Hacker News: clates

New comment by clates in ".gitignore Isn't the only way to ignore files in Git"

clates — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:13:04 +0000

> that is pure noise from a Git standpoint

It shouldn't be noise. Don't update it if you're not intentionally trying to, otherwise you're exposing yourself to supply-chain risk for no reason. If you are regularly getting unexpected `package-lock.json` changes then you are doing something wrong.

New comment by clates in "Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games"

clates — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:29:19 +0000

> "What is Yacht Club's stance on AI and has AI been used in the production of Mina the Hollower at all?" to which their reply was "We all got caught up in AI fever like the rest of the world, but we didn't find it was very effective for what we're doing. Maybe our work just isn't that generic! We've found some ways it can help... like Google or a thesaurus, but it hasn't affected what's in our game." [1]

Can you see how this intentionally coy and evasive answer was made specifically to not say "No, we didn't use AI." but still sound like "No, we didn't use AI." so that people wouldn't immeidately bust out pitchforks and start review bombing their game before it takes off?

New comment by clates in "Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down"

clates — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 16:06:06 +0000

When people complain about housing prices being too high, this is what I usually point them to. There are _a lot_ of boxes to tick, some of those boxes are critical, some are not so much. Some are severely punished, some are not so much. Some have extremely high costs and are a PITA, some not so much.

New comment by clates in "I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great"

clates — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 14:54:25 +0000

For a layman, that's a catastrophic entire OS-loss right? Especially if your issue is somewhat novel or stack specific. *Most people* (not us) just lost their only desktop computer and are now trying to debug by googling random OS words and browsing reddit and forums on their mobile to try and find out what went wrong with a seemingly benign update.

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Now, AI makes this *WAY* easier since you have a practically omniscient distro debugger with infinity patience and you don't have to wait on their responses. So this is probably coming down as a barrier soon, but I want to stress that "the only problem I had in 4 years" is loosely the same as "I bought a new car and the only problem I had was a catastrophic transmission failure. I just had to rebuild the transmission from scratch using specialized tools and knowledge and it was okay.

New comment by clates in "I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great"

clates — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 14:17:10 +0000

Wouldn't that lend it credibility if your concern was privacy?

New comment by clates in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

clates — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 13:43:49 +0000

Yeah, but that's conflating that a key labeled "control" for a Windows machine and a key labeled "control" for a Mac refer to different concepts.