Hacker News: Little_Kitty

New comment by Little_Kitty in "Bring back crappy forums"

Little_Kitty — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:01:48 +0000

A problem on forums was people quoting large comments, adding their response of "this" and then an additional signature. Digg and later Reddit moving that junk out of sight and gradually educating people not to do so was a big win.

New comment by Little_Kitty in "Bring back crappy forums"

Little_Kitty — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 06:56:37 +0000

Old.reddit.com is the only way to get something useful, "new" reddit is slow, ad riddled and full of irrelevant and unwanted noise.

Discoverability of new subs used to be a bit of an issue, but people do cross-post.

New comment by Little_Kitty in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

Little_Kitty — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:33:04 +0000

Glad I'm not the only one to immediately think of it. It's a great story, but did feel unlikely when I first read it; should it prove largely true it would be terrifying.

New comment by Little_Kitty in "SQL Anti-Patterns"

Little_Kitty — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 20:04:26 +0000

It's great being able to use an any join (and the counterpart anti join) in Clickhouse to deal with these operations.

New comment by Little_Kitty in "Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image"

Little_Kitty — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 13:28:00 +0000

The sponsored spot is appalling, I reported something that looked dodgy which appeared above the UK gov identity verification for passports and such app. When people search for a specific app, putting something else in front only makes me think you are untrustworthy scum, so my trust in the play store is fundamentally broken. There's a fundamental incompatibility between giving the right result for what was searched for and pushing promoted irrelevant results.

New comment by Little_Kitty in "Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search"

Little_Kitty — Sun, 26 May 2024 08:34:39 +0000

The good answers tend to use links as well, which won't capture well. In many political and local subreddits there's a huge amount of Russian and far right sock puppet activity. Good luck training an AI to understand political opinions or what people in an area are like when most of the longer comments are pre written copy pasted talking points from astro turf groups and bad actors.

New comment by Little_Kitty in "Eternal September"

Little_Kitty — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 10:37:20 +0000

Many of us who were writing all the decent comments there left after they made clear they want it to be another bland nothing of a website during the blackouts. A hundred dull image macros a day aren't worth wading through for the few nuggets of decent content, so loads more left or majorly cut back. Some communities such as javascript are now dead.

New comment by Little_Kitty in "Why are most sofas so bad?"

Little_Kitty — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 07:35:34 +0000

Phillips master ultra efficient, similar to their Dubai lamp, may be what you need. Running much less power per led is more efficient, so there's less heat and the lifetime is massively increased. Big Clive put a good video out about Dubai lamps a few years back.

New comment by Little_Kitty in "Let's talk about joins"

Little_Kitty — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 21:15:06 +0000

Of the tens of thousands of queries I've written I've needed right join the exactly once. It's a feature which is neat in that it exists, but the prevalence in teaching materials is entirely unjustified. Cross joins are massively more practical and enable some efficient transformations, but are usually taught only as all to all without a clear position on why they are useful.

New comment by Little_Kitty in "UK plans to redefine extremism to include undermining the country"

Little_Kitty — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 20:35:25 +0000

So, about those pushing for Brexit...

New comment by Little_Kitty in "What happened to blogging for the hell of it?"

Little_Kitty — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 07:28:55 +0000

> Utilized Low Code Tools at Client’s Request for the Web Front End Work

Oof!

Nice to find someone else who recognises explicitly that management is in no way a natural career progression path, it may have been decades ago, but in the current market we often see seniority / value confused with team management when the two need have little relation.

New comment by Little_Kitty in "The Rise of the AI Engineer"

Little_Kitty — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 09:02:29 +0000

LLMs today are great for certain use cases, which is amazing when it suits your needs. Need to extract a hotel name, city, address and confirmation number from emails and return it as JSON? Not a problem. Need it to validate postal codes in Canada? It's the wrong tool.

New comment by Little_Kitty in "Most tech content is bullshit (2020)"

Little_Kitty — Sun, 18 Jun 2023 16:57:09 +0000

You get a lot more views for a video on how to index a column in MySQL than for how to approach evaluating your needs and choose a suitable database. The latter would be outdated in a few years as new technologies emerge, while the former can be padded with enough fluff to show two adverts. So we end up with the content you know today, rather than what you'd really like to see. It's good to remember this and interact with those who do publish the latter content, plus it makes the algorithm feed you more content that's worth your time.