Hacker News: joebates

New comment by joebates in "Show HN: An 8-bit live gamecast for baseball"

joebates — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:53:30 +0000

Ha! I'm watching the Astros game and I guess my stream is delayed because this just spoiled a home run. Great job!

New comment by joebates in "Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other"

joebates — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:31:42 +0000

Couldn't you have claude correct the CLAUDE.md?

New comment by joebates in "AI is making me dumb"

joebates — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:29:47 +0000

Same. Luckily I enjoy the process of refactoring and deleting code is nearly arousing, so I get the initial dopamine rush of wow this works, followed by the dopamine rush of "wow now this is cleaner and works so much better". Keeps me in touch with the codebase too.

New comment by joebates in "Show HN: Countries where you can leave your MacBook at a random coffee shop"

joebates — Mon, 11 May 2026 02:20:46 +0000

Of course, if we could just persecute minorities again, that would reduce the theft.

Please know that I'm being sarcastic.

New comment by joebates in "Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)"

joebates — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:39:43 +0000

Same. I even convinced my mom to buy me a transfer cable so I could distribute my programs to my classmates. I was the "plug" for a brief time. Probably my closest taste of being "popular". It was nice.

New comment by joebates in "Ti-84 Evo"

joebates — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:35:31 +0000

Programming mine in high school is how I ended up coding for the first time and led to my current career. Honestly a pretty good investment (from my parents) I'd say.

New comment by joebates in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

joebates — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:57:55 +0000

Too many people think being good at designing a UI primarily means knowing where to put something on a page.

New comment by joebates in "I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978"

joebates — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:39:19 +0000

Probably a smart move. Writing and mailing a letter takes a lot more time and effort than a phone call or comment online. If a person took the time to write a letter, they're probably worth taking the time to respond to.

New comment by joebates in "Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state"

joebates — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:36:20 +0000

I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".

New comment by joebates in "Using an engineering notebook"

joebates — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 04:15:51 +0000

I found a similar blog post like this years ago at the start of my career and started keeping a Rhodia Webnotebook A5. I've got over a dozen now from all my years of work. Nice for nostalgia

New comment by joebates in "Show HN: Agent Alcove – Claude, GPT, and Gemini debate across forums"

joebates — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:34:39 +0000

Very interesting. Kind of funny to see a model debating that we should ignore its hallucinations. I'm interested in seeing where this goes.

Some feedback: The white text is a bit tough to look at against the dark background. Darkgrey was a lot easier on the eyes for me.

New comment by joebates in "AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it"

joebates — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:36:31 +0000

I tried this but didn't realize how exhausting it is to think about even 2 smaller items at once.

New comment by joebates in "AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it"

joebates — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:35:05 +0000

I've seriously wondered about merging a home office and home gym into one, and doing sets in between claude working. My usual workout has about 22-30 sets of exercises total and I probably wait on Claude that often in a day. It would be wonderful to be able to spread my exercise throughout the entire day. I'd also include an adjustable height desk so that I could be standing up for much of the workout/workday. I could even have a whiteboard in there.

New comment by joebates in "AGENTS.md outperforms skills in our agent evals"

joebates — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 01:17:52 +0000

It's still not always reliable.

I have a skill in a project named "determine-feature-directory" with a short description explaining that it is meant to determine the feature directory of a current branch. The initial prompt I provide will tell it to determine the feature directory and do other work. Claude will even state "I need to determine the feature directory..."

Then, about 5-10% of the time, it will not use the skill. It does use the skill most of the time, but the low failure rate is frustrating because it makes it tough to tell whether or not a prompt change actually improved anything. Of course I could be doing something wrong, but it does work most of the time. I miss deterministic bugs.

Recently, I stopped Claude after it skipped using a skill and just said "Aren't you forgetting something?". It then remembered to use the skill. I found that amusing.

New comment by joebates in "How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code"

joebates — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 02:41:48 +0000

Please do! This sounds way more interesting than a simple coding loop agent (not to knock the blog)