Hacker News: johnyzee

New comment by johnyzee in "Starbase, LA"

johnyzee — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:25:24 +0000

"Watch Now" just shows a black screen with an audio track for me.

New comment by johnyzee in "A week of using Codex more than Claude"

johnyzee — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 09:43:28 +0000

I do use a second Claude (both Opus) to review the first one's output - it almost always finds worthwhile (often critical) observations. They have different 'perspectives', one wants the job done, one wants to find problems, is how I had it explained.

Claude chat itself called it 'Claude-on-Claude action', which I found cute.

New comment by johnyzee in "What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality"

johnyzee — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 11:19:21 +0000

You heard it from someone with no experience developing software. A lot of AI hype comes from that, even (or especially) from people in the actual business of developing software - a surprising amount of managers and adjacent or supporting roles in the field actually have very little clue about software development.

It's cool that 'regular' people can now create solutions to many small problems, and automate stuff - genuinely a step forward. Like Excel, only vastly better. But for bigger projects, real software engineers know that what LLMs do today is only a tiny part of development. And it solves it in a way that might well make the rest of the lifecycle a lot harder. It's like that saying about tools that make easy things easier and hard things impossible.

New comment by johnyzee in "Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time"

johnyzee — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:00:21 +0000

Spot on. The Amiga broke my teenage heart (name checks out). I was disgusted with computers after Commodore had run themselves into the ground, and left the whole thing for a few years. I just couldn't work with clunky PCs. In the end I had to budge and here we are, though it will never be quite the same.

New comment by johnyzee in "Meta confirms 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot"

johnyzee — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:57:41 +0000

"Meta notified at least 20,225 people that their accounts had been compromised. [...]

The compromises allowed the hackers to take over the person's entire Instagram and any linked accounts, including obtaining contact information, dates of birth, and profile information, as well as the ability to access the person's posts, direct messages, and account activity [...]

the hacks began around April 17 and lasted until this week [...]"

This is staggering.

New comment by johnyzee in "Gradle Is Javamaxxing"

johnyzee — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:42:52 +0000

I always hated Maven, until I started using Gradle.

New comment by johnyzee in "Meta deletes popular 1M follower account after Kuwaiti request"

johnyzee — Sun, 17 May 2026 20:33:47 +0000

This is ridiculous. The only ones afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood are Middle Eastern dictatorships, who would rather not see a political movement take popular hold.

New comment by johnyzee in "Mythical Man Month"

johnyzee — Sat, 09 May 2026 20:04:15 +0000

It's mostly slop. And sometimes slop is good enough. But Fred Brooks was talking about actual software systems, not a shop front for an amateur wine importer.

New comment by johnyzee in "Rack-mount hydroponics"

johnyzee — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 06:24:09 +0000

I know this was about the journey, but for anyone interested in home hydroponics (without the journey of building it), I have had a Gardyn[1] for 6-7 years. It works well. It has a 6 gallon (20 liter) tank and a couple of strong vertical growth lights, in a sleek package that looks good in the home. Plants are fitted into pods, in standard-size rockwool blocks that you can get from any grower shop.

The fact that it works at all after a number of years, is surprising to me, given everything that goes on with it: You've got a moist environment with water pumped through it multiple times a day, fertilizer in the water crusting up in places, living plants with their roots growing into the pipes, algae growth, and a lot of parts that are shuffled around often.

There might well be other systems around these days that are the same or better, I wouldn't know, the Gardyn is just what I ended up with when I researched it years ago and I'm happy with it. For downsides, seeds are expensive from Gardyn, but you can plant your own. I do buy some from Gardyn because they have a big selection, and they usually come out good, which regular seeds often don't for whatever reason. They try to push their subscription service but I don't need it, so don't use it.

Hope this doesn't come off as advertisement, as I said there may well be better options (would like to hear about them), but this one works for me for a pretty hassle-free experience.

[1] https://mygardyn.com/product/gardyn-home-kit/

New comment by johnyzee in "Launch HN: Spine Swarm (YC S23) – AI agents that collaborate on a visual canvas"

johnyzee — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:32:00 +0000

Calling it a 'canvas' makes me think that this tool is about AI agents doing some kind of collaborative drawing. Looking at the vid though, it seems more like an environment for visually organizing and managing agentic work (which seems very cool, and quite a bit more than just a canvas).

New comment by johnyzee in "The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]"

johnyzee — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 21:37:19 +0000

The only winning move is not to play.

New comment by johnyzee in "Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy"

johnyzee — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:53:35 +0000

Calories isn't everything, there is a lot more focus these days on how different foods affect metabolic hormones affecting satiety, blood sugar, etc. On those metrics, fat alone (which account for most of the calories in peanuts) is very satiating and does not trigger a later blood sugar drop (which causes cravings). That's why people on a diet drink 'bulletproof coffee' (coffee with butter in it), because it is extremely filling while not making you hungry later.

New comment by johnyzee in "Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids"

johnyzee — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:05:14 +0000

I loved the tactile feel of 3.5" floppies (especially coming from the - actually floppy - 5.25"s). Great choice. In particular, the spring-loaded metal shield was very satisfying to play with, unfortunately those are missing on the disks in the picture (apart from one, which seems to not have the closing spring)! Possibly a casualty to the three year old user.

New comment by johnyzee in "I canceled my book deal"

johnyzee — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 21:06:19 +0000

That's how I read this too. The publisher invested a non-trivial amount of work and was left with nothing, for no better reason than the author changed their mind. From the tone of the post, the author seems to not realize or care.

New comment by johnyzee in "Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products"

johnyzee — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 17:19:29 +0000

MS Bob -> Clippy -> Copilot -> ?

New comment by johnyzee in "The Penicillin Myth"

johnyzee — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 17:46:47 +0000

That was a lot of words to get to the point that Fleming probably misremembered the sequence of events when he retold the story 15 years later. He even mentioned this possibility at the time. Interesting article but not much of a mystery.

New comment by johnyzee in "Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres"

johnyzee — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:12:15 +0000

Seems like you would at the very least need a fairly thick application layer on top of Postgres to make it look and act like a messaging system. At that point, seems like you have just built another messaging system.

Unless you're a five man shop where everybody just agrees to use that one table, make sure to manage transactions right, cron job retention, YOLO clustering, etc. etc.

Performance is probably last on the list of reasons to choose Kafka over Postgres.

New comment by johnyzee in "A years-long Turkish alphabet bug in the Kotlin compiler"

johnyzee — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 21:00:01 +0000

Ugh, I've had the exact same problem in a Java project, which meant I had to go through thousands and thousands of lines of code and make sure that all 'toLowerCase()' on enum names included Locale.ENGLISH as parameter.

As the article demonstrates, the error manifests in a completely inscrutable way. But once I saw the bug from a couple of users with Turkish sounding names, I zeroed in on it. And cursed a few times under my breath whoever messed up that character table so bad.

New comment by johnyzee in "LLMs are mortally terrified of exceptions"

johnyzee — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 20:46:16 +0000

Unchecked exceptions are more like a shutdown event, which can be intercepted at any point along the call stack, which is useful and not like a return type.

New comment by johnyzee in "Java 25 officially released"

johnyzee — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 18:14:54 +0000

Your neighbor's dog barks at Swing.