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ciaranmca

23 karma · joined May 2, 2025

Junior SWE. github: https://github.com/CiaranMcAleer
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ciaranmca··on Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC
Oh my pi does it, not sure if that’s something from upstream or just a fork feature but from my experience it seems to work well
ciaranmca··on Audacity 4.0
Usually I can’t stand scroll animated pages but they actually did a nice job at it.
ciaranmca··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
Don’t think I have ever came across a queue to buy a laptop before but congrats to the framework team.
ciaranmca··on Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
I actually really like that inverse Kickstarter idea, makes a lot of sense especially if you did some kind of enter some pain/problem, search through existing idea markets and you can throw money towards ideas that would solve whatever pain point you have. Builders would essentially just have a market of validated ideas and could submit a ‘bid’ before a set deadline and the finders would vote on which is best then the funds would resolve to whatever builder made the best product.
ciaranmca··on Satellite firm pauses imagery after revealing Iran's attacks on US bases
I would say Sent2 but there is examples of recent censorship with that as well (https://hntrbrk.com/eu-satellites/)
ciaranmca··on Show HN: Badge that shows how well your codebase fits in an LLM's context window
Never thought about the impact of comments, perhaps there is value in stripping those out of read file tools
ciaranmca··on Advanced Aerial Robotics Made Simple
It’s a really interesting project, worth checking out the video where he merged it with a companion computer to do computer vision tasks and inject controls straight into the flight controller https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uaY2G5Kbj_g
ciaranmca··on Launch HN: Omnara (YC S25) – Run Claude Code and Codex from anywhere
True, certainly something you could do with Tailscale+tmux but if this makes that a lot easier then it could end up being popular, increasingly the people who are pushing the most money into the likes of Anthropic are not rhe people focusing too much on the amount of money being put towards achieving their goal, rather the progress(tbh more realistic to say perceived progress) towards that goal in the shortest amount of time.

Obligatory https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

ciaranmca··on Launch HN: Livedocs (YC W22) – An AI-native notebook for data analysis
Fair enough but the examples shown could surely just display some pre-cooked examples to give a demo of how rhe product works with no real cost to you or barrier to potential users.
ciaranmca··on Show HN: LocalGPT – A local-first AI assistant in Rust with persistent memory
Confused me at first as when I saw mention of local + the single file thing in the GitHub I assumed they were going to have llamafile bundled and went looking through to see what model they were using by default.
ciaranmca··on Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence
100%, trying a bit of an experiment like this(similar in that I mostly just care about playing around with different agents, techniques etc.) it has built out literally hundreds of tests. Dozens of which were almost pointless as it decided to mock apis. When the number of failed tests exceeded 40 it just started disabling tests.
ciaranmca··on Poison Fountain
And most of the big players now have some kind of browser or bowser agent that they could just leverage to gather training data from locked down sources.
ciaranmca··on Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
^This 100%. Junior SWE here. Agentic coding has kinda felt like a promotion for me. I code less by hand and spend more time on the actual engineering side of things. There’s hype in both directions though. I don’t AI is replacing me anytime soon(fingers crossed), but it’s already way more useful than the skeptics give it credit for. Like most things the truth’s somewhere in the middle.
ciaranmca··on FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter
That’s why I like how OC handles sharing sessions https://opencode.ai/docs/share/

Wish other tools would copy this functionality(and maybe expand it so colleagues can pick up on sessions I share)

ciaranmca··on Launch HN: Hypercubic (YC F25) – AI for COBOL and Mainframes
In terms of training your own models, is there enough COBOL available for training or are you going to have to convince your customers to let you train on their data (do you think banks would push back against that?)
ciaranmca··on WriterdeckOS
Yea, that’s something that stuck out to me as well. Seems like auto save and version control could be done in a minimalist manner whist improving QOL
ciaranmca··on Why I love my Boox Palma e-reader
Actually seems like a really cool product, not sure if it would be that useful for any serious reading due to the small size but probably useful for displaying a calendar and other widgets.
ciaranmca··on Introducing architecture variants
Out of interest, what reader is this? Sounds interesting
ciaranmca··on OpenRouter Introduces Exacto Precision Tool-Calling Endpoints
“ These endpoints are focused on higher tool-calling accuracy by routing requests to providers that demonstrate measurably better tool calling performance.

Exacto endpoints are available for: - Kimi K2 - DeepSeek v3.1 Terminus - GLM 4.6 - GPT‑OSS 120B - Qwen3 Coder ”

ciaranmca··on LLMs can get "brain rot"
Agreed, “ Popularity as a better indicator”. Hypothetically you could look at popularity over time to filter out viral rot content and work out if people feel the content is useful.
ciaranmca··on Westjet is going to make you pay to recline your seat
Ryanair is probably a better comparison.
ciaranmca··on Kiwi.com flight search MCP server
We need a benchmark to test this, give an agent access to a browser and card details and set it free.
ciaranmca··on Monodraw
That animated ascii art on your site is really cool, something I will definitely have to keep in mind for documenting some of my projects in future.
ciaranmca··on Launch HN: Cyberdesk (YC S25) – Automate Windows legacy desktop apps
Haven’t looked into them much but I thought the Chinese labs had released some for this kind of thing
ciaranmca··on Ultrathin business card runs a fluid simulation
Thought the same but from what I can see those are somewhat uncommon, presumably you are unable to affix them to the board as securely as the typical connectors
ciaranmca··on Show HN: I built a tool to replace capcut audio transcription
Very cool product, just a heads up the footer links don’t seem to actually work on that link(I am using safari mobile)
ciaranmca··on Ollama Turbo
I think it’s the logical move to ensure Ollama can continue to fund development. I think you will probably end up having to add more tiers or some way for users to buy more credits/gpu time. See anthropic’s recent move with Claude code due to the usage of a number of 24/7 users.
ciaranmca··on Open models by OpenAI
Is this the stealth models horizon alpha and beta? I was generally impressed with them(although I really only used it in chats rather than any code tasks). In terms of chat I increasingly see very little difference between the current SOTA closed models and their open weight counterparts.
ciaranmca··on Launch HN: Gecko Security (YC F24) – AI That Finds Vulnerabilities in Code
Was it not curl https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/open-source-project-...
ciaranmca··on Ask HN: What's the 2025 stack for a self-hosted photo library with local AI?
I have used https://www.photoprism.app/ and have found the face recognition to work quite well.
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