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zekenie

1,055 karma · joined January 14, 2012

https://twitter.com/_off_by_one

https://offbyone.us

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zekenie··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
Claude tokens
zekenie··on Agents need control flow, not more prompts
you know it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish and if it's possible to describe it with deterministic control flow
zekenie··on Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines
This project is very cool! One readme nit: "Pack a stateful virtual machine into a single file (.smolmachine) to rehydrate on any supported platform." For awhile I thought this meant that you could rehydrate a machine's memory like you can with a firecracker vm, but as far as I can tell you can't? It's stateful == disk?
zekenie··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
You’re absolutely right!
zekenie··on $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents
It’s impossible to disengage the deployment of technology with the way the technology was deployed. I’m not saying anything that I’m not saying. I believe that there could have been a world where deploying technology in all these classrooms had a positive effect
zekenie··on GitHub discusses giving maintainers control to disable PRs
The increased review burden is also happening inside companies. It’s genuinely hard to keep up with the volume. I was a little surprised to see my comment downvoted. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be able to delete slop PRs. Of course we should! I’m saying that the pr should change at least _somewhat_ in response to how much programming is changing.

Also worth stating that I have been ranting about contract first reviews for 10 years and it’s not just in response to llm written code.

zekenie··on GitHub discusses giving maintainers control to disable PRs
They need to talk about how the pr itself should change. The text diff just is not the right thing to center. We should be using ai to chunk changes into reviewable bytes and to align on semantics and contracts.
zekenie··on Ask HN: Why isn't there competition to LinkedIn yet?
Network effects
zekenie··on Feedmaker: URL + CSS selectors = RSS feed
Not the same but this gives me an idea… what if there was a map reduce for doms as a web primitive. Like imagine if I could make a dom (or feed) that was some selection and transformation of another dom
zekenie··on Obsidian Bases
Because the data is front matter you can get it into other systems pretty easily but an sdk for executing the views seems really key
zekenie··on Quickshell – building blocks for your desktop
Neat! What OSes does this support?
zekenie··on Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself
I feel like itd be cool to try prompts based on an adversarial justice system… attorney agents arguing both sides, a judge ruling on “the law”—adherence to instructions etc
zekenie··on Data centers contain 90% crap data
Not my area of expertise but I don’t think storage is a big deal, relatively speaking. It’s all about the compute
zekenie··on Five Nurses who work on the same floor at hospital have brain tumors
I’m surprised the hospital said they were confident it was safe. I wonder what gave them confidence? I’m struggling to think of what data I could have on hand that would convince me it was really safe. Also, to folks saying that randomness is clumpy… did you read the article? I think a bunch of nurses that notice they are all getting sick (and then FIVE of them getting brain tumors) should be taken quite seriously. I’d start with the assumption that there IS an environmental problem and then figure out what it is.
zekenie··on Generative AI Hype Peaking
Idk I used Claude Code recently and revised all my estimates. Even if the models stop getting better today I think every product has years of runway before they incorporate these things effectively.
zekenie··on Show HN: Leaflet.pub – a web app for creating and sharing rich documents
consider tldraw :)
zekenie··on Show HN: Leaflet.pub – a web app for creating and sharing rich documents
I really love the ui exploration!

I wish canvases had edges connecting nodes

zekenie··on Matt's Script Archive (1995)
CGI bin babbbyyyyyy
zekenie··on Show HN: I Built a Visual Workflow Automation Platform – FlowRipple
i think it's a function of recency and points
zekenie··on Show HN: Subtrace – Wireshark for Docker Containers
This is such a cool product! I was looking through the docs and I think this could be a lot more prominent. Thanks for building in public!
zekenie··on I built an open source AI tool to find my autoimmune disease
RAG + analysis on health data has huge potential. We need to tread carefully, obviously, but I have also used these models + RAG on personal health data at times when the docs were scratching my head. It was very helpful, although I approached it a bit differently. In my case it was my infant in the hospital for breathing / eating issues. I took data from the network tab in mychart and added context additional context, then asked Claude questions. My main goal was to be prepared for rounds in the morning. I wanted to understand what types of information each test was going to give me.

It was pretty good! Unsurprisingly, it did hallucinate sometimes or miss some nuance. But, I knew I was talking to something that did that. It was helpful for me, even with errors. I didn't, however try to just say "hey given all this what's going on with my baby"

On another topic:

If I were you, I'd make this thing speak FHIR or some other common format. That'd make using this thing in an ecosystem of other tools a lot easier. There are even FHIR graphql apis you could just polp on top maybe.

zekenie··on Show HN: Ultra-portable Gantt chart tool for very regulated environments
Reminds me a little bit of https://markwhen.com/
zekenie··on Litdb – type safe SQL for JavaScript/TS
nit: i feel like this is a typesafe sql query builder and not typesafe sql. i'm always on the look out for _good_ typesafe sql which i have yet to encounter.
zekenie··on Show HN: Embed an SQLite database in your PostgreSQL table
I’m trying to think through when I’d reach for this over jsonb… I guess the fact that there’s an enforced schema? And that you could do aggregations on your SQLite db? Or maybe if you wanted to send the whole delete db to a client??
zekenie··on Monodraw
*Love* monodraw. The last 2 times i was on the job market I used monodraw extensively for little inline diagrams for my take-home projects. It always was a big hit with the reviewers.
zekenie··on Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
long pauses can be rhetorically powerful. i think showing people you’re thinking-and telling them—is also great. you can always say “i need time to process what you said” and write it down
zekenie··on Building ColdFusion for the Web
i learned cold fusion in middle school. this was before stack overflow and i remember that one of the benefits to cfml was that it was highly guessable. i wasn’t great at consulting docs and once you got a few patterns you could figure the rest out with trial and error
zekenie··on Interactive Code Cells
oooooh say more! i might use this for a personal project
zekenie··on Interactive Code Cells
what i’m really wondering is: could you build a stateful repl with this?
zekenie··on Interactive Code Cells
this is so interesting! does it memoize dependencies? if i have several cells that all depend on a central one, will the central one only run once? what about state? can you declare a variable in one cell then use it in another?
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