Hacker News: gmassman

New comment by gmassman in "2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026"

gmassman — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:18:30 +0000

Not necessarily…. As with all engineering choices there are tradeoffs involved. There can be both advantages and disadvantages to using AI to build scripts. And more likely than not you’ll need AI to help debug the scripts when they have issues. Real tradeoffs to consider.

New comment by gmassman in "Ask HN: Share Your Eccentric Hobby"

gmassman — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:39:39 +0000

Yes my dobro is a squareneck built by Richard Deneve. It’s tuned to open G, typical for the bluegrass style. I haven’t ventured into lap steel but I have played a little when friends give me the opportunity. Personally I find acoustic instruments incredible just for their portability. Also everyone and their parents owns an acoustic guitar, so finding people to play with has never been an issue :)

For me, music started out as a practice of getting better and developing my abilities as a songwriter. As I’ve gotten older though it’s shifted more towards sharing the joy of playing with others. Jamming with people and making them happy by sharing songs is a reward in and of itself.

New comment by gmassman in "Ask HN: Share Your Eccentric Hobby"

gmassman — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:54:27 +0000

I play in a band called Rare Company. We recorded an album last year and have been playing gigs around San Francisco to promote it this year. We play acoustic originals, with a style that spans bluegrass, swing, folk and rock. I play dobro and fiddle, and it’s great fun to see people’s reactions to my “shiny slide guitar”. Check out our music and come to a show if you’re in the bay area!

New comment by gmassman in "Ask HN: What game have you replayed more times than any other?"

gmassman — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:56:29 +0000

Sudoku. Wordle is a distant second.

New comment by gmassman in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

gmassman — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:25:01 +0000

Usually these were the developers who said their code didn’t need tests because it’s obviously correct/too simple to need them. And then their bug causes a crash that needs to be fixed over the weekend :/

New comment by gmassman in "Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)"

gmassman — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:00:30 +0000

I guess the joke is you can scale a file system or a fish, but can only tune a file system?

New comment by gmassman in "Show HN: Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search"

gmassman — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:47:17 +0000

Very exciting! Congrats on the release, this will be a huge benefit to all folks building RAG/rerank systems on top of Postgres. Looking forward to testing it out myself.

New comment by gmassman in "OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent"

gmassman — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 06:30:36 +0000

Seems like an anti-pattern to me to run AI models without user’s consent.

New comment by gmassman in "Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?"

gmassman — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 05:12:04 +0000

I’ve been using a zenbook for about 8 years now. Hardware and battery are still surprisingly solid, although one of the hinges is starting to fail…

New comment by gmassman in "Brain has five 'eras' with adult mode not starting until early 30s"

gmassman — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:14:01 +0000

Fiction can reveal a lot of real wisdom if you’re open to receiving it.

New comment by gmassman in "Tell HN: Azure outage"

gmassman — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:26:46 +0000

I’ve been migrating our services off of Azure slowly for the past couple of years. The last internet facing things remaining are a static assets bucket and an analytics VM running Matomo. Working with Front Door has been an abysmal experience, and today was the push I needed to finally migrate our assets to Cloudflare.

I feel pretty justified in my previous decisions to move away from Azure. Using it feels like building on quicksand…

New comment by gmassman in "My first impressions of Gleam"

gmassman — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 15:19:30 +0000

The BEAM is an amazing piece of technology. It’s built to scale massive concurrent systems and has great developer ergonomics. I’ve used it with Elixir and it’s really a breath of fresh air as far as running a webserver goes. Much more flexible and simpler to manage than a python or nodejs runtime, and also capable of scaling up with far fewer resources than you would think. Highly recommend giving it a go!

New comment by gmassman in "Ask HN: What are you working on this weekend?"

gmassman — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 15:53:17 +0000

My band is playing a small bluegrass festival this weekend. We’ve been recording an album since last year and are starting the work of promoting it by playing more gigs!

New comment by gmassman in "Where Do Scientists Think This Is All Going?"

gmassman — Sat, 03 May 2025 16:13:27 +0000

Would we consider the calculator useful if it sometimes told us 2+2=22? Would this at all be considered a sign of creativity or abstract thought?

New comment by gmassman in "Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?"

gmassman — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 06:00:27 +0000

Nice work, both to the prompter and the promptee!

New comment by gmassman in "Designing Electronics That Work"

gmassman — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 22:02:02 +0000

Nice work Hunter! I’m starting a hardware side project so I’ll definitely be giving the book a read. Hopefully it helps me avoid some of the common electronic pitfalls.

New comment by gmassman in "Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests shipped to cloud"

gmassman — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 19:22:44 +0000

It’s always the year of the linux desktop!

New comment by gmassman in "Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees"

gmassman — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 15:42:59 +0000

More than 50% voted for not-Trump

New comment by gmassman in "400 reasons to not use Microsoft Azure"

gmassman — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 04:47:35 +0000

Add Intune to the list of bad MS dashboards…

New comment by gmassman in "Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code"

gmassman — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 21:41:40 +0000

> Spends more time explaining why TypeScript in Svelte is problematic than actually fixing TypeScript in Svelte.

Damn, that’s brutal. I mean, I never said I knew how to fix ComponentProps or generic components, just that they have issues…