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clscott

215 karma · joined December 19, 2009

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clscott··on But yak shaving is fun (2019)
So yak shaving comes after bike shedding?
clscott··on Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API
Those exact words are the positioning statement (start the second paragraph) of the document you linked.

What are you trying to say?

clscott··on [dead]
Is this article just trying to distract from the fact that the largest data breach was actually Elon Musk and DOGE in 2025?
clscott··on Caffeine content for coffee, tea, soda and more
It is demonstrably NOT talcum powder. What did you really mean to say?
clscott··on Yawning has an unexpected influence on the fluid inside your brain
A trait doesn’t have to be advantageous to persist just non-detrimental.
clscott··on Canada's deal with China signals it is serious about shift from US
Trump could increase the tariffs he already set in April 2025 for new cars manufactured in Canada. Depending on the car model the increases vary between 2500 and 15000 USD.
clscott··on AI Front End Generator Comparison: Claude Code vs. v0 vs. Cursor vs. Replit
Not my blog but it’s an interesting exercise
clscott··on First Self-Propagating Worm Using Invisible Code Hits OpenVSX and VS Code
The issue does not lie with Unicode.

It's just a custom string encoder/decoder whose encoded character set is restricted to non-printables.

Many editors and IDEs have features (or plugins) to detect these characters.

VSCode: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=YusufDan...

VIM: https://superuser.com/questions/249289/display-invisible-cha...

clscott··on EPA Seeks to Eliminate Critical PFAS Drinking Water Protections
The last time you voted in The United States of America may be the last time you get a vote in The United States of America.

All three branches of The United States of America has been captured by a tyrannical government. Rights are being eroded for inhabitants of The United States of America, including its citizens.

You have no right to: safe medicine, safe food, safe water, vote.

The sooner the people recognize this and take action, the shorter it will be to reverse.

Americans have a duty to act, and act quickly: what's already been taken will take generations to regain.

clscott··on Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update
Do I understand correctly that you deliberately entered personal contact information into LLM?

If so, I would be a reprimanding anyone in my org that did this. While it’s more effort I’d use the LLM to write a script to read the page with the Confluence api, parse it, write out the json files and push them where they need to go.

Add in basic assertions to check the data is present, in the expected format and there is enough of it. Alerting when the assertions fail, then I can schedule it and forget about it.

This is where LLMs shine, I can now build a robust solution in an hour instead of a day.

clscott··on Walmart and Amazon Are Exploring Issuing Their Own Stablecoins
It’s just another way to rip off the small guy who thinks they are getting a deal but the company has all the power.

Who doesn’t think the terms and conditions will include phrases like “in the company's sole discretion" and "reasonable opinion."

Check out Loblaw in Canada abusing their position in their reward program.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/gopublic/pc-optimum-loblaws-rewards-...

clscott··on Reward program locks man out of $43K account without warning or explanation
Beware the terms of use for those point programs you are maximizing
clscott··on “ZLinq”, a Zero-Allocation LINQ Library for .NET
They still do and investigate each failure. If the end result is that the library is “wrong” tickets and patches get sent to the library maintainers.
clscott··on DuckDB Doesn't Need Data to Be a Database
Postgres calls these foreign data wrappers (FDW)

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers

clscott··on From Fill Prefix to TRAMP
%v/pattern/d can also be written as %g!/pattern/d
clscott··on ChatGPT went berserk
Copilot is just another junior teammate. You need to peer review the heck out of that code
clscott··on Show HN: Reor – An AI note-taking app that runs models locally
You can use Obsidian to create markdown from One Note.

https://help.obsidian.md/import/onenote

clscott··on Show HN: Odin – the integration of LLMs with Obsidian note taking
I would very much appreciate the same for RUNE if you feel motivated.

I'm looking now to choose the obsidian plugin that helps me take advantage of the vast amount of notes I have created with obsidian over the last few years.

clscott··on Why Perl?
I recommend this blog post to all devs I work with that need to pick up Perl: https://qntm.org/perl_en
clscott··on What should I do Before I give up programming?
Front end web development is an ever revolving carousel of pain.

20 years ago I was in the same place as you but with Enterprise Java.

I stuck with simpler environments where my ability to write and test code worked and code bases could be kept simpler.

You can consider switching to “backend” programming, manipulate data and databases with python. Build APIs with Ruby on Rails. Help business automat some software workflows with Autohotkey.

There are a million niches in software, try another.

clscott··on Please help me handle a security vulnerability
Is it a vulnerability in a business or in a government service/dept?
clscott··on Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?
Thank you all with the suggestions!
clscott··on Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?
What is this miracle software?
clscott··on Ask HN: Where can I find work?
There are multiple hiring related threads posted here on the first of each month.

Who is hiring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33818037

Who wants to be hired? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33818035

Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33818036

clscott··on Wasmer 3.0
Sure, maybe it's not as fast to execute as another implementation, but having ANY implementation is far more useful than none at all.

Here's an example where performance wouldn't matter as much:

Let's say I'm the author of a programming language and I want to add a db layer to my standard lib.

Via WASM I can use a working backend while I'm protyping the API for my db layer. If the performance isn't fast enough I can start implementing my own "native" version with feature parity.

I can then use some of the tests from the original library (via WASM) to make sure my implementation has feature parity to the original.

clscott··on Wasmer 3.0
It's also valuable for running code written in <random language> to be executed in <another random language>.

Write a library in Rust and compile it to WASM, theoretically any language with WASM bindings could run it.

This could really make niche languages more easily adopted if their execution environment supported libraries in WASM.

Imagine using Java's JDBC from something like Nim. Nim could take advantage of a 30 year old mature and fast database access framework without haveing to envest that ime and effort themselves.

Or even something more modern like the polars dataframe library.

clscott··on Not Your Grandfather’s Perl
1. What's your top technique for keeping it fast?

2. Are you hiring?

clscott··on Ask HN: Do you hike prices often as a freelancer?
Increasing prices is standard business practice. None of the negative adjectives you applied are true.

Anyone that accuses you of being any of those things for increasing your price is just trying to rip YOU off and you should consider getting rid of them as a customer.

clscott··on Ask HN: Who wants to help promote RSS?
I think the issue might be that ATOM is the less ambiguous feed specification and RSS should be just left to languish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)#Atom_compa...

clscott··on Leveraging SIMD: Splitting CSV Files at 3Gb/S
Perl's best known library Terxt::CSV has both a pure-perl and a C implementation.

Here is the C version

https://github.com/Tux/Text-CSV_XS/blob/master/CSV_XS.xs

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