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chadd

532 karma · joined December 20, 2016

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chadd··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
I do a lot more reading now while i wait for AI bots, it's much better than scrolling social media, i get a few minutes at a time all day long and it's been a mental game changer.

* Fun - Vince Fynn's "Mitch Rapp" Series - a bit dated, but if you like Tom Clancy it's got a similar vibe.

* Beautiful/Thought Provoking - Things In Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li

chadd··on Cowchat – Let Claude, Codex, and other agents talk to each other locally
I built this as a side project and mentioned it in a heavily upvoted comment[1], the top comment was "this is astrology for devs". Everyone is entitled to their opinion but our team has found a measurable decrease in bugs in code we write with multiple LLMs. Typically Codex + Claude + Kimi.

This is the other side of the coin of the HuggingFace incident - agents collaborating in that case shows the terrifying power of LLM collaboration. But it can also make your team more productive and your code better.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48206308

chadd··on Less Coffee, Better Sleep
magnesium glycinate (and/or a liquid IV or equivalent before bed) helped my restless legs
chadd··on DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
The problem with DOGE is it fired the bureaucrats but didn't eliminate the bureaucracy.

Thus we're stuck in a situation where the systems that used to work are crippled by lack of resources and we're in a decidedly more inefficient world and nothing to show for it.

Relevant example for the HN crowd - nondilutive funding through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) is much harder to get, because SBIR is a shell of its former self and startups doing interesting, cutting edge research are finding it much harder to navigate the process. The funds are still there, but the program administration has made it nearly impossible to access.

chadd··on What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis
the minimum dose of monjaro (2.5mg injection once/week) can often be enough
chadd··on Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids
The classic Mcsweeney's for the HN crowd is "E-mail Addresses That Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone"

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/e-mail-addresses-that-wo...

chadd··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
1. i'm notoriously bad about filing expense reports for my own companies. i built a macos desktop app which integrates with Plaid and keeps track of the things i need to expense, using an LLM to guess which company and whether it's reimbursible.

2. A MacOS app to manage my wife's SD Cards - downloads playlists from Spotify and finds the music, then makes sure the tracks are analyzed for BPM, key, then synced with Rekordbox for CDJ-3000s

3. https://clawchat.live - a homebrew package, which honestly works better locally but is available online, which provides a Rust chat server for separate LLMs to talk to each other and coordinate work. Longest session between Codex and Claude has been over 24 hours on big tasks. Generally I make one session the coordinator and the other does the coding.

chadd··on Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
Thanks for compiling this.

"A 100 to 300 kW beam has perhaps one to three seconds of dwell on a hardened, ablating, plasma-shrouded glide body. That is orders of magnitude short of the joules per square centimetre needed for a thermal kill."

- wondering if you can elaborate more on whether a laser energy-based device would ever be able to have enough power to stop one of these?

chadd··on Learnings from 100K lines of Rust with AI (2025)
We're working on a large Rust codebase, heavily assisted development with Claude and Codex, and one critical workflow is after you have written a spec, have the other LLM critique it thoroughly.

This back and forth will take quite a while, but the resulting implementation plan will be 10x better than the original.

You can automate this by giving Codex a goal, and a skill to call Claude to review the implementation spec until they both agree it's done.

Then, for critical code, have them both implement the spec in a worktree, then BOTH critique each other's implementation.

More often than not, Claude will say to take 2 or 3 pieces from it's design over to Codex, but ship the Codex implementation.

chadd··on Pomiferous: The most extensive apples (pommes) database
I love these niche sites! my friend recently started this for Tinned Fish (absolutely and solely for the love of the fish and with no plans to monetize.) He loves that a few random people will rank hundreds of tins. http://tinventory.co/
chadd··on Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy
i tried to stop using y'all when i got my first job at MSFT, having grown up in the South; then 10 years later I realized it's perfect for Corporate America given it's gender neutral
chadd··on The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode
re: binary attestation: "Whether the server rejects that outright or just logs it is an open question"

...what we did at Snap was just wait for 8-24 hours before acting on a signal, so as not to provide an oracle to attackers. Much harder to figure out what you did that caused the system to eventually block your account if it doesn't happen in real-time.

(Snap's binary attestation is at least a decade ahead of this, fwiw)

chadd··on Artemis II is not safe to fly
I'm literally guest lecturing at a Harvard class tomorrow on systemic failures in decision making, using the Columbia and Challenger disasters as case studies, and changed my slides last night to include Artemis II because it could literally happen again.

This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program.

In 1980, Gregg Easterbrook published "Goodbye, Columbia" in The Washington Monthly [1], warning that NASA's "success-oriented planning" and political pressure were creating the conditions for catastrophe. He essentially predicted Columbia's heat shield failures in the article 1 year before the first flight.

Challenger in 1986, and the Rogers Commission identified hierarchy, communication failures, and management overriding engineering judgment.

Then Columbia happened in 2003. The CAIB found NASA had not implemented the 1986 recommendations [2].

Now Charles Camarda (who flew the first shuttle mission after Columbia and is literally a heat shield expert!) is saying it's happening again.

[1] https://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.ht...

[2] Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Chapter 8: https://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/html/start.html

chadd··on Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant
Each ‘role’ (CTO, family manager, etc) is run in a separate claude instance and they don’t share context, which helps keep them on task.
chadd··on Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant
i built my own version of this called 'threethings' (per pmarca's essay on the subject of personal productivity). i gave an ec2 claude instance access to a folder that is synced with gdrive so it's easy to get local files to the instance, and gsuite access. i had claude build a flutter app one hour when i couldn't sleep, and gave it a telegram bot account. i talk to it via telegram and it keeps tabs on personal and work emails. it does 'deep work' late at night and sends me a 7am summary of my day. my wife is asking for it now, because it will notice urgent emails first thing in the morning and alert me.

i don't have time to open source it, but it's low key revolutionary having a pretty smart AI looking at my life every day and helping me track the three most important things to do.

chadd··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)
probably a longer answer is warranted, but we keep it simple - everyone pays - which essentially eliminates ghosting and self-selects for people who are serious about a search for a partner.
chadd··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)
Sitch App | Founding Product Manager | NYC-area HYBRID (2-3 days/week in NYC near Union Square) | Full-time

Sitch is a new type of concierge dating app. We're using AI + Humans to ask you questions, get to know you, then help you find love.

We're an AI powered concierge matchmaker for serious daters. Sitch is live in 5 cities and expanding nationally in 2026.

We're philosophically opposed to the dopamine-fueled mini-game doomswiping of 'traditional' dating apps which cynically monetizes desperation. We're monetizing intent!

* We're top-tier VC funded (a16z Speedrun, M13, early Snap angels) * Looking for a PM who loves building for consumers, loves relationships, is a bit unusual, and is obsessed with building unique experiences only made possible with the new era of LLMs

* 2-3 days/week in person, in Manhattan near Union Square

Site is at https://joinsitch.com, and feel free to send me (Chad) and Dini (co-founder) a note at hi@unusual.inc

chadd··on Is “The Phoenician Scheme” Wes Anderson's Most Emotional Film?
This is because the older films were co-written with Owen Wilson. Once they stopped collaborating, Anderson's later films are unbalanced - they have the whimsical aesthetic, but are too sweet without the bitter piercing wit and clarity of Wilson's writing to make them less cloying (IMHO).
chadd··on Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
i'm not sure this is true, for instance NYC ranks as the second most disabled-friendly city

https://www.amny.com/lifestyle/new-york-city-ranks-2nd-in-a-...

chadd··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)
Sitch App | Engineer | NYC-area HYBRID (2 days/week in Brooklyn) | Full-time | Python + Django + Flutter + Rust Sitch is a new type of concierge dating app. We're using AI + Humans to ask you questions, get to know you, then help you find love. We're a concierge matchmaker but we don't call ourselves that and we don't charge the obscene prices that matchmakers charge.

One of our metrics is how little time you spend in the app. We're explicitly opposed to the dopamine-fueled mini-game doomswiping of 'traditional' dating apps which cynically monetizes desperation. We're monetizing intent!

* We're top-tier VC funded, small team of 2 cofounders (Snapchat, Bumble), a CTO from Snap/Clubhouse, and 3 engineers, based in NYC.

* Stack is Django, OpenAI, Flutter, Rust

* Looking for a Mid-level Engineer who is an all-arounder. Backend more important than front-end code, but if can also work on client code (or want to learn) that would be ideal.

* 1-2 days/week in person, in Brooklyn, and the rest remote. We strongly prefer NYC area candidates.

See our "corporate" site at https://unusual.inc, and our app site at https://joinsitch.com, and feel free to send me a note at chad@unusual.inc

chadd··on AI models miss disease in Black and female patients
A surprisingly high number of medical studies will not include women because the study doesn't want to account for "outliers" like pregnancy and menstrual cycles[0]. This is bound to have effects on LLM answers for women.

[0] https://www.northwell.edu/katz-institute-for-womens-health/a...

chadd··on Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
I'm biased bc I worked with the team while there, but I believe Snap's acquisition of PlayCanvas was one of their most underrated. Incredible technology.
chadd··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2025)
Sitch App | Engineering Lead | NYC-area HYBRID (2 days/week in Brooklyn) | Full-time | Python + Django + Flutter + Rust

Sitch is a new type of concierge dating app. We're using AI + Humans to ask you questions, get to know you, then help you find love. We're a concierge matchmaker but we don't call ourselves that and we don't charge the obscene prices that matchmakers charge.

One of our metrics is how little time you spend in the app. We're explicitly opposed to the dopamine-fueled mini-game doomswiping of 'traditional' dating apps which cynically monetizes desperation.

* We're top-tier VC funded, small team of 2 cofounders (Snapchat, Bumble) and 3 engineers, based in NYC.

* Stack is Django, OpenAI, Flutter, Rust for Chat infrastructure.

* Looking for a Sr. Eng who is an all-arounder and wants to eventually manage. Backend more important than front-end code, but if can also work on client code (or want to learn) that would be ideal.

* 2 days/week in person, in Brooklyn, and the rest remote. We strongly prefer NYC area candidates.

See our "corporate" (hah!) site at https://unusual.inc, and our app site at https://joinsitch.com, and feel free to send me a note at chad@unusual.inc

chadd··on Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork
I used Riak for a project back in 2012, the app that became the Whisper App, and as a huge Erlang fanboy, I was so excited about it.

But it was incredibly unreliable at scale, and my colleague and I spent a week of sleepless nights under incredible personal and business pressure - as the servers got busier and busier - ripping it out.

Still love vector clocks, though, and have fond memories of the Basho team presenting at Erlang Factory

chadd··on Thomas E. Kurtz has died
C64 BASIC got me started in my career. So grateful!
chadd··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2024)
Sitch App | NYC-area | Full-time | Python + Flutter

Sitch is a new type of concierge dating app. We're using AI + Humans to ask you questions, get to know you, then help you find love. We're a concierge matchmaker but we don't call ourselves that and we don't charge the obscene prices that matchmakers charge.

One of our metrics is how little time you spend in the app. We're explicitly opposed to the dopamine-fueled mini-game doomswiping of 'traditional' dating apps which cynically monetizes desperation.

* We're top-tier VC funded, small team of 2 cofounders (Snap, Bumble) and 3 engineers, based in NYC.

* Stack is Django, OpenAI, Flutter.

* Looking more for a backend engineer but if you're an all-arounder and can also work on client code (or want to learn) that would be ideal.

* 2 days/week in person, in Brooklyn, and the rest remote is our ideal working environment, so we're strongly preferring the NYC area.

See our "corporate" (hah!) site at https://unusual.inc, and our app site at https://joinsitch.com, and feel free to send me a note at chad@unusual.inc

chadd··on Wild Mustang and Burro Freeze Marks (2020) [pdf]
what was it like owning a wild burro?
chadd··on The first snapshot of Hacker News on Archive.org
does anyone still remember the day HN was all Erlang articles?
chadd··on Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media
Great point about disregarding our own bubbles. Here's a good example re:Snapchat. Slightly more than 5% of the world is on Snapchat daily. That number has been going up, almost without fail, quarter over quarter for 12 years.
chadd··on Ask HN: Good examples of fault-tolerant Erlang code?
I have written a lot of Erlang code over the years, including an Erlang Redis clone which had some interesting performance characteristics[1] ... though not recently, I went too far down the engineering management track at Snap and elsewhere... but I worked closely with Fernando "El Brujo"[2] when he was CTO of my consultancy. If you want to see beautiful, canonical Erlang code, he's still slinging it out. Dig through his repos on Github, or better yet, ask him to provide his suggestions.

[1] https://github.com/cbd/edis [2] https://github.com/elbrujohalcon

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