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mattdeboard

5,745 karma · joined August 19, 2010

http://mattdeboard.net http://hnofficehours.com/profile/mattdeboard/ https://github.com/mattdeboard
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mattdeboard··on Show HN: An atlas of system designs with interactive architecture diagrams
I think they were saying that LLM wrote the prose on their project website, not in their comment.
mattdeboard··on Claude Status – Elevated errors for multiple models
Their "Subscribe to incident" doodad isn't working either. Hanging when posting contact info object
mattdeboard··on I resigned from Anthropic today
I wrote out a variety of replies but I just emphatically agree with your "lack of imagination" statement. I have been constantly surprised over the last 15 years at the general inability to correctly foresee how things can do wrong across a whole host of domains.

The replies here just adds AI to the list of domains.

mattdeboard··on De-Brainrot Vacations
The intro paragraphs talking about the mental disengagement or decline or whatever we want to call it really resonated with me. It's something I've also taken measures to counter. In fact I'm on vacation right now to Basque Country. I read "A Basque History of the World" to prepare for the trip and that act reassured me I'm not getting less capable of engaging intellectually, I just have different intellectual interests now than the most intimate details of making websites for and serving them to customers at varying scales.
mattdeboard··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
That is a distinction without a practical difference.
mattdeboard··on Show HN: How to mentally calculate the day of the week for any date
This is amazing! What a cool website.
mattdeboard··on Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI
Very insightful. The idea of using pseudocode is clever, and the persistence+correlation layer idea is great.
mattdeboard··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
You seem to be arguing that people shouldn't be skeptical, by default, of studies of products that are funded by the companies that make the products.

They funded this study as a prospective way of increasing the adoption and market share of their trademarked medication. It deserves skepticism.

mattdeboard··on I've yet to see any"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union
I reckon they used "pathologically" as a synonym for "compulsively" and/or "extreme"
mattdeboard··on I've yet to see any"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union
I get where you're coming from (having also watched that video), but I'm skeptical mainstream commercial chatbots would be built without constraints in regard to sandbox-jumping measures to help a customer. All the economic incentives go the other way.

But, maybe that's just a failure of imagination on my part!

mattdeboard··on Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
Your last two sentences remind me of the olden days of people building applications on top of FB and Twitter APIs (and later, Reddit), only to to have the rug pulled out from under them in one way or another
mattdeboard··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
I'm working on https://xingolak.pages.dev/

I've been learning Basque and wanted to see a visualization of how the semantics move into different grammatical structures when translating between Basque and English/Spanish.

Under the hood it's using Stanford NLP to analyze the input then that analysis is given to Claude to generate the data structure needed to visualize the translation. It's really cool and maybe my favorite of the itch-scratchers I've built for myself over the years.

(Xingolak is Basque for "ribbons," a nod to the visualizing metaphor used in the UI.)

mattdeboard··on Emacs appearances in pop culture
I traded emacs for vscode several years ago now but this post made me wonder if I'd be insane for dusting off my herd of finely shorn yaks to try typescript dev again with it.

At the time I left for vscode, emacs had a REALLY bad Typescript story and it felt like a revelation doing TS in vscode.

Surely emacs has gotten a definitive TS solution since, idk, 2018? 2019? Right?

mattdeboard··on pg_durable: Microsoft open sources in-database durable execution
The road to eternal burning hell is paved with stored procedures. My experiences (!!) make it so i will never be convinced on the risk:reward being worth it.
mattdeboard··on What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
The way this position conforms to the interests of the capital class, and conflicts with those of the labor class, is a red flag.

It simultaneously and conveniently: 1. takes the heat off AI blowback 2. synergizes perfectly with "RTO" mandates (to the extent this needed synergy to become A Widespread Thing)

On that basis alone, I'll wait for further analysis.

Edit: to be clear I'm no anti-AI holdout, and I actually don't mind working from the office (which i do 4x a week). Just observing.

mattdeboard··on I have officially retired from Emacs
It's not that i don't like it. It's that I've got 10-15 years (i think) of muscle memory with magit
mattdeboard··on I have officially retired from Emacs
I've been retired from emacs for several years now but I'm still looking for a magit replacement that is independent of my editor. Vscode's magit extension is really good but i split my time between IntelliJ and vscode.

Anyone know of something like this?

mattdeboard··on Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI
"don't be evil"
mattdeboard··on I decompiled the White House's new app
You would be lying if you wrote that because you do not know if that is true.
mattdeboard··on I decompiled the White House's new app
Uh, yeah, dude, when Whitehouse.gov announces its new app, the app is a government program. Hope this helps but something tells me it won't.
mattdeboard··on I decompiled the White House's new app
Are you upset people are being critical of a shabbily run government program?
mattdeboard··on I decompiled the White House's new app
He explicitly says he can't determine it, but that the location tracking as configured will turn on once the user grants consent. All true statements.

How would you have written it differently

mattdeboard··on Toward automated verification of unreviewed AI-generated code
Ok but are you arguing against code reviews of AI generated code?
mattdeboard··on Toward automated verification of unreviewed AI-generated code
People are determined to make the future of code an even bigger dumpster fire than the present of code.
mattdeboard··on Toward automated verification of unreviewed AI-generated code
Do you not review junior developers' code? I don't understand your point
mattdeboard··on Lexega Turns SQL into Signals
Hey just saw this. I will probably take a look at this on Monday.
mattdeboard··on Show HN: Now I Get It – Translate scientific papers into interactive webpages
I also have a a scratch-my-own-itch project[1] that leverages an LLM as a core part of its workload. But it's so niche I could never justify opening it up to general use. (I haven't even deployed it to the web because it's easier to just run it locally since I'm the only user.)

But it got me interested in a topic I have been calling "token economization." I'm sure there's a more common term from it but I'm a newb to this tech. Basically, how to optimize the "run rate" for token utilization per request down.

Have you taken a stab at anything along this vein? Like prompt optimization, and so on? Or are you just letting 'er rip and managing costs by reducing request volume? (Now that I've typed this comment out I realize there is so much I don't know about basic stuff with commercial LLM billing and so on.)

[1] https://github.com/mattdeboard/itzuli-stanza-mcp

edit:

I asked Claude to educate me about the concepts I'm nibbling at in this comment. After some back-and-forth about how to fetch this link (??), it spit out a useful answer https://claude.ai/share/0359f6a1-1e4f-4ff9-968a-6677ed3e4d14

mattdeboard··on Lexega Turns SQL into Signals
Honestly this insight feels very actionable to me. I do more SQL reporting for biz analysis than i would like (i'm a dev not a biz analyst).

I may take a crack at this tool next week.

mattdeboard··on Lexega Turns SQL into Signals
Interesting note about left join in the CTE being converted into an inner join. Didn't know that
mattdeboard··on Lexega Turns SQL into Signals
did you use AI to write this response? Why?
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