Hacker News: anaisbetts

New comment by anaisbetts in "I still prefer MCP over skills"

anaisbetts — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:18:16 +0000

Sure but on the flip side, skills not being in context means that for many harnesses, the model simply never finds them. Whether MCP or Skills are "better" depends extremely heavily on the context management functionality of your harness because if you use a relatively naive harness (i.e. one that implements MCP and Skills in a straightforward way), MCPs will generally be more effective, especially if your model is local-only (i.e. dumb), but at the cost of context.

New comment by anaisbetts in "I fixed Windows native development"

anaisbetts — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 14:53:04 +0000

Came in getting ready to hate on this article, but was actually pleasantly surprised, this is great. Good work OP.

New comment by anaisbetts in "The Codex App"

anaisbetts — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 17:00:29 +0000

That'll work great until your first customer from a CJK or RTL language writes in, "Hey, how come I can't type in your app?", or the blind user writes in "Hey how come your app is completely blank?" then you'll be right in the middle of the "Find Out" phase

These strategies are fine for toy apps but you cannot ship a production app to millions or even thousands of people without these basics.

New comment by anaisbetts in "The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis"

anaisbetts — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:44:25 +0000

A pervasive "Someone needs to do something!!!" attitude is why. Americans will forever wait for the school principal to come and get everyone into trouble

New comment by anaisbetts in "GDI Effects from the PC cracking scene"

anaisbetts — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 12:40:13 +0000

The code generator just recreates the C header files in C#, let's not be dramatic.

New comment by anaisbetts in "All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale [video]"

anaisbetts — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 17:05:41 +0000

If you've come to Germany as a foreigner recently you might have it automatically, newer ID cards have it activated

New comment by anaisbetts in "All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale [video]"

anaisbetts — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 17:03:20 +0000

The country that lived through pervasive mass state surveillance by secret police for 40 years is unsurprisingly quite cagey about digital centralization of records, even so many years later

New comment by anaisbetts in "All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale [video]"

anaisbetts — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:59:51 +0000

Transit companies are pretty bad at PKI infrastructure and internet security combined with the inefficiencies inherent in German bureaucracy / anti-centralization as well as the inherent insecurity of the SEPA model sometimes make crime possible

New comment by anaisbetts in "All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale [video]"

anaisbetts — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:57:49 +0000

> Germany has a tendency to wish something into existence with a law

After living here five years I've finally realized the same thing - Germany is the country of Rules, often well-intentioned, but no one actually follows them. It's especially damning when those rules actually are important and would protect regular people esp. around labor and housing, but oops zero meaningful enforcement. Wish we'd have 1/10th the rules but people had to actually follow them

New comment by anaisbetts in "Electron vs. Tauri"

anaisbetts — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 12:30:11 +0000

Tauri's approach of using the system Webview just doesn't scale to millions of users. You will end up having to tell your customers, "In order to fix the bugs in our app, you need to install a new version of your OS", or in the case of Apple, sometimes even saying, "You need to buy a new computer to use our app". It's not a great conversation to have.

Philosophically, it also optimizes something that doesn't really matter much in 2025, download and disk space - despite the perceptions, the system Webview usually uses the same order of magnitude memory as Electron; maybe a little less, but not a Lot less. We can see the WhatsApp rewrite on Windows to use WebView2 as evidence of that.

The one time that Tauri is legitimately better though, is if you've got a lot of Rust code that you want to integrate - GitButler for example uses Tauri and it works for them because they have a lot of Git systems code and it's all in Rust.

New comment by anaisbetts in "Raycast for Windows"

anaisbetts — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 18:59:04 +0000

Same tbh. macOS is my last resort, I find so much of it incredibly frustrating, from the literal constant permission nannying, the unrepentant "We broke your shit, deal with it" that comes with many many updates, the horrendous UI of Tahoe, it's the worst. Apple might have great (though boring) laptop hardware, but jeez louise does macOS ruin the whole thing.

New comment by anaisbetts in "Raycast for Windows"

anaisbetts — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:42:04 +0000

That's certainly what the app itself does (I'm even using it myself!), but I just don't understand why they couldn't resist putting in these overused digs.

New comment by anaisbetts in "Raycast for Windows"

anaisbetts — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 17:00:25 +0000

Why can Mac developers absolutely never resist making dated Win9x / Windows XP / BSOD references every time they make a port of their software to Windows? Zed did the same thing recently and it was just as overplayed.

Developers please, when you do this, you are telling your audience, the people you want to pay you money for your work, "Yeah, we think you suck, but here's some thing we finally got around to porting over" - why would you do that?

New comment by anaisbetts in "Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock"

anaisbetts — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 13:37:33 +0000

Ironically, because of East Germany, cameras like this are now extremely illegal here. Any camera that can see public or even semi-public property (i.e. a camera that can see out into your building's courtyard or hallway) are disallowed. Even ones that strictly are inside your own home are subject to rules around audio recording and a sign must be posted at all entrances.

New comment by anaisbetts in "Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account"

anaisbetts — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 07:38:04 +0000

Yes, LTSC is literally missing parts that are standard on a Windows install - it's an operating system designed for ATMs and kiosks that run exactly one tested application, it is not a general-purpose operating system.

If you happen to not need those pieces, and you don't care about running super out-of-date software? Sure it might work. But it's not a Good Idea in general.

New comment by anaisbetts in "PG: Free Press got bought by them to control US media, not for revenue growth"

anaisbetts — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 06:18:09 +0000

If you learn anything from the last 30 years, it's this - propaganda works. If you own the media and you're coordinated enough, you effectively can't lose; you completely own the framing of every debate.

New comment by anaisbetts in "Microsoft Surface Pen Compatibility / Interoperability FAQ (2024)"

anaisbetts — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 08:31:01 +0000

Despite Microsoft making a bunch of different versions of pens, they mostly all just work. This post is trying to be exhaustive but the vast majority of people who aren't extremely Deep into the Photoshop game will not need or care about any of this.

Basically, "If the pen fits in the keyboard slot, it just works". I'm currently using a pen from a Surface Pro 7 on my new Surface Pro 12" and it was trivial to connect it and it works great

New comment by anaisbetts in "Show HN: Autism Simulator"

anaisbetts — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 09:51:20 +0000

> Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.

I think the point is that for autistic people, a lot of things in their day-to-day life that randomly happen and can't be controlled for, can be the equivalent of just, random people walking by and punching you in the arm all day.

Each individual punch might not hurt, and describing the incident to a neurotypical person is probably met with "Eh, that doesn't sound that bad". An entire day's worth leaves you with a pretty sore arm though.

New comment by anaisbetts in "A new experimental Google app for Windows"

anaisbetts — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 18:53:36 +0000

It's actually also already built into Windows if you have a Copilot+ PC, hit Windows-Q to activate it

New comment by anaisbetts in "A new experimental Google app for Windows"

anaisbetts — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 18:52:19 +0000

ChatGPT does the same thing :-/ This is why Claude Desktop explicitly uses Ctrl-Alt-Space on Windows as its default shortcut rather than Alt-Space