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daviding

1,026 karma · joined September 25, 2010

homezada.com zoomread.com taglocity.com www.meridiansystems.com email: david.ing+hn@gmail.com
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daviding··on Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields
(deleted, political, no point)
daviding··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
For sit down, say flight, driving sims and productivity, then things to look at to compare would be things with a cable and no local compute taking weight, heat and component cost. There's the Pimax Dream Air SE and the Big Screen Beyond 2e as two recent updates in the ball park of Steam Frame pricing. Both that have eye tracking for better high resolution performance. The Pimax has a variable quality reputation and the Big Screen Beyond requires a deprecating Lighthouse tracking system, so no easy answers. None will be as smooth an experience of the Frame but are more geared to head mounted display.
daviding··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
A few things outside of normal work that are deliberately different to be interesting to me:

- Ongoing work on an airline announcement engine that works with flight simulators

https://github.com/fearlessfrog/MSFS_Universal_Announcer

- A multiplayer board game for Discourse forum users that is not the popular Risk (tm).

https://github.com/fearlessfrog/discourse-not-risk

Both have a fair bit of traction, but is often the case, keen to do something new this month.

daviding··on Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
It works great with UEVR, there's a discussion post in the steam forum on how to set that up. It plays really nicely in VR.
daviding··on Show HN: Metiq: a real time 3D globe for 100 public datasets
Very impressive! What's the stack used?

Also, is there a way to stop the 'Satellite Inspect' dialog from coming up when clicking around the globe? It obscures a bit of the map.

daviding··on Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis
A nice idea and good luck! My lawn is dead as our local data center took all the water (I'm kidding!).

We do home property and inventory services using AI on photos as well and the key thing we've found so far is that the biggest rival to those features is just people dragging photos into chatgpt and asking away. So the key here is differentiating from that and making something better and more accurate. What we did was to basically build a better and deeper prompt and history, e.g. context is king in a vertical. So that means the other info the user has put about the property, the memory of previous things asked or seen, combining with publicly available property info we already gather - this would make the information more valuable than straight gpt usage.

So what more can you bring to the bare prompt on the photos to help? What can you build in terms of info about the zip, so you do more 'vertical stuff' before the api call.

daviding··on Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing
Nice idea! fwiw, false positives and all, but the Windows 11 default Windows Security doesn't like it: `leakless.exe: Operation did not complete successfully because the file contains a virus or potentially unwanted software.`
daviding··on Ask HN: Are you still using your Vision Pro?
It does local stuff of course, and some are trying to bring PC streaming to it, e.g. https://github.com/Kross82/KRVR-releases
daviding··on Ask HN: Are you still using your Vision Pro?
Will be interesting to see which side of $999 it drops. I'll buy it regardless but the optics (heh) on the high RAM cost issue and the unit price might temper demand a bit.
daviding··on Claude Fable 5
Given the Fable 5 costs it's getting tricker to weight up 'how smart do you want it', like looking at the top of this graph..

https://cursor.com/evals

daviding··on Hacker News front page as a site
An overridden `.newspaper-copy { font-size: 1rem; }` works well.
daviding··on Mythical Man Month
"Adding tokens to a late software project makes it bigger and still late."
daviding··on Uncle Bob: It's Over
English is the new programming language.
daviding··on NASA Force
My 5090 couldn't handle that starfield at the beginning. I got a 1202 alarm just scrolling down..
daviding··on Codex for almost everything
There seems a fair enthusiasm in the UI of these to hide code from coders. Like the prompt interaction is the true source and the actual code is some sort of annoying intermediate runtime inconvenience to cover up. I get that productivity can be improved with a lot of this for non developers, just not sure using 'code' as the term is the right one or not.
daviding··on Cursor 3
Agree with that, they seem really good limits for daily use on something like Chat GPT Pro $20 account. I'm in the curious situation of using the Codex CLI within Cursor IDE and not really getting value out of my $60 Cursor sub. Plus at every update it seems Cursor seems to break more of their UI in the 'not a cloud agent chat UI' vs the more traditional VSCode sort of layout of code first. I should probably cancel.
daviding··on The Codex App
I find that the case too. For more complex things my future ask would be something that perhaps formalized verification/testing into the AI dev cycle? My confidence in not needing to see code is directly proportional in my level of comfort in test coverage (even if quite high level UI/integration mechanisms rather than 1 != 0 unit stuff)
daviding··on The Codex App
This looks interesting and I use Codex a fair bit already in vscode etc, but I'm having trouble leaving a 'code editor with AI' to an environment that sort of looks like it puts the code as a hidden secondary artefact. I guess the key thing is the multi agent spinning plates part.
daviding··on London–Calcutta bus service
1989. I saw a paper flyer in the New York Public Library and turned up a few days later at the bus station on impulse. It was basically a moving commune, where you slept on flat boards, cooked together and moved glacially slowly towards the destination. The NY -> SF went south via FL, TX etc. It was mainly young people not actually from the US, Europe, Australia etc.
daviding··on London–Calcutta bus service
I did too - did the SF back to NYC leg that goes the north route as well. Amazing experience. I was only 19 at the time. My favorite memory is that on the westbound leg we met up with the eastbound one in (I think) Yellowstone and while parking the buses they managed to slowly crash in to each other (just a dent, nothing serious). I liked the fact they both started from separate coasts and ending up colliding.
daviding··on GPT-5.2
So is maybe gpt-5.2 with reasoning set to 'none' identical to gpt-5.2-chat-latest in capabilities but perhaps with a different system (system) prompt? I notice chat-latest doesn't accept temperature or reasoning (which makes sense) parameters, so something is certainly different underneath?
daviding··on GPT-5.2
gpt-5.2 and gpt-5.2-chat-latest the same token price? Isn't the latter non-thinking and more akin to -nano or -mini?
daviding··on How People Use ChatGPT [pdf]
Not going to read all that.. ;)

> ChatGPT is widely used for practical guidance, information seeking, and writing, which together make up nearly 80% of usage. Non-work queries now dominate (70%). Writing is the main work task, mostly editing user text. Users are younger, increasingly female, global, and adoption is growing fastest in lower-income countries

daviding··on Hermes 4
user: hey hermes, why is your website scroll bar ungrabbable, I can't go up the page anymore? I'm stuck but want to read something higher up the page?

hermes4: We're all just stupid atoms waiting for inevitable entropy to plunge us into the endless darkness, let it go.

daviding··on Some thoughts on LLMs and software development
Yep, it's great for generating tests and so much of that is boilerplate that it feels great value. As a super lazy developer it's great as the burden of all that mechanical 'stuff' being spat out is nice. Test code being like baggage feels lighter when it's just churned out as part of the process, as in no guilt just to delete it all when what you want to do changes. That in itself is nice. Plus of course MCP things (Playwright etc) for integration things is great.

But like you said, it was meant more TDD as 'test first' - so a sort of 'prompt-as-spec' that then produces the test/spec code first, and then go iterate on that. The code design itself is different as influenced by how it is prompted to be testable. So rather than go 'prompt -> code' it's more an in-between stage of prompting the test initially and then evolve, making sure the agent is part of the game of only writing testable code and automating the 'gate' of passes before expanding something. 'prompt -> spec -> code' repeat loop until shipped.

daviding··on Some thoughts on LLMs and software development
I get a lot of productivity out of LLMs so far, which for me is a simple good sign. I can get a lot done in a shorter time and it's not just using them as autocomplete. There is this nagging doubt that there's some debt to pay one day when it has too loose a leash, but LLMs aren't alone in that problem.

One thing I've done with some success is use a Test Driven Development methodology with Claude Sonnet (or recently GPT-5). Moving forward the feature in discrete steps with initial tests and within the red/green loop. I don't see a lot written or discussed about that approach so far, but then reading Martin's article made me realize that the people most proficient with TDD are not really in the Venn Diagram intersection of those wanting to throw themselves wholeheartedly into using LLMs to agent code. The 'super clippy' autocomplete is not the interesting way to use them, it's with multiple agents and prompt techniques at different abstraction levels - that's where you can really cook with gas. Many TDD experts have great pride in the art of code, communicating like a human and holding the abstractions in their head, so we might not get good guidance from the same set of people who helped us before. I think there's a nice green field of 'how to write software' lessons with these tools coming up, with many caution stories and lessons being learnt right now.

edit: heh, just saw this now, there you go - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45055439

daviding··on Gemini 2.5 Flash Image
Since I can't edit, it seems like Flash image is about 23% (4 cents vs 17 cents) of the cost of Openai gpt-image-1, if you're putting an image and prompt in and getting out, say, a 1024x1024 generated image. With the quicker production time that makes it interesting. Expecting Openai to respond at least in terms of pricing, e.g. a flat rate output cap price or something to be comparable.
daviding··on Gemini 2.5 Flash Image
Not sure. If the Flash image output is $30/M [1] then that's pretty similar to gpt-image-1 costs. So a faster and better model perhaps but not really cheaper?

[1] https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-gemini-2-5-...

daviding··on The F-35 is losing the trade war
Up here in Canada it's a question of trust, or rather the lack of it. Things are unlikely to ever go back to the way things were.

Buy, make and domestically develop drones, lots and lots of drones.

daviding··on Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
The most fun one I've used is that it is my home environment in VR. In 3D it is a weird feeling to walk around and see how all the old sight lines are. I still duck a bit walking past mid doors :)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=21021...

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