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presentation

2,943 karma · joined December 27, 2012

Contact me at presentation.hn@gmail.com
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presentation··on Cursor Introduces Composer 2.5
Tried that, it just seemed way dumber this way unfortunately. And the zed UI provided 0 visibility whenever it was doing tool calls, and for some reason it kept running sleep 30 calls because it couldn’t figure out how to see the results of its own tool calls for some reason.
presentation··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
If anything it’s a tool for making people outside of Singapore like/want to do business in Singapore, so if that makes it some twisted kind of utility then I guess anything can be a utility. Not like they have domestic flights.
presentation··on A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury
Yeah we just use Zod’s branded type and that pretty much handles it. No casts, use a refinement then slap a brand on it.
presentation··on Why Japan has such good railways
That's the point, you need to make making money = improving society. If you think that's impossible in the USA, then the USA is doomed and maybe you should look for the door. I am not that pessimistic.
presentation··on Zed 1.0
Looks much better than when I last tried it! But I couldn't get it to work as well as Cursor for AI development, maybe I just need to get more used to it?

- I tried to use the Cursor Agent via ACP, it worked but it seemed markedly stupider than when I would use Cursor directly (saying that i18n strings were being used when they weren't, editing code differently than what I asked for, also when it is running terminal commands it seems to just say "Run Command: Terminal" and has no information on what's going on). Maybe I just need to not use Cursor Agent, but my company pays for it already so that's what I tried.

- Providing context is also cludgier - In cursor I often highlight specific chunks of code and add it to the AI context via Cmd+L, but I couldn't figure out any specific way of doing that with a keyboard in Zed besides clicking a tiny + button to add "Selection" to context, which got old fast.

- Maybe I just need to get used to it but reviewing code with the git integration is just hard for me to follow; one giant editor with every change in it is just harder for me to grok than showing each file one by one; so it was tiring to review the big changes produced by LLMs. Also, when you stage changes the file just stays where it is with a barely noticeable check in the checkbox in the sidebar - I prefer the behavior of Cursor where it actually moves the staged files to a separate section, but some kind of more obvious visual indication besides that perhaps would help. I did like the tree view, though!

- The tsgo and oxlint LSP servers kept crashing, which was frustrating. GraphQL LSP server also couldn't understand graphql.config.mjs, which is strange as that's supported out of box by graphql-config and works fine in Cursor/VSCode.

- I tried using a few of the different Edit Suggestion LLM options, but unfortunately Cursor is just way too good compared to any of them (slow, and just not very helpful in comparison).

- Just in general figuring out how to configure them is confusing, there's like 3-4 different places to configure agents and LLMs for different purposes, I found it very fragmented and confusing and the docs didn't make it particularly easy to set things up.

That all said, the performance was muuuuch better than Cursor. But the UX issues and general bugginess of ACP and these LSP plugins were impeding my workflow too much for me to tolerate it so back to Cursor for me. If anyone has tips on how I might make some of these better that would be cool, but if it's just inherent limitations then maybe I'll try again in 6 months or something.

presentation··on Why Japan has such good railways
Did you read what I said? The whole Japanese system is for profit and the one of the biggest reasons for Japan’s system being so pleasant is that it is done for commercial purposes.

If the incentives are right American companies can make good things, but usually they are not so because of poor policy.

presentation··on Why Japan has such good railways
Works in progress also had a great article recently (also discussed on hacker news) about how Japanese railways are private, profit earning real estate development corporations. [1]

Unfortunately, people from western countries have very negative views toward the privatization of mass transit despite the wild success that Japan has experienced. The model makes so much sense: if trains are just a way to get people to the real estate that you developed, then you’re going to make sure that the trains AND the destinations are really nice, which also turns out to be very lucrative (at least in densely populated areas) as a cherry on top.

And even worse, like this commenter above alludes to, it is trendy in the West to believe that real estate developers are evil, and that corporations that make money are sucking the life out of society. This kind of degrowth populism pretty much guarantees that the successful Japanese model is out of reach for most countries, because it is exactly the pursuit of profit that makes Japan’s system so nice - not some edicts from a benevolent and extremely capable government.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762060

presentation··on TanStack Start Now Support React Server Components
One example is that I have a fancy visualization in my app that is rendered in the server via RSC and just some interactive tidbits get sent to the client. If I packaged the whole visualization library it would have bloated my bundle size but instead I ship barely any JS and still get a nice interactive vector data viz experience. And the code just looks like normal react component nesting more or less.
presentation··on The secrets of the Shinkansen
Well, to be honest, the results in Japan and China, where that isn’t the case, have turned out to be much better.
presentation··on The secrets of the Shinkansen
China is giant and sprawling and they are able to do it.

That said this reply doesn’t actually address much of what the article talks about, most interestingly how rail companies are private and are also real estate developers. That thought process ought to make sense to Texans or something.

presentation··on New York City hospitals drop Palantir as controversial AI firm expands in UK
Hating Palantir without having any idea of what they are is the trendy thing to do. Their leaders are toxic which doesn’t help the case, but the core issue really is just that in this political climate, people all over the western world don’t trust their governments, and it’s also trendy to distrust anyone making money, as well as tech companies - especially those involved in data and AI related businesses - so the fact that Palantir makes these distrusted actors more competent while making money doing it, is seen as siding with the devil.

So it’s a trust problem, if the government were seen as effective and worthy then I want them to be effective, which includes using the data they collect effectively. In this climate trendy people would prefer that their corrupt government is also fully incompetent to limit the effect of the corruption.

presentation··on Some things just take time
I for one am not shedding tears about being able to waste less time with SOC 2 drudgery that doesn’t even make organizations secure.
presentation··on Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
I broadly agree with this, it really is all about trust. Just, as a company scales it’s hard to make sure that everybody in the team remains trustworthy – it isn’t just about personality and culture, it’s also about people actually having the skill, motivation, and track record of doing good work efficiently. Maybe AI‘s greatest value will be to allow teams to stay small, which reduces the difficulty of maintaining trust.
presentation··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
Lol so instead of paying maintainers who already built the thing you want, we instead charge you to use AI to make countless copies of maintainers’ work and direct the profits back to the maintainers? That sounds like true satire.
presentation··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
Actually it does harm people. High speed traffic is noisy and unpleasant, flows unpredictably, and tears up roads faster.
presentation··on Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
Japan has them built into My Number Cards too https://www.digital.go.jp/en/policies/mynumber/private-busin...
presentation··on Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional
One time when I was living in Shanghai, I accidentally took the train to the wrong airport and had to take a cab to the other one. The cabbie was driving on the highway right at the speed limit, and I was worried I wouldn’t make my flight. I asked him if he could rush a bit, but he replied that he would not speed because 100% he would get a ticket.

It only doesn’t work if the system is half assed. But I agree that in low speed pedestrian areas, the built form is a better solution, but knowing you will get caught is also effective (if you accept the privacy tradeoffs).

presentation··on Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch
Yeah, I am American but my wife is Japanese and she found it irritating and inexplicable that my friends and I would interrupt each other while talking. This number probably varies significantly by culture.
presentation··on Long Range E-Bike (2021)
Like it or not, if people who aren't big brained HN genius hackers like yourself do reckless things with powerful technology, like a stupid teenager killing someone's baby by running them over with an e-bike at max speed on a sidewalk around a sharp corner, then broader society will hate that technology, and then that woke freedom you crave will get wiped out by those small brained normies. The point is that it is better to set some rules ahead of garnering that hatred, so that the whole practice doesn't get wiped out by the 95% of the public who are those aforementioned idiots (at least as you see them).

But as a morally righteous big brained HN edgelord, feel free to live your anarchist life on a seastead in the middle of the ocean running drones into icebergs and enjoying the whiz of throttling your exquisitely powerful ebike on the deck of your boat if you please.

presentation··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
So your stance is that anything military-related is immoral?
presentation··on Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents
Well if it requires tampering with the software to do the insecure thing, then it’s presumably your company has a contract in place saying that if they get hacked it’s on them. That doesn’t strike me as just being retarded security theater.
presentation··on Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015
Problem with safari though is that it’s tied to OS updates that many people just defer for insanely long periods of time. So unlike the other browsers, it’s not evergreen, so if you need to support any iOS users or Mac users who don’t use chrome etc, you’re out of luck
presentation··on The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling
Half of the people on this site think that subscriptions are evil too, though.
presentation··on Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you
I like how at the end the author tries to get you to give him a tip with the buy me a coffee link
presentation··on Child prodigies rarely become elite performers
Basketball is probably not a great example since just being enormous gives you a huge chance of making it to the NBA, which I guess is just another form of being a prodigy.
presentation··on Child prodigies rarely become elite performers
I recall being told by an English teacher in high school once that because it was so easy for me to write something passable, I wasn't trying hard enough to write something excellent. Wish he pushed me harder on that.
presentation··on Petition for Recognition of Work on Open-Source as Volunteering in Germany
Yeah, I don't really want to subsidize people to work on open-source shitcoins for example. The devil is in the details here.
presentation··on How to turn 'sfo-jfk' into a suitable photo
My experience is that many Wikipedia place photos are quite ugly.
presentation··on Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study
They’re still filled with motorbikes and mopeds, they’re just electric.
presentation··on Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study
OK, the Former French Concession.
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