the version number seemed to be a thing). I also had a fun foray into mobile dev for a while, swift / iOS. More recently it’s been quite JS-heavy, and the past year or so, a lot of AI.

There is an underlying theme of open source throughout.

A fun trip down memory lane!

ColinEberhardton Juggling Lab GIF Server

You're welcome - it was a blast.