Hacker News: daviding

New comment by daviding in "Show HN: Kage – Shadow any website to a single binary for offline viewing"

daviding — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:26:06 +0000

Nice idea! fwiw, false positives and all, but the Windows 11 default Windows Security doesn't like it: `leakless.exe: Operation did not complete successfully because the file contains a virus or potentially unwanted software.`

New comment by daviding in "Ask HN: Are you still using your Vision Pro?"

daviding — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:31:25 +0000

It does local stuff of course, and some are trying to bring PC streaming to it, e.g. https://github.com/Kross82/KRVR-releases

New comment by daviding in "Ask HN: Are you still using your Vision Pro?"

daviding — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:14:39 +0000

Will be interesting to see which side of $999 it drops. I'll buy it regardless but the optics (heh) on the high RAM cost issue and the unit price might temper demand a bit.

New comment by daviding in "Claude Fable 5"

daviding — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:10:35 +0000

Given the Fable 5 costs it's getting tricker to weight up 'how smart do you want it', like looking at the top of this graph..

https://cursor.com/evals

New comment by daviding in "Hacker News front page as a site"

daviding — Mon, 25 May 2026 22:57:57 +0000

An overridden `.newspaper-copy { font-size: 1rem; }` works well.

New comment by daviding in "Mythical Man Month"

daviding — Sat, 09 May 2026 17:12:01 +0000

"Adding tokens to a late software project makes it bigger and still late."

New comment by daviding in "Uncle Bob: It's Over"

daviding — Sun, 03 May 2026 17:13:39 +0000

English is the new programming language.

New comment by daviding in "NASA Force"

daviding — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:45:10 +0000

My 5090 couldn't handle that starfield at the beginning. I got a 1202 alarm just scrolling down..

New comment by daviding in "Codex for almost everything"

daviding — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:23:54 +0000

There seems a fair enthusiasm in the UI of these to hide code from coders. Like the prompt interaction is the true source and the actual code is some sort of annoying intermediate runtime inconvenience to cover up. I get that productivity can be improved with a lot of this for non developers, just not sure using 'code' as the term is the right one or not.

New comment by daviding in "Cursor 3"

daviding — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:00:13 +0000

Agree with that, they seem really good limits for daily use on something like Chat GPT Pro $20 account. I'm in the curious situation of using the Codex CLI within Cursor IDE and not really getting value out of my $60 Cursor sub. Plus at every update it seems Cursor seems to break more of their UI in the 'not a cloud agent chat UI' vs the more traditional VSCode sort of layout of code first. I should probably cancel.

New comment by daviding in "The Codex App"

daviding — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:39:20 +0000

I find that the case too. For more complex things my future ask would be something that perhaps formalized verification/testing into the AI dev cycle? My confidence in not needing to see code is directly proportional in my level of comfort in test coverage (even if quite high level UI/integration mechanisms rather than 1 != 0 unit stuff)

New comment by daviding in "The Codex App"

daviding — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:46:49 +0000

This looks interesting and I use Codex a fair bit already in vscode etc, but I'm having trouble leaving a 'code editor with AI' to an environment that sort of looks like it puts the code as a hidden secondary artefact. I guess the key thing is the multi agent spinning plates part.

New comment by daviding in "London–Calcutta bus service"

daviding — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:24:58 +0000

1989. I saw a paper flyer in the New York Public Library and turned up a few days later at the bus station on impulse. It was basically a moving commune, where you slept on flat boards, cooked together and moved glacially slowly towards the destination. The NY -> SF went south via FL, TX etc. It was mainly young people not actually from the US, Europe, Australia etc.

New comment by daviding in "London–Calcutta bus service"

daviding — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:49:44 +0000

I did too - did the SF back to NYC leg that goes the north route as well. Amazing experience. I was only 19 at the time. My favorite memory is that on the westbound leg we met up with the eastbound one in (I think) Yellowstone and while parking the buses they managed to slowly crash in to each other (just a dent, nothing serious). I liked the fact they both started from separate coasts and ending up colliding.

New comment by daviding in "GPT-5.2"

daviding — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 20:15:14 +0000

So is maybe gpt-5.2 with reasoning set to 'none' identical to gpt-5.2-chat-latest in capabilities but perhaps with a different system (system) prompt? I notice chat-latest doesn't accept temperature or reasoning (which makes sense) parameters, so something is certainly different underneath?

New comment by daviding in "GPT-5.2"

daviding — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:14:34 +0000

gpt-5.2 and gpt-5.2-chat-latest the same token price? Isn't the latter non-thinking and more akin to -nano or -mini?

New comment by daviding in "How People Use ChatGPT [pdf]"

daviding — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 21:35:12 +0000

Not going to read all that.. ;)

> ChatGPT is widely used for practical guidance, information seeking, and writing, which together make up nearly 80% of usage. Non-work queries now dominate (70%). Writing is the main work task, mostly editing user text. Users are younger, increasingly female, global, and adoption is growing fastest in lower-income countries

New comment by daviding in "Hermes 4"

daviding — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 23:40:39 +0000

user: hey hermes, why is your website scroll bar ungrabbable, I can't go up the page anymore? I'm stuck but want to read something higher up the page?

hermes4: We're all just stupid atoms waiting for inevitable entropy to plunge us into the endless darkness, let it go.

New comment by daviding in "Some thoughts on LLMs and software development"

daviding — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 21:05:24 +0000

Yep, it's great for generating tests and so much of that is boilerplate that it feels great value. As a super lazy developer it's great as the burden of all that mechanical 'stuff' being spat out is nice. Test code being like baggage feels lighter when it's just churned out as part of the process, as in no guilt just to delete it all when what you want to do changes. That in itself is nice. Plus of course MCP things (Playwright etc) for integration things is great.

But like you said, it was meant more TDD as 'test first' - so a sort of 'prompt-as-spec' that then produces the test/spec code first, and then go iterate on that. The code design itself is different as influenced by how it is prompted to be testable. So rather than go 'prompt -> code' it's more an in-between stage of prompting the test initially and then evolve, making sure the agent is part of the game of only writing testable code and automating the 'gate' of passes before expanding something. 'prompt -> spec -> code' repeat loop until shipped.

New comment by daviding in "Some thoughts on LLMs and software development"

daviding — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 20:47:33 +0000

I get a lot of productivity out of LLMs so far, which for me is a simple good sign. I can get a lot done in a shorter time and it's not just using them as autocomplete. There is this nagging doubt that there's some debt to pay one day when it has too loose a leash, but LLMs aren't alone in that problem.

One thing I've done with some success is use a Test Driven Development methodology with Claude Sonnet (or recently GPT-5). Moving forward the feature in discrete steps with initial tests and within the red/green loop. I don't see a lot written or discussed about that approach so far, but then reading Martin's article made me realize that the people most proficient with TDD are not really in the Venn Diagram intersection of those wanting to throw themselves wholeheartedly into using LLMs to agent code. The 'super clippy' autocomplete is not the interesting way to use them, it's with multiple agents and prompt techniques at different abstraction levels - that's where you can really cook with gas. Many TDD experts have great pride in the art of code, communicating like a human and holding the abstractions in their head, so we might not get good guidance from the same set of people who helped us before. I think there's a nice green field of 'how to write software' lessons with these tools coming up, with many caution stories and lessons being learnt right now.

edit: heh, just saw this now, there you go - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45055439