Hacker News: Merad

New comment by Merad in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

Merad — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 04:51:20 +0000

Are you trying to split it with an axe? You need a sledgehammer and a few splitting wedges. The sledge lets you apply a lot more force than an axe and striking the wedge focuses that force onto a small area. The first wedge will open a crack, then you use additional wedges to expand that crack until she splits.

Source: grew up in a wood burning family, helped split many stubborn hardwood trees (all by hand).

New comment by Merad in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

Merad — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:50:52 +0000

> I enforce CC on my projects because I don’t have the energy to police horrendous commit messages.

And does it actually accomplish that goal? I've been on several projects where someone pushed CC on the team with this reasoning. Every time my experience has been that you get the same crappy messages with a tag that may or may not be accurate.

BTW, AI absolutely knows how to bypass pre-commit hooks and will do so when they come up with some reasoning why their situation is an exception to the rule. I've watched them do it. The only way I've found to strictly enforce things on an agent (tests, linting, whatever) is to use a claude pre-command hook that will block git commit if the checks don't pass.

New comment by Merad in "AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study"

Merad — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:54:19 +0000

> Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will

Absolutely not harmless if you're the executor of an estate forced to deal with a screwed up AI will. I just handler my dad's estate this spring. It's a frustrating and confusing process even with the simplest of estates.

New comment by Merad in "Hershey Bets on Agentic AI to Rethink $2B in Marketing Spend"

Merad — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:14:11 +0000

Not 100% sure if you're serious, but it's a piece of Hershey Kisses candy which predates the existence of emojis by at least a century.

New comment by Merad in "Two EA-18 fighter jets collide at Mountain Home airshow, pilots ejected safely"

Merad — Mon, 18 May 2026 01:36:57 +0000

Basically all modern fighters since the 1980s are aerodynamically unstable and require a computer to fly. A collision like this is almost certainly going to do major damage to the airframe (screwing up its aerodynamics) and maybe flight controls as well. I suspect the plane will be well outside the parameters that the flight controls software can deal with, making stable flight impossible.

New comment by Merad in "Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS"

Merad — Sat, 16 May 2026 16:52:45 +0000

You aren't wrong, but the _overwhelming_ majority of "full stack" devs I've worked with only know CSS at the most basic level and have little interest in learning it in depth. I myself have been programming for more than 20 years, doing web dev for almost 15, and I can't find the motivation to learn it well. There are too many technical skills to keep up with and CSS is pretty low down on my priority list. I would prefer to rely on specialists who are experts but companies aren't willing to hire dedicated front end devs.

New comment by Merad in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

Merad — Thu, 07 May 2026 17:02:58 +0000

I've been in a similar situation as the GP. 15 years ago my first job after college was at a large Fortune 500 building LOB apps. The company was full of departments that were run entirely out of a massive Excel spreadsheet (hundreds of MB or more), or better yet a totally custom thing built on Access97 and VB made by a guy who retired 10 years ago. More than a few of the people in these departments had been in the same job for 20+ years and literally done the job the same way the whole time. Our mandate was not to modernize their business processes or make them friendly to automation, it was literally to indulge their stupid whims. But at least at the end they would be on an app where IT had access to the source code, could ensure databases were backed up, etc.

New comment by Merad in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

Merad — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:34:14 +0000

> intelligent autocomplete

I'm curious how much value others are finding in this. Personally I turned it off about a year ago and went back to traditional (jetbrains) IDE autocomplete. In my experience the AI suggestions would predict exactly what I wanted < 1% of the time, were useful perhaps 10% of the time, and otherwise were simply wrong and annoying. Standard IDE features allowing me to quickly search and/or browse methods, variables, etc. are far more useful for translating my thoughts into code (i.e. minimizing typing).

New comment by Merad in "Ted Turner has died"

Merad — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:04:52 +0000

Definitely have mixed feelings about whats become of CNN and how the 24 hour news cycle has affected the world, but I'm very grateful that Turner financed the movie Gettysburg [0]. One of my favorite movies, based on one of my favorite books. I've probably seen it at least 50 times.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_(1993_film)

New comment by Merad in "Ti-84 Evo"

Merad — Sat, 02 May 2026 03:39:32 +0000

I had a TI-83 in high school and upgraded to a TI-89 for college circa 2002. Used the heck out of those calculators because I did all the math and physics prerequisites for an engineering degree before switching to CS. It also helped me get a B in Linear Algebra thanks to holding a cheat sheet document for the final exam. I had no trouble with the likes of Calculus 3 and differential equations but for some reason the later material in linear algebra didn't click with me.

New comment by Merad in "Credit cards are vulnerable to brute force kind attacks"

Merad — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:25:14 +0000

That's not quite accurate. They have 10 days to issue you a temporary credit if the investigation is going to take more than 10 days. They are willing to issue the credit immediately precisely because it's temporary. If the investigation resolves in your favor the credit becomes permanent and you never know the difference. If it takes more than 30 days - well, I worked with BofA about 15 years ago and saw more than a few customers who ended up with a giant mess because that temporary credit expired after 30 days resulting in a snowball effect of failed payments and NSF charges.

New comment by Merad in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

Merad — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:45:32 +0000

I've been using it for a few months because Copilot was the only AI blessed by our corporate overlords. It's not bad, I would say it's about 80% as capable as Claude Code, which I've used extensively on personal projects. However CC was recently approved, and I'm betting that with these changes to Copilot pricing we'll end up dropping it like a hot potato.

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.