Hacker News: MatthewPhillips

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader"

MatthewPhillips — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 01:22:36 +0000

Can someone explain the whole thing about wanting to attach it to your phone? Why? What does this provide over just putting it in your pocket?

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "MCP is dead?"

MatthewPhillips — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:04:58 +0000

Ok sure, the "never" was a bit strong here. Running CLIs on phones is not a normal thing and not as simple as it is on desktop. Apple prohibits apps from downloading and executing code, so some sort of new Apple-approved thing would be required here. That's a very heavy lift.

Of course anything is possible, I just don't think that people advocating for MCP's death have really thought through these problems, and are mostly focused on the desktop productivity use-cases.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "MCP is dead?"

MatthewPhillips — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:37:00 +0000

Ok, I can see there's a new (to me) Customize section where you can install skills. You have been able to connect MCP servers for quite a while.

The UX here isn't great, but let's assume it can be improved. How would auth work with this alternative method? I want to connect to Puma store and that's done using a skill with a CLI. Can the CLI launch your web browser to do oauth from the skill (on a phone)? And then the credentials are saved where?

Not challenging you, I'm open to alternatives to MCP for sure. But MCP seems way more mature especially for non-programming use-cases.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "MCP is dead?"

MatthewPhillips — Sat, 30 May 2026 13:03:14 +0000

Walk me through how a user installs and then uses these CLIs from their mobile phone.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "MCP is dead?"

MatthewPhillips — Sat, 30 May 2026 13:00:36 +0000

How is the user installing the CLIs? Proprietary app store for each chat app?

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "MCP is dead?"

MatthewPhillips — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:19:21 +0000

Please keep in mind that CLIs do not run on mobile and never will. This is the elephant in the room that nearly everypne seems to be ignoring. This "debate" is built around the assumption that AI is only for at-your-desk work. It's obviously not. Having the ability to mix/match the services you use for everything in your life, whether that's email or social networks or managing your book collection, is going to be a normal thing everyone does in the future. It's just not today, because AI companies are almost exclusively focused on the programming use-case (and related desk job stuff).

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "The best is over: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet"

MatthewPhillips — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:29:42 +0000

Every new generation thinks things were better when they were young. Personally I liked the internet of the mid to late 90s, just as the web was overtaking AOL. By the mid 2010s, which this article calls the golden age, the internet was already very commercial; personal sites barely existed, most activity took place in walled social media gardens.

I bet people older than me disliked the 90s web and preferred the days of gopher and newsgroups. No one is wrong and everyone is wrong.

Part of the reason things felt better when you were young is because it was; for you. Fewer responsibilities. Less understanding of the nuances and intricacies of the world. More room for idealism. Another part of the reason is that time tends to fade away the bad parts of life while retaining the things you enjoyed. This is good.

Nostalgia is great for reconnecting yourself to a simpler time in your life. Nothing wrong with that. But when you start making comparisons you're only fooling yourself.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "MCP is dead; long live MCP"

MatthewPhillips — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:20:53 +0000

This limits AI usage to desktops, and mostly technical oriented tasks. MCP let's you connect to your email, shop, etc, from phone chat apps.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "I Built a Scheme Compiler with AI in 4 Days"

MatthewPhillips — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 18:11:30 +0000

Yeah, I didn't take it that way, just thought it was worth clarifying that this isn't a case of AI hitting a wall or anything like that, I just went down other rabbit holes.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "I Built a Scheme Compiler with AI in 4 Days"

MatthewPhillips — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 18:07:04 +0000

The reason it's only 73% is because I prioritized fun stuff like self hosting and platform binaries. I think finishing off the standards would only take a few more hours (except eval which I don't plan to do).

I Built a Scheme Compiler with AI in 4 Days

MatthewPhillips — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:58:03 +0000

Article URL: https://matthewphillips.info/programming/posts/i-built-a-scheme-compiler-with-ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47208423

Points: 43

# Comments: 33

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "Cloudflare acquires Astro"

MatthewPhillips — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 21:30:58 +0000

I have a preview release ready, if you scroll down you'll see the instructions. If you're able to try it out and leave a comment on whether it fixes your issue it'd be a big help.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "Cloudflare acquires Astro"

MatthewPhillips — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:08:14 +0000

Sorry we haven't fixed this issue sooner. In this case it's a complicated CSS issue, but nevertheless I've got a fix I'm working on here:

https://github.com/withastro/astro/pull/15227

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA"

MatthewPhillips — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 12:49:47 +0000

I think this really undervalues what Linux provides. The Android software is Linux software.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "Show HN: Tattoy – a text-based terminal compositor"

MatthewPhillips — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 16:35:26 +0000

This looks amazing. Well done.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "JavaScript Views, the Hard Way – A Pattern for Writing UI"

MatthewPhillips — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 19:41:23 +0000

Hey, I'm the author of this doc. The reason for the pattern is to make it so you always can find why a mutation occured. So combining state variables and dom changes is ok as long as that's the only place that does the mutation. If not, now you've made it harder to debug. I keep the strict separation so that I can always stick a debugger and see a stack trace of what happened.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "Lucy: A concise language for describing Finite State Machines"

MatthewPhillips — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 14:25:47 +0000

Writing a language, even a DSL is a lot of work. It's not enough to just make a good language, there's also a whole world of tooling support that people expect nowadays.

Also ultimately it was hard to sell the idea of living in a different file format from the rest of your code. This is always a tough sell for DSLs. Even languages as good as CSS and SQL struggle with this for a lot of devs.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "Astro DB"

MatthewPhillips — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 20:43:14 +0000

First, we have just launched and are still figuring out pricing, this is a great point of feedback that we'll consider, thank you.

What differentiates Astro DB is the deep integration with the Astro framework and providing an easy path for common scenarios. Astro DB is a higher-level product than using a database service directly. For example, Astro DB handles migrations transparently for you and guides you when manual intervention is needed, just from running `astro db push`.

Astro DB also includes a local story, by default you use a local SQLite database that you can seed (using db/seed.ts) for local development. You can even use it for a purely static site, although we're still working on making SSG use-cases more seamless. For now though, this gives you a great local workflow for development that you can think easily connect to production with `astro build --remote`.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "Astro DB"

MatthewPhillips — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 20:23:32 +0000

This is a very good question! One of the big reasons we partnered with Turso was for their edge network, so replicas are available close to your origin server. Being able to host anywhere is something that's important to Astro, so this felt like the right balance. Turso is known for its speed and one of the main thing that attracts people to use it.

New comment by MatthewPhillips in "Astro DB"

MatthewPhillips — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 20:13:06 +0000

It does use libSQL, yes!