Hacker News: Tallain

New comment by Tallain in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

Tallain — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 05:36:39 +0000

In my experience, Codex / ChatGPT are better at telling you where you're wrong, where your assumptions are incomplete, etc., and better at following the system prompts.

But more importantly, as a coding agent, it follows instructions much better. I've frequently had Claude go off and do things I've explicitly told it not to do, or write too much code that did wrong things, and it's more work to corral it than I want to spend.

Codex will follow instructions better. Currently, it writes code that I find a few notches above Claude, though I'm working with C# and SQL so YMMV; Claude is terrible at coming up with decent schema. When your instructions do leave some leeway, I find the "judgment" of Codex to be better than Claude. And one little thing I like a lot is that it can look at adjacent code in your project so it can try to write idiomatically for your project/team. I haven't seen Claude exhibit this behavior and it writes very middle-of-the-road in terms of style and behavior.

But when I use them I use them in a very targeted fashion. If I ask them to find and fix a bug, it's going to have as much or more detail as a full bug report in my own ticketing system. If it's new code, it comes with a very detailed and long spec for what is needed, what is explicitly not needed, the scope, the constraints, what output is expected, etc., like it's a wiki page or epic for another real developer to work from. I don't do vague prompts or "agentic" workflow stuff.

New comment by Tallain in "So you want to write an “app” (2025)"

Tallain — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 05:01:10 +0000

Delphi has an amazing RAD environment. For building small, self-contained desktop apps (with cross-platform support!) it beats any other modern offering... if you can get past the ecosystem. The language and ecosystem very much show their age.

Anyway, I think this generation is missing out on the experience of building in a real RAD environment. I'm more on the backend, but from what I see the pinnacle is fast hot reload, which pales in comparison to what could be.

New comment by Tallain in "Will Claude Code ruin our team?"

Tallain — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 04:18:07 +0000

I've been thinking of jumping into this sooner rather than later because I see this becoming a Thing eventually. Are you enjoying it?

New comment by Tallain in "The tech monoculture is finally breaking"

Tallain — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 20:13:02 +0000

Fair argument, these devices (the Hiby R4, in particular, which is the one I have) are absolute tanks. Way too heavy and big to throw in your pocket for any reason, especially if you use a case. Still, it's nice to be able to (sort of) carry my own library around and never need internet to listen to it.

New comment by Tallain in "The tech monoculture is finally breaking"

Tallain — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 02:07:44 +0000

I think Fiio and Hiby are the closest that exist today. They have dedicated hardware and physical buttons for the things listed in your comment. However, they do still ship with a custom Android OS and you need the touch screen to navigate your library and such. On the upside, this lets you choose your media library app. On the downside, it still isn't as good as the touch wheel on old iPods. I, too, am waiting for something like this to return. The Hiby is good enough until then for me.

New comment by Tallain in "State of the Fin 2026-01-06"

Tallain — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:46:37 +0000

When I looked for a Plex alternative I settled on Emby. It still has some "premium" features but they're all just QOL, not necessary things. The base app is great and even has handy little features Plex doesn't, and so far, it runs on all the same devices with a much snappier UX on the client side.

New comment by Tallain in "All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)"

Tallain — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:19:53 +0000

Do you honestly believe that DJs, particularly the very famous ones, just play CDs?

New comment by Tallain in "I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model"

Tallain — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 05:50:29 +0000

Curious if you've heard of or participated in NaNoGenMo[0] before. With such a corpus at your fingertips could be a fun little project; obviously, pure Markov generation wouldn't be quite sufficient but a good starting point maybe.

[0]: https://nanogenmo.github.io/

New comment by Tallain in "I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model"

Tallain — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 05:46:50 +0000

I have a pet tool I use for conlang work for writing/worldbuilding that is built on Markov chains and I am smacking my forehead right now at how obvious this seems in hindsight. This is great advice, thank you.

New comment by Tallain in "Two billion email addresses were exposed"

Tallain — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:12:53 +0000

This is the same setup I used for years with no issues, both KeePassXC and multiple Obsidian vaults, along with some other random files and folders. Syncthing is pretty much rock solid. Now I have the KeePassXC database stored on my NAS which is even simpler.

New comment by Tallain in "The link between trauma, drug use, and our search to feel better"

Tallain — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 04:06:48 +0000

The DSM isn't the only book, and is not the singular source of diagnosis around the world, so believing that because CPTSD is not in the DSM and therefore doesn't exist is also disingenuous.

The ICD does have an entry for Complex PTSD, but it may not match what many people think of as CPTSD, which from what I see is closer to what Bessel van der Kolk called "developmental trauma."

New comment by Tallain in "Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks"

Tallain — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 06:11:57 +0000

Having recently read through a handful of issues on their forums, they seems to brush aside a lot of things. It's a useful tool but the mod / dev team they have working with the community could use some training.

New comment by Tallain in "Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources"

Tallain — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 20:00:14 +0000

That was my experience as well. But it was interesting to see what was popular with other users, and I found a cool artist (yeule) this way.

New comment by Tallain in "The staff ate it later"

Tallain — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 22:28:26 +0000

I don't see how any of these could be considered "mystery" veggies in most contexts, let alone on pizza.

New comment by Tallain in "Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears"

Tallain — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 17:06:16 +0000

Outside of going back to school for another degree, how would this shift be possible?

New comment by Tallain in "Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)"

Tallain — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 23:25:56 +0000

You can find a condo cheaper and also much more expensive. There's also often a hidden "farang tax" where you will be charged more simply because they know you can pay more, regardless of the quality of the place. This is where the variance comes in. It happens with certain services, especially things like taxis (but not Grab or Line Man).

But yes, Bangkok / Thailand in general has huge wealth disparity. There are a lot of people living on very little money, and some people grossly rich.

New comment by Tallain in "1976 Soviet edition of 'The Hobbit' (2015)"

Tallain — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 18:21:28 +0000

Similar experience for me, except my imagery was influenced by the Brothers Hildebrandt. I collected all their cards and was obsessed with the detail in them.

New comment by Tallain in "Telo MT1"

Tallain — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 19:51:54 +0000

He may look like a duck, and he may quack like a duck, but don't let that fool you...

New comment by Tallain in "Yearly Organiser"

Tallain — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 07:23:49 +0000

At this rate, we'll be done in no time!

New comment by Tallain in "How I Use Kagi"

Tallain — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 17:03:17 +0000

I'm curious because I go through this experience a little more often than I'd like to admit, and typically end up frustrated and without any results (admittedly without using Kagi, yet). Did you just search for a phrase from the video, or what did you do to find what you needed with Kagi?