Hacker News: jsmith99

New comment by jsmith99 in "Show HN: Editing 2000 photos made me build a macOS bulk photo editor"

jsmith99 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 21:34:25 +0000

Capture One which is the biggest Lightroom alternative (popular with wedding and fashion industry) has pretty good tools for batch edit and getting a consistent look across a shot. It's expensive though.

New comment by jsmith99 in "OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable"

jsmith99 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:04:59 +0000

They can do that by jailbreaking models but is that really easier and less work than getting it from Wikipedia?

New comment by jsmith99 in "The three pillars of JavaScript bloat"

jsmith99 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 10:27:20 +0000

Is the lack of CVE because the implementations you wrote are better written and safer than those in the standard libraries or because no one has checked?

New comment by jsmith99 in "How Big Diaper absorbs billions of extra dollars from American parents"

jsmith99 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:04:17 +0000

The big difference is that 'real' nappies become extremely uncomfortable when wet (child immediately cries to be changed) so toddlers get a strong incentive to stop wetting whereas with modern disposables they barely even notice when they wee.

New comment by jsmith99 in "A ternary plot of citrus geneology"

jsmith99 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:37:43 +0000

I assume the esrog is the primeval citron but I've noticed that Jewish tradition (which rejects the use of hybrid citrons) allows some surprisingly different citrons in practice, popularly associated with Israel, Morocco, Yemen, Corfu etc. These differ considerably in eg rind thickness.

New comment by jsmith99 in "GPT-5.4"

jsmith99 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:26:55 +0000

It's still unavailable in many regions.

New comment by jsmith99 in "How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution"

jsmith99 — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:41:42 +0000

Whenever I build a new feature with it I end up with several plan files leftover. I ask CC to combine them all, update with what we actually ended up building and name it something sensible, then whenever I want to work on that area again it's a useful reference (including the architecture, decisions and tradeoffs, relevant files etc).

New comment by jsmith99 in "Looks: A Halide Mark III Preview"

jsmith99 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:36:39 +0000

The first baby photo is definitely the best. Artistic lighting setups can work for adult portraits, photographers used to recommend side lighting for male bone structure, but it just looks wrong in these baby photos.

New comment by jsmith99 in "Show HN: Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KB"

jsmith99 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 20:38:21 +0000

Wouldn't stockfish's position evaluation be incorrect in that case? (If it evaluated the position based on a formula that assumed normal rules)

New comment by jsmith99 in "Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you"

jsmith99 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 06:41:09 +0000

London oyster cards also offer a refund of your pay as you go balance.

New comment by jsmith99 in "eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update"

jsmith99 — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 23:34:27 +0000

It's a second price auction. Who cares what their limit is. If it's more than the value of the item to you then they will win. Otherwise you will win.

New comment by jsmith99 in "Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title"

jsmith99 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:31:19 +0000

They've now made a change in that at least when you open a csv it now asks you beforehand if you want your data transformed, eg converting strings to numbers where that loses leading zeros.

New comment by jsmith99 in "Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment"

jsmith99 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:36:36 +0000

Unfortunately many countries have blanket extradition bans. US is one of the worst - it caused a lot of tension in the past when they wouldn't extradite IRA bombers but got UK to agree to extradite anyone US wanted.

New comment by jsmith99 in "Google Antigravity exfiltrates data via indirect prompt injection attack"

jsmith99 — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:15:43 +0000

There's nothing specific to Gemini and Antigravity here. This is an issue for all agent coding tools with cli access. Personally I'm hesitant to allow mine (I use Cline personally) access to a web search MCP and I tend to give it only relatively trustworthy URLs.

New comment by jsmith99 in "Element: setHTML() method"

jsmith99 — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 21:24:20 +0000

It's arguably easier just to sanitise at display time otherwise you have problems like double escaping.

New comment by jsmith99 in "The AI coding trap"

jsmith99 — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 20:09:31 +0000

Cline plan mode doesn't tend to read files by default but you can tell it 'read all files necessary to establish a detailed plan'. GPT5 also seems more eager to read files.

New comment by jsmith99 in "The AI coding trap"

jsmith99 — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 16:03:32 +0000

> lack in-depth knowledge of your business, codebase, or roadmap

So give them some context. I like Cline's memory bank approach https://docs.cline.bot/prompting/cline-memory-bank which includes the architecture, progress, road map etc. Some of my more complex projects use 30k tokens just on this, with the memory bank built from existing docs and stuff I told the model along the way. Too much context can make models worse but overall it's a fair tradeoff - it maintains my coding style and architecture decisions pretty well.

I also recommend in each session using Plan mode to get to a design you are happy with before generating any code.

New comment by jsmith99 in "Want to piss off your IT department? Are the links not malicious looking enough?"

jsmith99 — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 14:12:43 +0000

My IT department use the official Microsoft phishing test. The emails arrive in inbox with 0 headers. (There's also a helpful Microsoft page of all the dodgy sounding domains they've registered for this.)

New comment by jsmith99 in "Microsoft PowerToys"

jsmith99 — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 13:14:20 +0000

7zip adds a context menu option for this.

New comment by jsmith99 in "Show HN: I built AI that turns 4 hours of financial analysis into 30 seconds"

jsmith99 — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 08:55:51 +0000

Large companies need to do it too, including all LSE listed. Here is a summary by the regulator https://www.frc.org.uk/library/digital-reporting/structured-...

But of course a LLM could theoretically automate much of the analysis stage.