HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mitchitized

162 karma · joined August 5, 2010

submissionscomments
mitchitized··on Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md
Claude also checks your settings.json first, and if it sees a default there it then prefers that over anything in CLAUDE.md. This is particularly nefarious as they ship logic to presume a default if a setting is not there in settings.json, even if there are instructions in CLAUDE.md for exactly that.

For instance, say you added "do not add 'Made with Claude Code' in any issues, pull requests or wiki entries" in your CLAUDE.md. So far, so good.

Well the latest update now looks for something in your settings.json. Since you don't know about it, it is not set. Claude then says "not explicitly set, so now it is true by default". It completely ignores your CLAUDE.md.

Wait, what?

You shouldn't be shipping logic that arbitrarily redefines the behavior of the program, especially if your new logic actually ignores your own configuration or directives.

mitchitized··on Bing Wallpaper showing Ad for Harry Potter and Fantastic beasts box set
> The last time I remember hearing positive news about Windows was the Win 7 launch.

For me it was Windows 95 finally getting rid of Trumpet Winsock. Been a steady decline ever since.

mitchitized··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
Poking around and have to ask an obvious question: What's the difference between this and Canonical's Juju from twenty years ago? Isn't this just the same thing, but with newer tools?
mitchitized··on Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone
I remember driving to the datacenter to setup my own servers. I had a fractional T1 to my desk, it provided a blazing 640k (sometimes all the way up to an unfathomable 1MB!!1!) of bandwidth and only cost around $1,300 a month. Good times.

That gave way to hosting providers, like ServerBeach and Rackspace, where you paid them to setup the server hardware for you, saving the drive. You still had to deal with bandwidth, backup, redundancy, etc. Much easier than before but still a pretty big hassle.

Then the cloud happened. "Come to the cloud, where everything just magically happens for you," the salesperson said. So I went. And discovered that none of my scripts, tools or knowledge worked there, and had to completely start over from scratch. FOR EACH VENDOR. Gah.

The ONE thing I will grant cloud providers is that I can usually automate my way around their enshittification. They over-complicate things to an extreme where I do wonder if there is an actual savings or not, just based on the headaches their setups can consistently produce.

My take is that your needs pretty much determine which route is more/less painful. Sometimes you DO need the redundancy and uptime enough to tolerate the shenanigans of the vendor, and other times you just need your own machine to quietly get things done (without worrying about SLAs or client expectations).

The ultimate question you should be asking, and there is no right/wrong answer: For this particular effort, is it more valuable to you to learn how to do these things by hand, or is the infrastructure just a means to an end so you can do something specific?

mitchitized··on The AirPods Effect
The author has clearly never tried to leg press 300+ pounds in the gym to Madonna's "Like a Virgin". Sometimes the biggest sell of earbuds is noise REDUCTION, not what sounds they can make.

I do agree that there are "social interactions" that are greatly devalued by people wishing not to be interacted with. But for me the earbuds are usually in to block annoyances, not avoid human contact.

mitchitized··on OpenAI frontier models and Codex are now available on AWS
Another reality is that at that scale you need to diversify your vendor portfolio so you never get stuck in a single-vendor scenario (for contracts, liability or scale). Many companies half this size have infrastructure across all three - AWS, Azure and GCP. The primary reason is redundancy, but that also gives them potential leverage for contract negotiation.
mitchitized··on Apple accidentally left Claude.md files Apple Support app
You're absolutely right!

(sorry couldn't resist)

mitchitized··on Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"
I don't think consolidation will ever happen, the AI space is already dominated by a few whales.

Seems most of the open weight models are from outside the USA (shocker), going to be interesting to see how THAT shakes out.

mitchitized··on Nanobrew: The fastest macOS package manager compatible with brew
(report card for an0malous): "Does not play nice with other students."
mitchitized··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
You're absolutely right!

(Sorry, couldn't resist.) I could be the lone dissenter here, but to me well-written comments are a lot more fun to read than near-gibberish.

I wished more people tried harder to be better communicators, but it is what it is. If AI can decipher these comments and produce a much more coherent statement, then I'm for it.

mitchitized··on Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion
The world changes. Time marches on, and the very skills you spend your time developing will inevitably expire in their usefulness. Things that were once marvelous talents are now campfire stories or punchlines.

LLMs may be accelerating the process, but definitely not the cause.

If you want a career in technology, a durable one, you learn to adapt. Your primary skill is NOT to master a given technology, it is the ability to master a given technology. This is a university that has no graduation!

mitchitized··on Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign
The only places where a 4-way stop has room to make a roundabout are places where there is not enough traffic for it to matter either way.

The biggest obstacle is that there are just too many 4-way stops in urban areas where there is no space left to make a roundabout, you would have to tear down buildings. I don't think that is a valid argument in that scenario.

mitchitized··on Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis
This is ultimately the first question I have whenever someone tells me about a bouncing new AI shiny... "Where does my data go?" Because if it does not stay on my machine, hard pass.
mitchitized··on West Midlands police chief quits over AI hallucination
I'd say the exact opposite, "doing this will get YOU fired" is the strongest possible message.
mitchitized··on Apple picks Gemini to power Siri
What I want to know is the privacy impact of this partnership. I see terms like "Apple will be running Google's models on their infrastructure" but that definitely is not enough detail for me to know where my data is going.

Any details on privacy and data sharing surfaced yet?

mitchitized··on RustGPT: A pure-Rust transformer LLM built from scratch
You're absolutely correct!
mitchitized··on Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources
> People listening to music for free is less than a drop of water in the ocean of causative reasons musicians get fucked.

Astonishingly ignorant hot take. Music is what MUSICIANS DO. Some of them are also performers, many are not. What they create is the same as what a painter does, or even a chef or architect. However it is not a physical good so people with tiny brains think that means "iT's FreEEe!!1!" when each musical instrument used costs money, the recording cost money, the distribution cost money, the filing/registration costs money, and then there's all the years of time and effort spent learning how to do all of this.

The fact of the matter is that right now music is treated very similarly to software. There is ownership and copyright, and being able to make a digital copy for minimal cost/effort does not magically remove that ownership.

If you don't like it then you should change the laws. It's like being mad at cops because of the speed limit, when the likely culprits are your local city council.

mitchitized··on You don't want to hire "the best engineers"
Although I agree with the overall sentiment of the article, the reality in 2025 is that it is a totally dead market and we are still trying to figure out WTH is going on.

Some companies are holding their breaths due to political instability, others are in sectors that are already getting decimated (likely from the same instability above), yet others have reached a point where they (and "they" appear to be in a majority in their respective industries) are more centered on efficiency than headcount.

I'm employed and I'm grateful... I know plenty of people searching and are getting nothing but silence in their search. I think both sides of the hiring equation are getting a hard reset right now.

mitchitized··on Open SWE: An open-source asynchronous coding agent
Hol up

How can it be AGPL and not provide full source? AGPL is like the most aggressive of the GPL license variants. If they somehow circumvented the intent behind this license that is a problem.

mitchitized··on My experience with Claude Code after two weeks of adventures
Each use case, which for many is a project-by-project thing, likely determines the right tool for the job.

For new projects, I find Claude Code extremely helpful, as I start out with a business document, a top-level requirements document, and go from there. In the end (and with not a lot of work or time spent) I have a README, implementation plan, high-level architecture, milestones, and oftentimes a swagger spec, pipeline setup and a test harness.

IMHO pointing CC at a folder of a big typescript project is going to waste a ton of compute and tokens, for minimal value. That is not a good use of this tool. I also have a pretty strong opinion that a large, complex typescript codebase is a bad idea for humans too.

Point CC at a python or go repo and it is a whole 'nother experience. Also, starting out is where CC really shines as stated above.

For a big complex typescript repo I would want very specific, targeted help as opposed to agentic big-picture stuff. But that also minimizes the very reason I'd be reaching for help in the first place.

mitchitized··on Artisanal handcrafted Git repositories
I closed the tab as soon as I saw `ignorecase = true`.

Absolutely NOT going there again.

* points at numerous scars and trauma

mitchitized··on AI is turning Apple into a "loser"
Definitely not seeing the horrendous collapse of the once mighty Apple.

That said, they have always been behind the curve with AI, and recent product releases/updates have been, uh, suboptimal. Latest Logic Pro is a disaster (e.g. unstable/crashing, removed key shortcuts killing productivity) and don't get me started on the dumbing-down of iOS.

They are for sure headed in the wrong direction, but they are just too big to fall overnight.

mitchitized··on Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet
That is because I do not think Google's aims for captcha are the same as ours.

I can tell you that as soon as you download Chrome and login to any Google account of yours, the captcha tests are suddenly and mysteriously gone.

Use firefox in full-lockdown mode, and you will be clicking fire hydrants and crosswalks for the next several hours.

My crazy conspiracy theory is that Google is just using captcha as an opportunity to force everyone out of privacy mode, further empowering the surveillance capitalism engines. The intent is not to be effective, but inconvenient.

mitchitized··on Show HN: Memex is a Claude Code alternative built on Rust+Tauri for vibe coding
Hey, there's a really cool new tool that you could use to add this feature, I think it was called 'memex' or something like that.

(sorry couldn't resist)

Been playing around with this for a day and found it intuitive and fun to use. A little scary on the "but how much will this cost me if this becomes a frequently-used tool?" question. Can't wait to point this at local models, too!

mitchitized··on Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks
It is a public website and a public service - it's like saying "hey I got free lemonade here, but you can't have it unless I decide I like you first."

If you're giving something away online for free, then you are giving it away for free. I'll never understand the cognitive dissonance of "conditionally free".

A more important question is where do we draw the line of abuse? If someone links to my website and that's okay with me, but someone else does and I don't like it, do I have the right to conditionally block access to them? And do they have the right to circumvent that to regain access that I freely give to others?

mitchitized··on Meilisearch – search engine API bringing AI-powered hybrid search
Fire it up in a docker container and limit the RAM usage that way.

This is a trick I learned years ago with other mmap-based systems.

mitchitized··on Gumroad’s source is available
This actually strikes at the heart of the disconnect between open source philosophy and common vernacular.

I've argued for years that "free" does NOT mean "free to use as long as you follow my restrictions". To me the only licenses that meet this criteria are the permissive ones such as MIT, BSD and friends where the only requirement is preservation of the copyright notice. The vast majority have limits of what you can do, or when you have to pay, or some other BS that just complicates everything and IMHO just reeks of "I'm manipulating the FOSS community so I can make a buck" or "I'm pretending to give this software away but actually have a laundry list of rules you have to live by". Basically the opposite of what "free" means!

Similarly, "open source" implies that I can do whatever I want, since it is "open". But most open source licenses - including this one - have restrictions and in many cases pretty strict ones that forbid use for many. This is not open at all.

Either give it away, or lock it up, but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE stop with the hypocrisy, lying and wordplay so you can make a buck (or satisfy a religious tilt). If you want me to help you with your code then you gotta let me use it how I see fit!

And for the love of all things holy, quit calling restrictive licenses "free". This is a binary state, it is either free or non-free, and "you can only use this if you make less than X" or "only use this with other free software" or "if you make changes you have to share" are NOT FREE.

There. Thanks for reading. Stepping outside to yell at a cloud now. And get off my lawn.

mitchitized··on Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri
Apple needs to just put Siri down and launch a brand new, ground-up service/feature that completely changes the subject. That is a win for them, and we finally get rid of the most unhelpful "assistant" the world has known since Clippy.
mitchitized··on Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)
> I think teaching requires not only that you understand how to do something, but also what someone else's incomplete understanding is.

This 100%. I have been playing guitar since around 1972, and am really good at it. I will never offer lessons to anyone, at any level, because that is a completely different skill than just being able to play a guitar.

I also know instructors at bootcamps that are not master programmers, in fact more than a few don't meet senior-level expectations; but they are exceptional at explaining the basics, triggering those "lightbulb" moments in their students, that makes them a far better instructor than someone with vastly more experience and expertise.

mitchitized··on The barriers to AI engineering are crumbling fast
As a hiring manager LinkedIn profiles are a huge window into someone's professional side, just like github may be a huge window into their technical side.

As a candidate I think LinkedIn is absolute trash - and toxic with all the ghost jobs and dark patterns. Feels like everyone else has the same opinion, or at the very least it is a common one. But when I have 50 candidates to review for 5 open positions, LinkedIn is going to give me great insight that I cannot really get anywhere else. I keep my profile current in the hopes that I'm not doing it for LinkedIn, but for the person researching me to see if I am a valid candidate for their role.

Page 1 of 3Next →