Hacker News: jlawrence6809

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "RepRapMicron"

jlawrence6809 — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 15:00:07 +0000

Okay my tinker-lust has been aroused! Can someone tell me what I can make with this thing so I have an excuse to build it?

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch series"

jlawrence6809 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:58:53 +0000

If Linus Torvalds is being outperformed what hope is there for the rest of us?

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "JetKVM Mini"

jlawrence6809 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:25:44 +0000

I had no idea KVMs existed until an agent filled me in last night (I had the idea of building one with an fpga so an agent could drive os installation). Lo and behold the next day KVMs are on the front page of Hacker News!

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

jlawrence6809 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:58:43 +0000

Yeah that pretty close to some problems I'm working on with mine. It has an "IQCON ALC loop failure" and claude was able to diagnose that the 2013 rail is around 11.44v (outside of the 10v range iirc) and the 2015 one is zero instead of the min of 0.13v. The RF paths looks mostly healthy as far as we can tell but I've only tried 10db steps and it seems consistently 4-5db low, assuming I'm using my oscope right.

Which MMIC did you replace? And what errors did you see? I have 110 and 111.

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

jlawrence6809 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:53:33 +0000

Some parts. It's still a WIP!

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

jlawrence6809 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:25:49 +0000

Oops yeah you're right, it's a VNG. A VNA would be great to have though! I wonder if these agents are going to just increase the utility of ever piece of equipment people can hook them to.

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

jlawrence6809 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:14:28 +0000

Very cool! Yeah I lucked out finding mine. It was in the intake section at my 2nd hand electronics store. It had a broken power button so they were selling it "as-is". A button repair and battery swap later I have a 3.3Ghz VNA. Can't complain!

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

jlawrence6809 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:38:03 +0000

My model is an SMIQ03E actually! I've grown quite addicted to going to my local 2nd hand electronics store in recent months scrounging for anything with an rs232 port!

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

jlawrence6809 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:20:24 +0000

I just had claude walk me through refurbishing a Rohde & Schwarz signal generator from the 90s. It feels pretty cool getting a multi thousand dollar piece of equipment for 60 bucks even if you have no idea what you'll use it for.

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "AI-written code is still your code"

jlawrence6809 — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:52:10 +0000

That's as good a guess about the future as any I suppose! Personally I'd give that about a 30% chance of happening in a large way. For small systems though I don't think I could ever personally go back to the old way. And maybe we should be composing small systems anyway...

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "AI-Written Code Is Still Your Code. Are You OK with That?"

jlawrence6809 — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:14:43 +0000

Maybe I'm a bad programmer or have worked at places with terrible dev culture, but honestly I've made changes to code I didn't really understand. The changes I made seemed to accomplish the task I was aiming at, but the downstream effects were sometimes impossible for me to grok. Before vibe coding took over, using AI to help me get a handle on what a bunch of code was doing was actually one of the things that sold me on using AI.

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?"

jlawrence6809 — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 04:02:51 +0000

Programming was the thing that clicked for me most out of anything I've done in my life. That's not to say I was an exceptional programmer, probably a bit above average among professionals but not by much. However for some reason I am absolutely having the time of my life using AI tools to build all kinds of fun and useful (to me) things.

I do sometimes miss programming by hand; the flow state, the satisfaction upon completion, the sense of ownership and identity. But it feels similar to how I look back on doing math in college... a fun thing I was pursuing at the time. An academic and pure thing that I may return to as a hobby someday.

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default"

jlawrence6809 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:38:51 +0000

I've been using the "experimental teams" in claude code forever and its great for this. I never start a claude code session manually, I just ask the main agent to open a new tmux window for me. The lead agent knows all the agents I've ever interacted with and built its own system to keep track of things between compactions.

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default"

jlawrence6809 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:15:14 +0000

This is probably a controversial take, but I love this. Back in the early days of claude code I had to write a script (well, claude wrote it) to pull out the session id and append it to every commit. It's a lifesaver when you are trying to debug an old commit to pull up the chat session that actually wrote it.

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps"

jlawrence6809 — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 01:07:10 +0000

When I was shopping for a mini split recently all the models I could find seemed to be variable speed compressor and blowers, unless I was reading something wrong. So maybe this isn't an issue anymore? I oversized mine but wish I went even bigger after a cold snap we just had in the pnw this last winter.

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps"

jlawrence6809 — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 19:17:48 +0000

A heat pump is just an AC that can move heat in either direction so you should be able to.

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Ask HN: What have you built with LLMs?"

jlawrence6809 — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 06:46:49 +0000

I built a platform for homeschooling families with structured courses that are taught and graded by an llm (chatgpt 4 API).

Homeschoolmate.com

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)"

jlawrence6809 — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 21:56:49 +0000

This extension is pretty unlike most of the examples the chrome docs provide because it extends the devtools which most extensions don't do. There are a lot of hidden gotchas you have to look out for when extending devtools and the api they provide just isn't as well thought out. However I actually made the first version of this extension when I was just starting out learning html/css/js and I think it was good project for that. I wouldn't worry about making something presentable for the webstore at first. Just build whatever you need with really bare bones UI and iterate if you forsee it being useful for other people. Maybe even start with a greasemonkey script.

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)"

jlawrence6809 — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 18:13:16 +0000

Thanks! Here is the repo if you have any issues/suggestions: https://github.com/jlawrence6809/CSS-Selector-Helper-for-Chr...

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)"

jlawrence6809 — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 17:55:30 +0000

I built a chrome extension that is featured on the chrome web store[1] and the number of requests I get from shady data brokers looking to buy my extension and fill it with spyware is really concerning. A naive dev could build something cool and sell it off to someone thinking they'll maintain if for them but instead just cause a hazard for users. Google seems to do a decent job of reviewing the use of permissions but some extensions like mine really need access to everything on the page so I can only imagine what a data broker could do with it. Be careful what you install.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/css-selector-helper...

Hacker News: jlawrence6809

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "RepRapMicron"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch series"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "JetKVM Mini"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "AI-written code is still your code"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "AI-Written Code Is Still *Your* Code. Are You OK with That?"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Why do I lose my passion and want to do nothing?"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Nine US states are teaming up to accelerate the adoption of heat pumps"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Ask HN: What have you built with LLMs?"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software (2019)"

New comment by jlawrence6809 in "AI-Written Code Is Still Your Code. Are You OK with That?"