Hacker News: keithnz

New comment by keithnz in "German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews"

keithnz — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:06:09 +0000

The irony of an article that makes a false claim about what Google was found liable for.... and that very few are fact checking it :)

The law they broke was a law protecting personal and business reputation against false statements of fact. Essentially no one can say I might be wrong, check yourself, but X is Y if that claim is essentially defamatory.

This is pretty good, I hope googles approach is to make sure they don't end up making statements of fact like they did and use more appropriate wording like according to X.... with direct disclaimer that they can't verify it. Even better that they look court documents to find any legal ruling and point people to that too.

New comment by keithnz in "Making Graphics Like it's 1993"

keithnz — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:13:17 +0000

it used to be a hardware thing, so if your pixels were represented by a nibble, and the definition of the color for each of the 16 possible value is in table the hardware references, you just update that table (on a vsync, or even an hsync) and you could get cool animations effects (for the time)

random example from the Atari 800xl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPjLZ4MVKCc (you can see how slow it is to draw a scene, but the animation effect due to pallete rotation is really fast).

New comment by keithnz in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

keithnz — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:46:25 +0000

autocomplete isn't "exact", so it does have in its suggestions things that don't exactly always make sense, but it does list things by what is contextually relevant. It has a basic understanding of sql syntax such it will suggest potential keywords next, it introspects things like tablenames so they are available in spots where a tablename would be relevant, and if it has tables it will introspect them to get fieldname, and any named things like x as y will also become suggestions within the context of the query you are working on. This results in mostly correct suggestions. However it generally always has the suggestion you want, it works really well with field names / table names, which mainly what I wanted, and very basic with sql syntax (which I normally don't need any help with other than relevant keyword completion)

New comment by keithnz in "Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)"

keithnz — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:53:21 +0000

thing is, he didn't accept the limitations, he categorically cut off his "Dream". The whole point is, if you are going to super rigid about the criteria of your "dream" then you are likely going to be defeated by all kinds of hurdles. You need to adapt. If at the first hurdle you give up, then likely it's just a whimsical fantasy, not something you seriously wanted in your life. To me, it's not rude. It is ok to give up on things like that if it's not really seriously what you want. Which is essentially what he is saying. I'm saying not to confuse it with the dreams that the commenter above is saying, things that he seriously wants to be part of his life. Not whimsical fantasy. For that, pursue it, adapt, change, find solutions, don't be rigid. Hence the problem with the term "Dream"

New comment by keithnz in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

keithnz — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:46:20 +0000

I wrote a tui sql client to replace DataGrip (which is really slow). https://github.com/keithn/sql It's quite customized to what I wanted, I haven't really checked it works with other things.... only thing is, I don't really use it much anymore, I just get claude to do all my querying.

Most of the tools I write now are bridges to various SaaS products that have APIs but no CLIs.

New comment by keithnz in "Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)"

keithnz — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:42:44 +0000

I don't think you understood the point. If it really is your "dream" you adapt, as someone else pointed out, there's people without knees who snowboard.... there's a bunch of things you can do. But quite clearly, he hadn't even started on that journey, he didn't even know if he would have enjoyed it. it was a fantasy. Trust me, I get it, I have bad knees, but during my 40s my fantasy was to do parkour, and I did, I just adapted and got pretty good at it, now in my 50s, I don't do parkour anymore, but have a bunch of other problems and I still work out how to do the things I want.

New comment by keithnz in "Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)"

keithnz — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:35:13 +0000

The article is a bit off base IMHO. That guy could go snowboarding, he just thinks the warning he got creates a risk that isn't worth it. It sounds to me he hasn't even thought much about risk mitigation, or alternatives, etc. So really he's talking about letting go of a non serious fantasy that he has. 'Dream' is a bit of a wishy washy term... you could call that fantasy a dream, but you could also call things you are really determined to achieve a dream also. As long as something is possible, then its potentially achievable. Sometimes you have to go down paths where things only "might" be possible before really knowing if it is actually achievable. If things are important to you, go down "might be possible" paths unless the pursuit of that is detrimental in other significant ways.

New comment by keithnz in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

keithnz — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 03:54:50 +0000

schooling has to be designed around "average" teachers. Having someone who is gifted at teaching is great, but there wouldn't be many teachers if that was the standard. I often think when people idealize what schooling should be like it always seems like they are imagining teachers who are gifted.

New comment by keithnz in "WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access"

keithnz — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 03:28:30 +0000

Just a comment on Proton... I've recently shifted to linux (garuda ) as a native OS for gaming (still dual booting, but linux is my main OS now, I used to run linux VMs in windows). My experience with Proton is that only ~30% of my games work out of the box. Some games like dota2, and factorio are native linux and work MUCH better (faster/higher fps) in linux. A bunch of windows games work fine, other's semi work, and I have to spend a bunch of time investigating why I'm getting the issues I'm getting. Others just aren't really supported (it seems anti cheat software is a big blocker) or I just can figure out what is going wrong quick enough that I just abandon it. Overall, everything seems better in linux world, everything is really snappy. I'm hoping more game companies treat linux as a first class citizen as more people switch. It is definitely a great platform for gaming but really just needs game creators to ensure their games work, ideally native, but even just using Proton would be good.

New comment by keithnz in "NSA using Anthropic's Mythos for cyber attacks"

keithnz — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:42:24 +0000

seems they forgot to say "...and the networks of friendly nations / allies"

New comment by keithnz in "The ways we contain Claude across products"

keithnz — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:39:00 +0000

but no matter what you do this is the tradeoff you are making. Different people have different tolerances for that balance, hence why I'm happy to watch people on youtube in wingsuits and not do it myself. Of course in this new AI world, quantifying the probability and scale of harm is hard/not fully known. We are trying to mitigate risks with AI, but who knows, could be one misstep away from plummeting off a cliff.

New comment by keithnz in "I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis"

keithnz — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:19:46 +0000

These kinds of things can be quite life changing, people can come out the other side quite different people.

New comment by keithnz in "I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis"

keithnz — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:15:01 +0000

one of the really good things about these kinds of write ups and accounts of experiences and false leads is that I hope it feeds the LLMs with more context. For both me and my partner we've had problems with misdiagnosis that took a while to correct. My partner also suffered with auditory psychosis, and that was a super difficult (and bizarre) time. A little while ago I just started recording everything so I can use AI tools to validate medical advice and track symptoms, already it's caught things (semi minor things) that I've been able to address with my doctor. I would never suggest relying on AI tools, but certainly useful as a second opinion type thing as well as exploring possibilities.

New comment by keithnz in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

keithnz — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:58:45 +0000

seems ironic that critics were saying, it needs typing, and all the elixir fans were saying you don't need typing, you don't get bugs related to typing because elixir is somehow magic, now they get typing and it finds bugs for them.... but you said you didn't need that to prevent bugs? But good to see! I spent a bunch of time trying out Elixir a while back, I enjoyed it, but just didn't agree with the lack of types.

New comment by keithnz in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

keithnz — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:18:45 +0000

if you are prompting such that the LLM isn't pulling context that the recipient doesn't have access to, then your email is likely marginal.

ie the prompt "Send 'bob' an email with a description of why the VPN bridge isn't working so they can debug their side" is a mostly useless as a prompt for anyone, it's only useful when the LLM has all the context of some analysis of the particular issue and what is going on and then injects it into the email.

New comment by keithnz in "GitHub and the crime against software"

keithnz — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:29:45 +0000

where are you getting that information from? see https://www.githubstatus.com/ uptimes are really high. This is kind of exactly what I'm talking about, people are over exaggerating problems with github for some weird reason. Working with github daily, I haven't even noticed down time expect maybe once or twice in the last year or so.

New comment by keithnz in "GitHub and the crime against software"

keithnz — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:47:49 +0000

All this hate directed at github feels odd, every time I look into people complaining, or moving their projects off, other than a few related to genuine bugs, many just seem ideological. This article, calling it a crime against software? ... It's just silly. The article itself is a crime against articles, barely readable, weird ass colors. It mostly seems a regurgitation of other peoples complaints and mostly overblown.

We've been using github for a while at our company and find it really good. Copilot reviews are good, we have actions that work every single time, everything just works really well. There are, of course, plenty of things that could be improved, but it's still top dog in this space. I think maybe a couple of times there's been an outage that's affected us for a small amount of time. Overall, it's a good product.

New comment by keithnz in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

keithnz — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:30:34 +0000

If you look at the latest stuff from the previous owner where they recorded multiple conversations / pulled security footage... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zedmOopRTm0 1, they were allowed to do consignment deals, 2, when corporate took control, they said they'd take on the consignment liability, 3, BAM outright threatens them with making the legal process too expensive for them.

All of which contradicts the current corporate response

New comment by keithnz in "Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking"

keithnz — Wed, 27 May 2026 01:02:03 +0000

Not sure about SaaS, For nearly all our SaaS AI's just made it easier to work with, we haven't got rid of a single SaaS product, but via APIs, we've integrated and automated a LOT more of our existing SaaS products.

New comment by keithnz in "Uber blows through its AI budget in 1 quarter"

keithnz — Tue, 26 May 2026 23:00:50 +0000

My ongoing theory is for small to middle sized businesses AI is incredibly useful as it will help leverage you to grow your business by building more than you could before AI. But for big businesses, like uber, not sure the advantages are the same, they could already build what they want, so it seems the only thing that's likely is cost savings.