Hacker News: Bockit

New comment by Bockit in "Domain expertise has always been the real moat"

Bockit — Sun, 31 May 2026 01:27:20 +0000

I think it's more: AI assisted engineering is a new skill people are trying to develop and we're on this collective experimentation process, working out how to use AI for engineering with varying degrees of success.

If that's true, any statements defining what is necessary to do should be ignored in that context. I'm still interested in hearing about what people tried, what results they think they saw, and then trying to apply those findings to my own processes.

Which is to say I don't think the pontificating is pointless, but as statements of Real Truth, I agree they're likely wrong. We're too early in the game.

New comment by Bockit in "Coding agents could make free software matter again"

Bockit — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:50:20 +0000

I have a Mac mini and I put every device that needs access on Tailscale

New comment by Bockit in "Coding agents could make free software matter again"

Bockit — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:43:00 +0000

It’s such a fun time to have 1+ decade(s) of experience in software. Knowing what simple and good are (for me), and being able to articulate it has let me create so much personal software for myself and my family. It has really felt like turning ideas into reality, about as fast as I can think of them or they can suggest them. And adding specific features, just for our needs. The latest one was a slack canvas replacement, as we moved from slack to self-hosted matrix + element but missed the multiplayer, persistent monthly notes file we used. Even getting matrix set up in the first place was a breeze.

$20/month with your provider of choice unlocks a lot.

Edit: the underlying point being, yes to the article. Either building upon the foundations of open source to making personal things, or just modifying a fork for my own needs.

New comment by Bockit in "The three pillars of JavaScript bloat"

Bockit — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 10:15:11 +0000

I've been doing JS for nearly a couple decades now (both front and back) and I landed on the same approach a few years ago. Pick your absolutely minimal set of dependencies, and then just make what you need for everything else. Maybe counter-intuitive to some, I feel like I'm more comfortable maintaining a larger codebase with less people.

What's more, given the tools we have today, it fits really well with agentic engineering. It's even easier to create and understand a homegrown version of a dependency you may have used before.

New comment by Bockit in "What if you don't need MCP at all?"

Bockit — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 03:08:06 +0000

This is probably a semantics problem. You’re right. The models don’t know how to mcp. The harness they run in does though (Claude code, Claude desktop, etc), and dynamically exposes mcp tools as tool calls.

New comment by Bockit in "I can't use my number pad for 2FA codes"

Bockit — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 13:41:41 +0000

What’s special about front-end developers here?

New comment by Bockit in "Do you remember Ultima Online?"

Bockit — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 09:07:50 +0000

Taran's Sphere Scripting for Dummies was what taught me how to program as a 14-15 year old trying to do the same thing :)

New comment by Bockit in "Slab City reaches its boiling point"

Bockit — Sat, 13 Aug 2022 23:51:50 +0000

If it doesn’t load for you either: https://web.archive.org/web/20220813225258/https://bluedotli...

New comment by Bockit in "Show HN: HN Avatars in 357 bytes"

Bockit — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 12:37:43 +0000

Test post please ignore!

New comment by Bockit in "Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone"

Bockit — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 14:12:04 +0000

Essentially, you don’t.

New comment by Bockit in "Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players"

Bockit — Sun, 23 Dec 2018 22:52:33 +0000

I have a very similar story. I spent many many evenings in my teens learning to “script” with Taran’s Sphere Scripting For Dummies website and .chm file for the Sphere Server UO emulator.

Best part is I didn’t even realise I was programming. In my mind I was just making the game do what I wanted.

Show HN: Element, use Puppeteer to load test your app

Bockit — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 15:00:34 +0000

Article URL: https://element.flood.io

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18648330

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Beijing Sinnet says it will buy Amazon Web Services’ China business

Bockit — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 04:16:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-sell-its-china-cloud-computing-business-1510628802

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15692609

Points: 135

# Comments: 60

New comment by Bockit in "'Very, very pink' tap water in Alberta town"

Bockit — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 11:10:56 +0000

We used to gargle water mixed with potassium permanganate as children after cleaning our teeth to see if we did a good enough job. It would colour plaque pink, so it was very obvious if you hadn't cleaned properly!

New comment by Bockit in "Elixir 1.2.0 Released"

Bockit — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 15:53:16 +0000

It's the super terse anonymous function syntax. You could use the slightly more verbose version with named instead of positional params or put a named function in there instead.

New comment by Bockit in "ReactCSS – Bringing Classes to Inline Styles"

Bockit — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 16:07:58 +0000

More that I don't have to force everything into a single file. I think it's more flexible that way. Let's say one day I work static files into my build process I could chuck them into the same folder where they're relevant to the component.

New comment by Bockit in "ReactCSS – Bringing Classes to Inline Styles"

Bockit — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 15:50:35 +0000

I prefer to colocate into 1 folder. index.jsx, index[.css,.styl,.scss, etc.]

Just like my JS requires different JS files, my CSS imports various files too. The preprocessor turns that into 1 css file (or n, if you want).

New comment by Bockit in "What was the technology stack driving the original Ultima Online servers?"

Bockit — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 04:33:14 +0000

I had a similar experience. Between the ages of 14-16 I tinkered on my own sphere shard with a friend of mine. I didn't realise what I was doing was programming until I took courses 16-17 and realised what I had been doing the whole time :)

There was one website, Taran's Scripting For Dummies, that was pretty much my bible.

New comment by Bockit in "The Unkillable Demon King"

Bockit — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 14:42:10 +0000

Just a quick comment on the spamfest side of things. Disclaimer that I never got into LoL. I've found over the years playing most of the different MOBAs that when I come into a new one I find it nearly impossible to delineate what is happening in a many-player fight. It only comes after some time playing the game that I'm able to recognise this shade of light in this pattern means this spell is being used, etc. After a point it becomes quite clear what is going on and looks a lot less like a spamfest.

New comment by Bockit in "PM of Singapore Shares His C++ Sudoku Solver Source Code"

Bockit — Mon, 04 May 2015 11:23:04 +0000

I think the distinction the grandparent made was they would be happy to see the trait in the leader of the country, not that seeing the trait makes a good leader.