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philipnee

13 karma · joined November 14, 2023

https://pnee.uk/
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philipnee··on Googlebook
Hey Google: please control my computer.
philipnee··on US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war
this is core inflation no? it's interesting that it doesn't account for food and energy. so likely much higher in reality...
philipnee··on I hate soldering
Soldering was my favorite part of ee course in the university… i even kinda liked the fume..
philipnee··on Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
80% of my day to day job has never been pumping out lots of code. it is a complicated career is it? we do a lot of alignment, design and thinking. i can't even agree the idea of outsourcing thinking, i think AI is very good at helping us to think clearly, but it doesn't really "think" for us.

if you do that then... likely very replacable.

philipnee··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
seems.. interesting. will definitely be interested in testing this.
philipnee··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
sure! - security layer between your local data and public internet, i use it as mcp server to let claude safely read/write to my computer!

cli: https://github.com/philipnee/mvmt ui: https://github.com/philipnee/mvmt-desktop

philipnee··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
what exactly is going wrong with github aside from all the outages in the past x months? i honestly don't find it particularly disruptive to work/personal stuff. excuse my ignorant, maybe i don't use github enough to know what causes this fury...

fwiw - i do keep a fair amount of code in my computer. i don't push everything..

philipnee··on Watching TV with the Second-Party
I feel this must have been posted on HN before, but I was pretty shock at finding this out...
philipnee··on I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
thanks for bringing it back!
philipnee··on Commenting and approving pull requests
Just want to comment here. I hate reviewer leave a bunch of nits and stamp the PR. This is ambiguous, are these nits asks or just you opinions? What if I dont address all of them. Also folks need to take rejection lightly - your reviewer wants you to address something, thats really it.
philipnee··on Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing
Firstly - Greetings! It’s so rare to see a Clojure person in the wild! and secondly, I really resonated with this! it feels like we, computer programmer, typically overthink too much to begin with, and then LLMs come along and actually help us overthink even more!
philipnee··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
was it actually? I don't know the full technical behind this but wiki does suggest: "A search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services, designed by Robin Li in 1996, developed a strategy for site-scoring and page-ranking.."

This is before Google.

philipnee··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
i argue that most ideas aren't necessary novel, so stealing idea isn't necessary bad.... e.g. i don't think google search was entirely novel, but was well executed.

honestly - meta has built quite a lot of cool things, but c-suite is probably to be blamed for what's going on today.

philipnee··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
build and tear down metaverse. zero sum.
philipnee··on Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?
here's my take - the hardest part isn't doing more computer programming, it is context switching between technical and sales. It has been done, so it is possible, but it is very difficult as people said.

very few computer programmers have good business insight. we know how to build cool stuff, but most of the cool stuff are either - unable to directly bring values to people or cool but no one cares. that's why we need a cofounder, ideally, a person closer to product/sales, who can help you to make connection, understand what people want, shapes product... all the non computer programming stuff.

also - we tend to work in isolation when being the only founder. at least for myself, i sometimes live in my own head, which can be very far from reality...

despite that - i share the same sentiment with you and will not give up trying to found a business :)

philipnee··on Show HN: Stage – Putting humans back in control of code review
(i find)the right way to read a PR can differ a lot from project to project. it's not just about context, or syntax, or workflow...

sometimes the best entry point is the PR description or an external ticket. sometimes you need to read the code first to understand the reasoning behind the changes. sometimes the diff itself is fine, but you have to go back several PRs to see how the codebase got into its current state.

i guess like everyone said here, there no right way to do it.

but i enjoy the video and the project, kudos ;)

philipnee··on Do I Stop Learning Coding? DSA?
producing code is just part of the programming, albite a very important part. from my very limited exp, i say programming is more about ...reasoning about behavior, managing complexity, making tradeoffs, handling failure, and building things that still make sense six months later.

AI gets your there faster, but you still need to do the work.

Also think about.. understanding correctness, performance, memory, concurrency, failure modes, and long-term maintainability is another.

just IMHO.

philipnee··on Ban the sale of precise geolocation
companies don't buy anymore, they just take it. think about Claude, every time you use it, you are literally give away your code, your data, and even your personal information.
philipnee··on Spending 3 months coding by hand
still remember my assembly class with HC11 20 yrs ago: amazed by how much we can do with so little hardware.
philipnee··on OpenSSL 4.0.0
And QUIC.
philipnee··on Fuck the cloud (2009)
The reliability, speed and internet connectivity makes local first more appealing. Honestly - i host my own webpage, file server, and some compute locally.
philipnee··on Ask HN: What are you using OpenClaw or agents for?
i say this (OC) is early, but directionally right. we can see how people are enthusiastic about local ai infra and we can all understand the idea of democratizing compute. though it might never happen.
philipnee··on Introduction to Obsidian
Reading all the comments here i feel I’ve learned all the obsidian i need.
philipnee··on Why most AI projects feel useless
it's like everyone is launching their own interpretation to a problem/idea. persuading people is really hard, you know.
philipnee··on Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?
just an anonymous public billboard :)

https://www.litboard.net/

philipnee··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
just a weekend project. a bulletin board to share ideas with the internet haha - https://www.litboard.net/
philipnee··on A Simple Lofi Player
"i wanted a small, simple app that would just play random ambient music without video and other fluff." - 100%
philipnee··on Best AI coding interview assistant in 2026
this is... cheating?

when i interview candidates, i want to have an open discussion with the candidate. i can be careless about the quality of the solution, but i really care about originality.

philipnee··on Ask HN: Should AI credits be refunded on mistakes?
probably not. but they should be more explicit about the usage, not just - you've used up 5%.