HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ripley12

1,514 karma · joined April 24, 2015

reillywood.com
submissionscomments
ripley12··on Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose
It does not guarantee accuracy, but it helps a lot in my experience; I find that models tend to hallucinate a lot more about things that aren't in their context window.
ripley12··on Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website
They are still in lots of cities outside Toronto.
ripley12··on International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply
Awful headline and I doubt it's what the author would have chosen, given that her comments are much more to do with supply:

> “In San Francisco, demand is reflected in increased prices,” she says. “In Charlotte, demand is reflected in increased quantities.”

> “A big takeaway is that cities are in control of a big portion of their supply sensitivity,” Gorback says. “It’s cities that control zoning. It’s cities that control permitting. The real keeper of the keys are the municipalities.”

ripley12··on Hormuz crisis side effect: a sharp rise in container shipping rates
Externalities were a very big part of my first-year microeconomics course circa 2008, FWIW.
ripley12··on Winapp, the Windows App Development CLI
Yes, Package Identity was the bane of my existence for a while. It's wild how MS gated important APIs behind it and then made it so difficult+impractical to work with (I honestly think this is a large part of why WinRT was mostly ignored by developers).

I've moved on, but this looks like it will at least fix some of the paper cuts.

ripley12··on Bugs Apple loves
This was with an iCloud email address.
ripley12··on Bugs Apple loves
The search bugs in Mail are absolutely real. They might not affect every user but I've had major issues on both macOS and iOS mail, and eventually gave up and switched to Gmail.
ripley12··on What if you don't need MCP at all?
That makes sense to me, thanks for the clarification.
ripley12··on What if you don't need MCP at all?
I can see where Mario is coming from, but IMO MCP still has a place because it 1) solves authentication+discoverability, 2) doesn't require code execution.

MCP shines when you want to add external functionality to an agent quickly, and in situations where it's not practical to let an agent go wild with code execution and network access.

Feels like we're in the "backlash to the early hype" part of the hype cycle. MCP is one way to give agents access to tools; it's OK that it doesn't work for every possible use case.

ripley12··on The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain
120m would be an absolutely insane width for a trench. It seems more likely that you’ve misinterpreted that.
ripley12··on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
Midori was fascinating. Joe Duffy's writing on it is the most comprehensive I've seen: https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/

I've heard someone at Microsoft describe it as a moonshot but also a retention project; IIRC it had a hundred plus engineers on it at one time, including a lot of very senior people.

Apparently a bunch of research from Midori made it into .NET so it wasn't all lost, but still...

ripley12··on Prompt analytics for MCP servers
Not just that - for every tool call, the user's agent has to output some extra tokens to put the context info in the additional argument.
ripley12··on Prompt analytics for MCP servers
Similar approach as MCPCat (telling agents to specify context about why a tool was called in special tool arguments): https://mcpcat.io/

I don't love it (potential privacy issues, and it makes the user's agent spend more tokens), but I don't think there's a better approach right now. Would be great if someone took the time to add an observability mechanism to the MCP spec itself.

ripley12··on Find SF parking cops
That's more or less how Tokyo works. Almost no on-street parking, people have to prove that they have a parking spot when buying a car, liberal zoning so there are lots of very small pay parking lots around the city. It works really well IMO but it would be politically very difficult in North America.
ripley12··on Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
Sharpening a knife to r/sharpening standards is hard. But just honing frequently and occasionally using a cheap sharpener will get you further than 95% of home chefs.
ripley12··on We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application
> This has already led to more easily introducing GUI features like a new GTK titlebar tabs option

Yes! This is huge, I previously gave up on Ghostty because the title bar wasted so much space on my laptop screen: https://bsky.app/profile/reillywood.bsky.social/post/3lebapf...

I found the PR in case anyone else is curious what the new functionality looks like: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/8166

ripley12··on Show HN: MCP Security Suite
I work in this space and I was not able to understand how this project works in a couple minutes. The README feels LLM-generated. I think you're supposed to point this at your MCP server's code and not the server itself, is that right?
ripley12··on Claude Code Router
Aider is good at one-shotting Git commits, but requires a human in the loop for a lot of iteration. Claude Code is better at iterating on problems that take multiple tries to get right (which is most problems IMO). I was really impressed by Aider until I started using CC.
ripley12··on Mistral Releases Deep Research, Voice, Projects in Le Chat
Anthropic's Research is pretty good; I'd say on par with OpenAI.

Agreed about Google, accuracy is a little better on the paid version but the reports are still frustrating to read through. They're incredibly verbose, like an undergrad padding a report to get to a certain word count.

ripley12··on Void, the Bluesky bot that remembers everyone
Been impressed by this; it's really fun to watch Void interact with people on Bluesky.
ripley12··on Coventry Very Light Rail
That's sort of the popular wisdom, but rails don't guarantee it will be there for the long run. DC recently announced that they're replacing their light rail with buses:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/27/steetcar-...

Jarrett Walker has a good piece about it: https://humantransit.org/2025/05/what-was-wrong-with-the-was...

I agree with him that in order to endure and justify a permanent operating subsidy a transit service needs to be useful and used by many people. Most American light rail doesn't meet that bar.

ripley12··on Authentication with Axum
This is very useful, thanks. I've implemented similar authentication with tower_cookies in a home project, and it took me a long time to figure out; Axum is powerful but not always the most intuitive. It was a great learning experience, but I'd love to offload more of this to a crate next time.
ripley12··on Yes-rs: A fast, memory-safe rewrite of the classic Unix yes command
The README was meh but skimming the source code was amusing. If nothing else, they certainly committed to the bit.
ripley12··on Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?
- Lazygit

- WezTerm

- Signal

ripley12··on Yes-rs: A fast, memory-safe rewrite of the classic Unix yes command
yes-rs is a joke, not a serious project.
ripley12··on DDoSecrets publishes 410 GB of heap dumps, hacked from TeleMessage
I agree with this. It's surprising how often I encounter people with that belief, because I was disabused of it very early on in my career; this industry is chockablock with people who are brilliant in 1 area and deficient in others.
ripley12··on University of Toronto Snags Yale Professors as Canada Raids American Brain Trust
From the article:

"Of course our American catastrophe played a role in our final decision."

"My decision was entirely because of the political climate in the United States."

"Both Toronto and the Munk School were and are very attractive places unto themselves... bracketing the American descent into fascism."

ripley12··on Airline demand between Canada and United States collapses, down 70%+
It's primarily the constant, repeated threats of annexation ("51st state"). Americans don't seem to understand how much these have tanked the relationship between the two countries.
ripley12··on Show HN: A website for sharing the "Good, Bad, and Why"s of urban spaces
This is very cool, thanks for sharing it. I'll try to add some entries about Vancouver when I have time.
ripley12··on Atlanta Fed predicts -2.8% GDP
Perhaps you've missed that Trump and several administration officials keep referring to Canada as the 51st state, stating in no uncertain terms that their goal is to annex Canada. Canadians have definitely not missed that. https://www.westernstandard.news/news/trump-dhs-sec-straddle...
Page 1 of 17Next →