Hacker News: insin

New comment by insin in "Show HN: Ilha – a UI library that fits in an AI context window"

insin — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:24:42 +0000

Create a new UI library without spending a decent chunk of the landing page telling the reader what it isn't challenge.

New comment by insin in "YouTube users get option to set their Shorts time limit to zero minutes"

insin — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 01:19:22 +0000

Upvoting because Shorts are terrible. Flagging because the submission title - which is 100% faithful to the friendly article - is a complete lie!

Plug: I added a bunch of features to Control Panel for YouTube [1] which let you either hide Shorts completely, everywhere (which is the default) or take more control of how you use them if you do (e.g. redirecting to the normal video player)

[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube

New comment by insin in "Project Maven Put A.I. Into the Kill Chain"

insin — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:41:45 +0000

Bravo New Yorker, defeating my regular expression because I've never once seen it referred to as A.I. (I'm sure it happens)

New comment by insin in "JSON formatter Chrome plugin now closed and injecting adware"

insin — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:22:34 +0000

This was added in January:

https://github.com/callumlocke/json-formatter/commit/caa213d...

Someone on Twitter noticed it pretty quickly, considering:

https://twitter.com/devinsays/status/2012195612586914143?mx=...

Extensions which ask for all URLs should really be subjected to more thorough reviews.

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

insin — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:45:03 +0000

At the level of the agent, it knows nothing about MCP, all it has is a list of tools. It can do anything the tools you give it let it do.

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

insin — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:43:51 +0000

Not all agents are running in your CLI or even in any CLI, which is why people are arguing past each other all over the topic of MCP.

I implemented this in an agent which runs in the browser (in our internal equivalent of ChatGPT or Claude's web UI), connecting directly to Atlassian MCP.

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

insin — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:18:40 +0000

The more things change in tech, the more they stay the same.

The shoe is the sign. Let us follow His example!

Cast off the shoes! Follow the Gourd!

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

insin — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:13:07 +0000

You can make it compose by also giving the agent the necessary tools to do so.

I encountered a similar scenario using Atlassian MCP recently, where someone needed to analyse hundreds of Confluence child pages from the last couple of years which all used the same starter template - I gave the agent a tool to let it call any other tool in batch and expose the results for subsequent tools to use as inputs, rather than dumping it straight into the context (e.g. another tool which gives each page to a sub-agent with a structured output schema and a prompt with extraction instructions, or piping the results into a code execution tool).

It turned what would have been hundreds of individual tool calls filling the context with multiple MBs of raw confluence pages, into a couple of calls returning relevant low-hundreds of KBs of JSON the agent could work further with.

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

insin — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:27:07 +0000

The chatbot app initiates an OAuth flow, user SSOs, chatbot app receives tokens to its callback URL, then tool calls can access whatever the user can access.

If you use the official MCP SDK, it has interfaces you implement for auth, so all you need to do is kick off the OAuth flow with a URL it figures out and hands you, storing the resulting tokens and producing them when requested. It also handles using refresh tokens, so there's just a bit of light friendly owl finishing on top.

Source: I just implemented this for our (F100) internal provider and model agnostic chat app. People can't seem to see past the coding agents they're running on their own machines when MCP comes up.

New comment by insin in "Claude mixes up who said what"

insin — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:18:21 +0000

Gemini seems to be an expert in mistaking its own terrible suggestions as written by you, if you keep going instead of pruning the context

New comment by insin in "Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read"

insin — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:22:57 +0000

Ooh, I'm having that feature for the next version of Comments Owl for Hacker News (which already moves the [-] to the left and increases the size of it on mobile), but does that not lead to accidental collapsing while scrolling on mobile?

I've already added using a confirm() for flagging and hiding in list pages on mobile to it because it's so easy to accidentally hit while scrolling.

New comment by insin in "App Store sees 84% surge in new apps as AI coding tools take off"

insin — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:34:00 +0000

/r/chrome_extensions feels like it's getting close to being 100% LLM generated, extension code, submission descriptions which read like you accidentally went to LinkedIn, and generic LLM replies

New comment by insin in "LLMs can't justify their answers–this CLI forces them to"

insin — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 03:27:51 +0000

I only stay on this particular variant of one of the 5 site designs every LLM spits out for long enough to check that - yes - it has the annoying thing where content fades in as you scroll, before closing the tab.

New comment by insin in "Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters"

insin — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 03:21:52 +0000

It's gone massively downhill recently, noticeably so since the ability to sort by upload date was removed from the UI (and then very quickly removed from the API too). That was the final brick that prevented it from being literally unusable, now it's scroll and hope (and give up).

New comment by insin in "Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters"

insin — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 03:02:53 +0000

This is also the way I use YouTube and is the main thing I made Control Panel for YouTube [1] for (well, that plus globally hiding Shorts and removing all the unwanted recommendations everywhere) - my Subscriptions page acts like an inbox of unwatched videos and everything else is hidden (most recently: the new "Most relevant" section and "Collaborations" videos with channels I'm not subscribed to).

My Subscriptions page currently has 15 videos above the fold, 5 of which are from the last 12 hours. The oldest video in that first page is 2 weeks old, and if I turn the extension off I need to press Page Down 17 times to reach it in the vanilla YouTube interface.

[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube

Show HN: The Comments Owl for HN browser extension now hides obvious "AI" items

insin — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:41:59 +0000

If you want to give yourself a break from the flood of "AI" items on Hacker News until/unless you feel like reading them, the Comments Owl for Hacker News browser extension now adds a handy toggle to your right-click context menu on the main item list pages (or the extension popup, for mobile browsers) which filters out the most obvious "AI" items by title and site, using (editable) regular expressions which have been tested on the contents of these pages over the last week or so.

The extension's primary functionality is to make it easier to follow comment threads across repeat visits, and catch up with recent comments, but it also offers other UI + UX tweaks, such as muting and noting users, and tweaks to the UI on mobile.

Release notes and screenshots for new functionality:

https://github.com/insin/comments-owl-for-hacker-news/releas...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47626570

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by insin in "GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash"

insin — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:27:47 +0000

Would you like Copilot to generate ads?

[Yes] [Maybe later]

New comment by insin in "The first 40 months of the AI era"

insin — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 22:46:03 +0000

Literally every day from green accounts on Hacker News, and in many, many TFAs.

New comment by insin in "The first 40 months of the AI era"

insin — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 22:43:02 +0000

*LLM

New comment by insin in "Firefox introduces Split View: Two tabs side by side, right where you need them"

insin — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:30:09 +0000

I've found myself wanting something like this since I switched to the new built-in vertical tabs, as it's a pain to get rid of them temporarily in side-by-side windows.