<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: afc</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=afc</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 25 Apr 2026 19:06:28 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=afc" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "War on Raze"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> by someone who maybe isn't so great at clear communications<p>I don't think that's fair. If you're familiar with the programming language, his writing is fairly clear. If you're not, maybe you're just not in his target audience.<p>IOW, optimizing his text for people familiar with the language is probably a better choice than teaching the language, which would distract him from his goal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:41:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716612</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716612</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716612</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>She has a cool blog, I liked her articles!<p>How does she keep track of what row she's on, as she knits? I wonder if she'd be interested in specifying her patterns in a format my knitting software (visualization) could consume.<p>Anyhow, cool stuff!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:00:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714977</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714977</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714977</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Tree Calculus"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is indeed <i>much</i> better. I couldn't really follow the original, but this one made it click. Pretty cool!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:08:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708254</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708254</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708254</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Claude mixes up who said what"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's exactly my understanding as well. This is, essentially, the LLM hallucinating user messages nested inside its outputs. FWIWI I've seen Gemini do this frequently (especially on long agent loops).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:50:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702437</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702437</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702437</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't know if it's niche, but I like making granola for my friends and family. I give them a big jar and tell them free refills are included ("just bring me the empty jar"). I get pretty good nuts and tend to make largish batches (around 2 kg), and, because of the refills, I get a good sense of who appreciates it — always happy to make more for them. My recipe is here: <a href="https://alejo.ch/365" rel="nofollow">https://alejo.ch/365</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:39:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47695233</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47695233</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47695233</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I got into designing my own knitting patterns. I enjoy that I can customize everything — the yarn material, color (including marling, helix knitting, double knitting), yarn weight, needle size (e.g., resulting in "airy" vs "packed" textures), knit textures (e.g., stockinette, linen, miss, etc.), construction process (e.g., can I figure out a way to knit in the round vs flat?), cables, gradual increases/decreases, selvedge/cord, desired ease, etc..<p>I wrote software to generate patterns given configurations and keep track of which row I'm on. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089</a><p>I am sharing some of my patterns here: <a href="https://alejo.ch/2s0" rel="nofollow">https://alejo.ch/2s0</a><p>I'm currently working on my second ruana.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:01:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694704</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694704</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47694704</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was also baffled. "No formal specification"? Two minutes of browsing is enough to find it: <a href="https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/src%2Fparse.y" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/src%2Fparse.y</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:16:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47653964</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47653964</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47653964</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Looks pretty cool. I think it's great that you support light/dark mode. FWIWI, I'm also a huge fan of Excalidraw.<p>I wanted to ask you: is there's a reason you use a separate svg file for each (light/dark) mode?<p>A single SVG file using CSS can change it's own colors based on the user's preference. I have an example here: <a href="http://alejo.ch/3jj" rel="nofollow">http://alejo.ch/3jj</a> - the 3 plots should honor your mode (I put the generator code here: <a href="https://github.com/alefore/mini_svg" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alefore/mini_svg</a>)<p>Just figure I'd ask. If you have a good reason for using separate files, I'd love to hear it (because it probably would also apply to what I'm doing). :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:09:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575308</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575308</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575308</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Minimalist library to generate SVG views of scientific data]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just wanted to share with HN a simple/minimal open source Python library that generates SVG files visualizing two dimensional data and distributions, in case others find it useful or interesting.<p>I wrote it as a fun project, mostly because I found that the standard libraries in Python generated unnecessarily large SVG files. One nice property is that I can configure the visuals through CSS, which allows me to support dark/light mode browser settings. The graphs are specified as JSON files (the repository includes a few examples).<p>It supports scatterplots, line plots, histograms, and box plots, and I collected examples here: <a href="https://github.com/alefore/mini_svg/blob/main/examples/README.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alefore/mini_svg/blob/main/examples/READM...</a><p>I did this mostly for the graphs in an article in my blog (<a href="https://alejo.ch/3jj" rel="nofollow">https://alejo.ch/3jj</a>).<p>Would love to hear opinions. :-)</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492871">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492871</a></p>
<p>Points: 47</p>
<p># Comments: 4</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:54:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://github.com/alefore/mini_svg/</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492871</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492871</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Every layer of review makes you 10x slower"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Waiting for a few days of design review is a pain that is easy to avoid: all we need is to be ready to spend a few months building a potentially useless system.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:55:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410108</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410108</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410108</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "I put my whole life into a single database"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How long have you been tracking? Can you share an insight you've had from your data?<p>I've been weight lighting for ten years and initially tried to track things (down to how many reps I did of which exercise, with how much weight) and quickly came to the conclusion that is want worth it for me.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:38:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323107</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323107</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323107</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://alejo.ch/" rel="nofollow">https://alejo.ch/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:11:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632771</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632771</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632771</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut had something to say. We have it on tape"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thank you for your comment. I like Vonnegut (my favorite is Hocus Pocus) but hadn't read Bluebeard. I only started it and I'm already enjoying it significantly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 26 Dec 2025 23:55:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46397696</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46397696</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46397696</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "What Killed Perl?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even as an experienced developer who even owned CPAN modules and was very familiar with the Unix ways, Python was a no-brainer.<p>I mention this on light of the article's claim that this has to do with "a new generation of programmers brought up on … I don’t know, Microsoft systems, Visual Basic and Java". No. The new languages that appeared were just so much much better.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 20:01:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984365</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984365</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984365</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Project Gemini"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Agree, that was exactly my reaction. What a terrible introduction, wasting many words on such platitudes as telling me that the idea isn't new but it isn't old fashioned either, or that they want to provide "some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:08:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45959934</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45959934</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45959934</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Vibe Code Warning – A personal casestudy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Wonder if you've tried spec driven development (as opposed to just prompting)?<p>I used to create requirement-oriented prompts and I felt something similar to what you describe. However, I've switched to generating parts of my source code from my specs in a semi-automated way and it made the process much more pleasant (and efficient, I think).<p>I wrote a bit about my current state here: <a href="https://alejo.ch/3hi" rel="nofollow">https://alejo.ch/3hi</a> - for my Duende project I generate 8821 lines of code (2940 of implementation, 5881 of tests) from 1553 lines in specifications.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2025 23:54:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882488</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882488</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882488</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "You should write an agent"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I also started building my own, it's fun and you get far quickly.<p>I'm now experimenting with letting the agent generate its own source code from a specification (currently generating 9K lines of Python code (3K of implementation, 6K of tests) from 1.5K lines in specifications (<a href="https://alejo.ch/3hi" rel="nofollow">https://alejo.ch/3hi</a>).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2025 07:55:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45844395</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45844395</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45844395</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[AI Juries]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://alejo.ch/3he">https://alejo.ch/3he</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45733699">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45733699</a></p>
<p>Points: 4</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:57:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://alejo.ch/3he</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45733699</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45733699</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "Don't Force Your LLM to Write Terse [Q/Kdb] Code: An Information Theory Argument"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Disagree. If some small adjustments to your workflow or expectations enable you to use LLMs to produce good, working, high-quality code much faster than you could otherwise, at some point you should absolutely welcome this, not stubbornly refuse change.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2025 08:16:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45641195</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45641195</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45641195</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by afc in "IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For what it's worth it, I'm still developing and using exclusively my own text-based editor/IDE: <a href="https://github.com/alefore/edge" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alefore/edge</a><p>I wrote recently a bit about my conclusions after ten years of developing it: <a href="https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/edge/README.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alefore/weblog/blob/master/edge/README.md</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Oct 2025 14:39:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627760</link><dc:creator>afc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627760</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627760</guid></item></channel></rss>