Hacker News: Merad

New comment by Merad in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

Merad — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:47:09 +0000

If you're suggesting that the US submarine should have rescued the survivors - with respect I think you don't understand how submarines work. They have no capability to perform rescue operations. They have no way to handle mass numbers of injuries, there's normally just one corpsman (basically a medic) on board. Even if they want to do a rescue operation they have no place to put them. Subs barely have room for their own crew; typically 2 or even 3 sailors share the same bed.

New comment by Merad in "She called 911 for an ambulance. She got a nightmare instead"

Merad — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 21:43:59 +0000

The situation with the ambulance service is obviously disgusting and immoral in a civilized society. But the article fails to address the elephant in the room - her chief complaint was severe pain in her knees due to RA. If she had been taken to the ER she almost certainly would've been given some short term pain meds and sent home unless she was showing some very obvious signs of cardiac issues. The system had already failed her because she really needed skilled nursing or assisted living help, being immobile due to chronic disease. It happens all the time. Several years ago my elderly father fractured an ankle - no surgery required, just a boot - and was sent home even though he was unable to stand or walk on his own. Fortunately he had savings and I was able to talk him into paying out of pocket for a stay in rehab (to the tune of about $18,000).

It's also likely that she ended up in this position because she couldn't afford proper treatment of her RA, resulting in it destroying her knees. I also have RA, diagnosed 3 years ago and my treatment costs $15,000 per month. Losing my job and/or having insurance that won't cover it is a terror that knaws at the back of my mind because without the treatment I'll start suffering debilitating symptoms in 3-6 months.

New comment by Merad in "“Microslop” filtered in the official Microsoft Copilot Discord server"

Merad — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:19:50 +0000

An awful lot of corporate workers are stuck with Copilot as their only approved chat option, so some of them are probably trying to learn how to get the best results they can from it.

New comment by Merad in "How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution"

Merad — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 06:13:08 +0000

I've been working off and on on a vibe coded FP language and transpiler - mostly just to get more experience with Claude Code and see how it handles complex real world projects. I've settled on a very similar flow, though I use three documents: plan, context, task list. Multiple rounds of iteration when planning a feature. After completion, have a clean session do an audit to confirm that everything was implemented per the design. Then I have both Claude and CodeRabbit do code review passes before I finally do manual review. VERY heavy emphasis on tests, the project currently has 2x more test code than application code. So far it works surprisingly well. Example planning docs below -

https://github.com/mbcrawfo/vibefun/tree/main/.claude/archiv...

New comment by Merad in "Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV"

Merad — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 04:21:58 +0000

The RAV4 Prime is extremely hard to get if you live outside of SoCal and maybe a few other areas. I'm in the southeast and a few years ago the local dealer told me that this entire region is only allocated a few Prime's each quarter. Even today I've never seen one in the wild.

New comment by Merad in "Two kinds of AI users are emerging"

Merad — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:09:42 +0000

I haven't seen it bypass my hook yet (knock on wood). I have my hook script [0] tell that its commits are required to pass validation, maybe that helps push it in the right direction?

0: https://github.com/mbcrawfo/vibefun/blob/main/.claude/hooks/...

New comment by Merad in "Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50%"

Merad — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:05:33 +0000

My dad died at the end of last year, and was not too different from your grandma. For him the main problem was chronic pain from his failing body. Even fairly powerful opioids from a pain management doctor only helped a bit. Basically all he could do was sleep, eat meals, and sit in his chair in pain.

I feel similar to you, but I wonder if it's one of those those things where age changes your perspective. Dad was in assisted living and had several stints in rehab/nursing home facilities, and in both there were quite a few people with what I'd call poor quality of life who were still holding on to life.

New comment by Merad in "Two kinds of AI users are emerging"

Merad — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:06:17 +0000

I've been using Claude Code with Opus 4.5 a lot the last several months and while it's amazingly capable it has a huge tendency to give up on tests. It will just decide that it can commit a failing test because "fixing it has been deferred" or "it's a pre-existing problem." It also knows that it can use `HUSKY=0 git commit ...` to bypass tests that are run in commit hooks. This is all with CLAUDE.md being very specific that every commit must have passing tests, lint, etc. I eventually had to add a Claude Code pre-command hook (which it can't bypass) to block it from running git commit if it isn't following the rules.

New comment by Merad in "NASA's WB-57 crash lands at Houston"

Merad — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:33:33 +0000

There probably isn't much structural damage to the plane aside from the scraping/grinding on the bottom. Don't misunderstand, that's going to be bad damage - we aren't just talking about scratched paint. But it looks like the pilot set it down soft as a feather, they're definitely a pro.

Planes are so expensive that it's worth putting a lot of money into saving them. A replacement airframe comparable to the B-57 would probably cost $10 million, then you'd probably spend that much again to customize it for NASA mission. Even if they need to spend a couple million dollars fixing the WB-57 it beats the alternative.

Edit: It occurs to me that rather than use a different plane they'd probably reactivate another B-57 from the boneyard - but B-57's have been retired for > 50 years to restoring one would still be a significant project.

New comment by Merad in "NASA announces unprecedented return of sick ISS astronaut and crew"

Merad — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 15:07:28 +0000

Do you seriously believe that you should have the right to demand access to the private medical records of every teacher, soldier, judge, cop, etc. in the country because their pay comes from taxpayers? If yes I'm not quite sure how to respond, IMO that's an utterly absurd position. If no, why are astronauts being singled out for this treatment?

New comment by Merad in "I couldn't find a logging library that worked for my library, so I made one"

Merad — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 22:28:27 +0000

In the .Net space log4net is horrifically outdated and there's zero reason to use it today. Logging for modern .Net apps and libraries should be built on the Microsoft.Extensions.Logging abstractions which provide the type of features covered in TFA. They also provide a clear separation between generating log events in code and determining where & how logs are stored. For basic needs you can use simple log writers that tie in directly with MEL, or for advanced needs link MEL with Serilog so that you can use its sinks and log processing pipeline.

New comment by Merad in "JSDoc is TypeScript"

Merad — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 15:35:59 +0000

Can you perform type checking with JSDoc? As in, run type checks in CI/CD, commit hooks, etc?

New comment by Merad in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

Merad — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 14:54:35 +0000

I've been exploring getting some deeper experience with Claude Code (my org only allows Copilot) and exploring vibe coding by using CC to design a functional programming language that transpiles to JS and build out a full language specification and the tooling to go along with it. I haven't pushed anything to Github yet but it's been very educational, and also a little terrifying to see how easy it is now to produce tens of thousands of lines of code that you totally don't understand.

New comment by Merad in "End of Japanese community"

Merad — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 16:05:31 +0000

As a native speaker (American) the phrasing is classic condescending soulless corporate customer service speak. 1) You must always apologize, 2) you must never admit fault. "I'm sorry you feel this way about what we did" comes across _to me_ as "what we did was totally fine, it's too bad that you don't understand the wisdom of our actions." That kind of phrasing is also a bit of a trigger because the majority of the time you hear it from companies that don't give a damn how you feel and will fight to avoid doing anything to actually help you.

It's of course impossible to say if this was just an unfortunate choice of phrasing or if it's a sign that Mozilla has become that soulless corporate entity (I say this as a Firefox user for more than 20 years).

New comment by Merad in "Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower"

Merad — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 20:21:08 +0000

> Toyota-style hybrid drives could be a lot lighter

The hybrid electric motor in a Toyota is already pretty comparable in weight to the motor in TFA, but obviously much less powerful. You can see the main hybrid motor of a RAV4 at [0]. If memory serves both the Camry and RAV4 hybrid models are only 2-300 lbs heavier than their gas counterparts.

0: https://youtu.be/O61WihMRdjM?t=120

New comment by Merad in "If a pilot ejects, what is the autopilot programmed to do? (2018)"

Merad — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 23:12:45 +0000

I dunno, the current approach seems quite reasonable. In the grand scheme of things the overwhelming majority of the Earth's surface is empty space where a plane crash is unlikely to cause much damage. You also have the complication that military pilots usually try to make sure their plane will crash in a "safe" area before they eject - many have died because they waited too long to eject trying to avoid a populated area. Giving the plan a mind of its own after they pull the handle would be unlikely to go over very well. I believe the scenario of a pilot ejecting from a perfectly good plane that keeps flying for more than a few seconds has only happened perhaps a dozen times in the entire history of aviation? Not really worth worrying about.

New comment by Merad in "Harnessing America's heat pump moment"

Merad — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 03:11:23 +0000

The heat pump will always produce air that is warmer than the temp in the house, but as the temp outside drops the temp of the air coming out of the vents also drops. So on a very cold day when the house temp is say 70F, the system might only be putting out air that's 75-80F. The air coming out of the vents doesn't really _feel_ warm and it may take an hour or two to raise the temperature in the house when you wake up or get home in the evening.

In my experience at least with relatively modern heat pumps (roughly 2000 and newer) it doesn't matter that much when outside temps are above freezing. But it quickly starts to become noticeable as temps drop into the 20s.

New comment by Merad in "Harnessing America's heat pump moment"

Merad — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 23:30:02 +0000

I have to agree. I've spent about 2/3s my life in houses with heat pumps and the last 5 years with a gas furnace (the rest being wood heat as a child). Mostly in Western NC and Eastern TN near the mountains, so chilly but not extreme cold.

Heat pumps work, but they aren't nearly as _pleasant_. You can write essays about the efficiency of heat pumps, how lukewarm air works just fine to warm the house, how heat pumps are great _most of the time_ and you can supplement with space heaters or whatever when they fall short... But as long as furnaces are accessible and affordable, an awful lot of people are going to choose to have nice warm heat that is always going to be nice and warm regardless of the outside temperature.

New comment by Merad in "Google flags Immich sites as dangerous"

Merad — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 19:35:53 +0000

You will have the same problem if you build a Linux container image using scripts that were checked out on the windows host machine. What's even more devious is that some editors (at least VS Code) will automatically save .sh files with LF line endings on Windows, so the problem doesn't appear for the original author, only someone who clones the repo later. I spent probably half a day troubleshooting this a while back. IMO it's not the fault of any one tool, it's just a thing that most people will never think about until it bites them.

TL;DR - if your repo will contain bash scripts, use .gitattributes to make sure they have LF line endings.

New comment by Merad in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

Merad — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 14:10:00 +0000

The web operates in a very different world if you've invested in good tooling. I used to be lead on a modestly sized payment processing back end to the tune of about 100 transactions/second (we were essentially Stripe for the client facing apps at the company). In many cases our monitoring and telemetry let us identify root cause in a matter of minutes. Not saying that is or should be the norm for all web apps, but what we had was not too far off from a read-only debugger view of the back end app's state throughout the request and it was very powerful. Of course for us more often than not the root cause was "the bank we depend on is having a problem" so our knowledge couldn't do much other than help the company shape customer communications about the incident.