<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: hughdbrown</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hughdbrown</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:56:20 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=hughdbrown" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Ask HN: Why is my Claude experience so bad? What am I doing wrong?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I used this entire HN discussion as the input to a design/task SKILL.md. I asked Claude to prepare the design document and a task list. When it was done, I asked it to implement the task list.<p>I got this: <a href="https://github.com/hughdbrown/visualize-grid-layouts.git" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hughdbrown/visualize-grid-layouts.git</a><p>You can follow how this all happened by looking in `docs/design/`.<p>The SKILL.md had this description:<p>```
Collaboratively designs a new software feature with the developer. Explores the existing codebase to ground all technical decisions in the project's actual architecture, conventions, and dependencies. Produces two deliverables:<p>1. *Product Requirements Document (PRD)* — what the feature does, technical decisions, how it operates, and ordered implementation stages.<p>2. *Detailed Task List* — within each stage, test-first scoped steps covering tests to write, code to implement, config changes, environment variables, dependencies, and documentation.<p>Both deliverables are written to files in the project for reference during implementation.
```<p>You can get Claude to produce the skill for you, too.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:08:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092406</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092406</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47092406</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Repair a ship’s hull still in the river in -50˚C (2022)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am not understanding this.<p>Propane does not freeze anywhere near -60C. Wikipedia [1] says it freezes (liquid to solid) below -187C and boils (liquid to gas) above -42C.<p>Propane is probably unusable as a fuel below -42C because there is no vapor leaving the tank [not within my experience]. That is different from the propane being a solid.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propane" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propane</a>
Melting point −187.7 °C
Boiling point −42.25 to −42.04 °C</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2026 05:48:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46523047</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46523047</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46523047</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Ask HN: Is AWS down again?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ah, you have fallen for it:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa4VJobPBr4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa4VJobPBr4</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2025 18:17:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45724456</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45724456</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45724456</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is really interesting, but I need the highlights reel. So I need a script to summarize Hacker News pages and/or arbitrary web pages. Maybe that's what I want for getting the juice out of Medium articles.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:02:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45682656</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45682656</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45682656</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Tel HN: GitHub account locked just after launching my startup. Any help?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Your knowledge of the author of Pingoo makes you more likely to believe that he may have erred? This explanation gains strength for you given your knowledge of his character and personality and professional practices?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2025 16:09:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45374630</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45374630</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45374630</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was about to call fake on this -- Americans from south Jersey are largely unfamiliar with the present perfect and would not say "[I] have never heard of" but "[I] never heard of" instead.<p>But it turns out this grammatical cue is an effective way to discover that the comment is not about an American south Jersey but a British one.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 27 May 2025 18:52:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44109673</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44109673</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44109673</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "How a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>'Racoon', variant of 'raccoon'.<p>Of course, I prefer the double-c variant because of the orthographic anomaly of the person who tends to the raccoons' area at the zoo, the raccoon-nook-keeper.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 27 May 2025 18:37:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44109546</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44109546</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44109546</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Root for your friends"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I thought it was a peevish Kiwi joke about how people of other nations do not use words as they do.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 24 May 2025 04:06:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44078678</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44078678</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44078678</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Directory of MCP Servers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, but there is a distinct advantage to using a standard.<p>Suppose you want your agent to use postgres or git or even file modification. You write your code to use MCP and your backend is already available. It's code you don't have to write.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 May 2025 22:20:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44017459</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44017459</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44017459</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Harvard Law paid $27 for a copy of Magna Carta. It's an original"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Came here to understand exactly this point. It made no sense to me that a document created in 1215 would have a copy made in 1300 that was referred to as an original.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 May 2025 22:35:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000058</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000058</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000058</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Tariff: A Python package that imposes tariffs on Python imports"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Because those packages are cheating us.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Apr 2025 22:54:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687185</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687185</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43687185</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Odd. When I look at it, the first item is my own suggestion for debugging:<p>> In my experience, the most pernicious temptation is to take the buggy, non-working code you have now and to try to modify it with "fixes" until the code works. In my experience, you often cannot get broken code to become working code because there are too many possible changes to make. In my view, it is much easier to break working code than it is to fix broken code.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 05 Apr 2025 20:07:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596426</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596426</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596426</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sort of like the first debugging tip here:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682602">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682602</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 02 Apr 2025 03:30:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43553390</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43553390</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43553390</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "HHS Secretary: It Would Be Better If 'Everybody Got Measles'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://archive.is/IWQFv" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/IWQFv</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2025 20:03:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43347125</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43347125</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43347125</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Rust, C++, and Python trends in jobs on Hacker News (February 2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am not sure I believe the numbers shown here. More jobs offered in Rust than C++? I would not think so.<p>I think that many of the hits on 'rust' in the job postings are actually 'trust':
```<p>>>> import requests<p>>>> page_id = 42919502 # Feb 2025<p>>>> url = f"<a href="https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/{page_id}" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/{page_id}</a>"<p>>>> resp = requests.get(url, headers={'Accept': 'application/json'})<p>>>> data = resp.json()<p>>>> sum('rust' in child['text'].lower() for child in data['children'])<p>42<p>>>> sum('trust' in child['text'].lower() for child in data['children'])<p>13<p>```<p>Check out the gist here: <a href="https://gist.github.com/hughdbrown/f41f5f3c072067c2351460d8d3a739d0" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/hughdbrown/f41f5f3c072067c2351460d8d...</a><p>It shows that 30-40% of 'rust' is really 'trust':
```<p>-------------------- 2025-02-01: rust = 42 trust = 13<p>-------------------- 2025-01-01: rust = 28 trust = 10<p>-------------------- 2024-12-01: rust = 32 trust = 14<p>-------------------- 2024-11-01: rust = 28 trust = 8<p>-------------------- 2024-10-01: rust = 36 trust = 12<p>-------------------- 2024-09-01: rust = 32 trust = 9<p>-------------------- 2024-08-01: rust = 36 trust = 10<p>-------------------- 2024-07-01: rust = 33 trust = 11<p>-------------------- 2024-06-01: rust = 36 trust = 15<p>-------------------- 2024-05-01: rust = 42 trust = 14<p>-------------------- 2024-04-01: rust = 30 trust = 12<p>-------------------- 2024-03-01: rust = 32 trust = 12<p>-------------------- 2024-02-01: rust = 25 trust = 10<p>-------------------- 2024-01-01: rust = 22 trust = 8<p>```<p>I have a python repo specifically for finding Rust action in Who Is Hiring: <a href="https://github.com/hughdbrown/who-is-hiring">https://github.com/hughdbrown/who-is-hiring</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Feb 2025 06:37:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168886</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168886</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168886</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "What happened to the n in restaurateur?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> This puzzler, like many other difficult-to-spell food terms (such as hors d’oeuvre), also has its derivation in the French language.<p>That's the whole story: people who don't know French (or any foreign language, likely) cannot spell a French word.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Feb 2025 20:14:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43164406</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43164406</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43164406</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "When your last name is Null, nothing works"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And owns the eatery, Restaurants Near Me.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2025 23:31:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121928</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121928</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121928</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Why I'd never apply for a job online again"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> When 99.9% of posted jobs are fake (including in HN's Who's Hiring)<p>Okay there a lot of fake jobs, maybe not as high as 99.9%, though.<p>But what's the basis for saying that "Who's Hiring?" is fake? Why would a business seek out a relatively lower traffic job venue, field the traffic of submissions, and then ghost everyone who applies (or whatever is done by 99.9% fake jobs)? Why wouldn't employers just save themselves the effort and do nothing?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Feb 2025 01:14:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064329</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064329</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064329</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "Canada Tech Companies Map"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Your JSON schema says this:
```
            "location": "City, State",
...
            "workField": "Industry Field"
```<p>But:
`location` can be an array:
```
            "name": "Shopify",
            "location": ["Ottawa, ON", "Toronto, ON", "Montreal, QC", "Waterloo, ON"],
```<p>and `workField` is an array:
```
"workField": ["Banking", "Financial Services"]
```<p>And if it is for Canada, why identify locations as `"location": "City, State"`?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2025 13:11:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43025043</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43025043</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43025043</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by hughdbrown in "A new supergiant Bathynomus species discovered in Vietnam"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This scientific-academic synopsis gives me only the faintest idea of what kind of animal this might be:<p>> A new supergiant species of Bathynomus A. Milne-Edwards, 1879 from Vietnam is described. Bathynomus vaderi sp. nov. is characterised by its wide, rectangular clypeal region with parallel lateral margins, concave distal margin, and narrowly acute apex; the distally narrowing and posteriorly curved coxa of pereopod 7; and the presence of 11 upwardly curved pleotelson spines.<p>"Curved coxa of pereopod?" "Curved pleotelson spines?" "Wide, rectangular clypeal region"?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 02 Feb 2025 20:46:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911643</link><dc:creator>hughdbrown</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911643</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911643</guid></item></channel></rss>