Hacker News: GrinningFool

New comment by GrinningFool in "My old job feels distant now"

GrinningFool — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:00:39 +0000

Did you look closely at what it had done? It's possible to save a lot of time on CI by omitting tests, for example...

New comment by GrinningFool in "Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years"

GrinningFool — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:13:40 +0000

Asking in the US seems to risk a faux pas these days. "Why do you assume I'm 'from' somewhere else?"

New comment by GrinningFool in "How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet"

GrinningFool — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:27:00 +0000

That's irrelevant, the context was "Or we just go somewhere else that's cheaper, because capitalism means competition." Amazon is making it so that's less of an option, effectively regulating [portions of] the market through their size and leverage.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Amazon pushes up prices across the Internet"

GrinningFool — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:18:55 +0000

Amazon's regulation often means sellers are blocked from selling the same items at a lower price elsewhere.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Redesigning source control at Anthropic"

GrinningFool — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 01:35:22 +0000

It seems those classes of things are more important than ever. It's not about how tedious it is - it's about the models being able to build accurate context and understanding. All the same things that made it better for humans also makes it better for models. More specifically in this context, well-maintained code results in fewer bugs and lower token usage.

I tend in the other direction when I can (for components and microservices - harder for monorepos): I encourage refactors on a continual basis, as it prevents the models from getting bogged down with the way the system used to behave across changes.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Firefox Enterprise"

GrinningFool — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:40:57 +0000

You can already do that in regular firefox. I think in this case, it's adding the capability to enable/disable via policy at the enterprise level.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Local Indexing to reduce tool calling and token usage"

GrinningFool — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:10:57 +0000

I think there's a time-spent curve. If you put enough time into iterating and refining with attention to arch and design (weeks or months) then it might be worth sharing. If you've done it in days or a week, probably not.

New comment by GrinningFool in "The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME"

GrinningFool — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 20:25:12 +0000

I used to put it first for convenience, but got increasingly paranoid about something same-named getting slipped into my ~/.local/bin; now it lives at the end.

New comment by GrinningFool in "The role of cat eye narrowing movements in cat–human communication (2020)"

GrinningFool — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:54:11 +0000

My cat does both. He will sit in human spots hoping the human will join him and perhaps be better furniture.

And he will sprawl all over the dog bed,with the intent of rubbing in that he is there and the dog is not going to take it.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app"

GrinningFool — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:07:22 +0000

Indeed. I would much prefer to read someone's poor English over their fluent LLM.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app"

GrinningFool — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:05:07 +0000

For me (not the OP) I see the patterns 'The X is the Y', 'Every X is a Y' (both of which are there) and llm-sense tingles. Add in Not A, B, C or Z and I'm increasingly convinced it's LLM generated text.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Show HN: Agent.reviews – Where AI agents read and write reviews on tools"

GrinningFool — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:57:13 +0000

Didn't appreciate the two separate popups that took over my screen while trying to read a linked review.

It's good that they didn't show again the next time, but the second one almost sent me away from the site.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Lawmakers Introduce Multiple Laws to Curb Flock After 404 Media Coverage"

GrinningFool — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:45:00 +0000

Right now, we are pretty much guaranteed that they can access the data. As opposed to no guarantees that they can't.

I'm not clear the point of your post. Is it to say that what we had before is not guaranteed safe, so let's do this worse centralized thing because reasons?

New comment by GrinningFool in "FTC is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over product risks"

GrinningFool — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:55:00 +0000

Perhaps once they all agree to calling it "superintelligence", these troubles will go away.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Commit description as a thinking tool"

GrinningFool — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:06:37 +0000

But the code doesn't always have the answer to "why". At best that means the commit-writer has 'guessed' at why.

New comment by GrinningFool in "SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today"

GrinningFool — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:33:15 +0000

On a smaller scale, driving through the mountains and seeing the tunnels where we said "screw it, we're going through" is also pretty amazing.

New comment by GrinningFool in "How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs"

GrinningFool — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 02:06:34 +0000

Be careful with the goals you give for writing tests. Telling it that you want 100% coverage can often lead to performative tests that don't validate anything meaningful.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Silicon Valley 'sex assault list' with 'over 100' names circulated"

GrinningFool — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:12:50 +0000

Fair, but isn't that the nature of these accusations? It's almost always one party's word against another's. So insufficient corroborating evidence seems to mean no witnesses or paper trail.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Silicon Valley 'sex assault list' with 'over 100' names circulated"

GrinningFool — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:48:02 +0000

The criterion for being considered false accusations in that table seems to be 'no charges filed'. Even in those cases, the disclaimers are pretty strong:

> The police continue to misapply the "no-crime" or "unfounded" criteria.

> It is impossible to "discern with any degree of certainty the actual rate of false allegations" because many of the studies of false allegations have adopted unreliable or untested research methodologies.

New comment by GrinningFool in "Meta takes down a critical video about meta AI Glasses after filming at Meta"

GrinningFool — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:13:33 +0000

I think it's a matter of trust. How many times has Meta proven untrustworthy over the years? Do we have reason other than their pinky-promise -- backed by the potential for nuisance fines and lawsuits -- to assume they should get it now?