Hacker News: klabetron

New comment by klabetron in "Show HN: AI SDLC Scaffold, repo template for AI-assisted software development"

klabetron — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 10:46:21 +0000

Thoughts on publishing an example output perhaps in another repo? Perhaps just the first two phases? Would be interesting to see what the output looks like practically speaking (before committing to using it for a project).

New comment by klabetron in "An experiment to use GitHub Actions as a control plane for a PaaS"

klabetron — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:33:21 +0000

Minor feedback: struggled to read this with the too-clever but distracting horizontal line scrolling down the page. Also the headers look squashed.

New comment by klabetron in "Bad Dye Job"

klabetron — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 10:41:44 +0000

I don’t think we should conclude that a tech columnist who regularly shits on EU tech policy really intends to attack the EU writ large. If he sounds like he’s generalising to the “whole thing,” I’m pretty sure he understands most readers know he’s not talking about the entire EU experiment. Just the backward tech regulation.

New comment by klabetron in "We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs"

klabetron — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:14:19 +0000

I introduced this to my old company years ago and called it Big Block of Cheese Day after the West Wing episode [1]. We mostly focused on very minor bugs that affected a tiny bit of our user base in edgey edge cases but littered our error logs. (This was years ago at a, back then, relatively immature tech company.)

It had the same spirit as a hackathon.

[1] https://westwing.fandom.com/wiki/Big_Block_of_Cheese_Day

New comment by klabetron in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

klabetron — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 09:37:30 +0000

Ugh. Reminds me that some time ago Siri stopped responding to “turn off my TV.” Now I have to remember to say “turn off my Apple TV.” (Which with the magic of HDMI CEC turns off my entire system.) Given how groggy I am when I want to turn off the TV, I often forget.

New comment by klabetron in "The World's 2.75B Buildings"

klabetron — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 08:47:49 +0000

Meta note: don’t see many blog posts as detailed as OP with seemingly mundane details. It assumes almost nothing of the user. So many posts would just say “install this QGIS plugin” with no mention of the pip calls, etc.

Not sure if this comes from search engine optimisation or years of experience consulting to clients that know nothing :)

Anyway, good work Mark. Another of your posts I’ll bookmark.

New comment by klabetron in "How Kyoto, Japan Became the Loveliest Tourist-Trap"

klabetron — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 09:01:15 +0000

This.

Went to Japan for the first time in August (…don’t recommend…the heat is intense…) and instead of spending days in Kyoto and Osaka, we spent a few days in Otsu on Lake Biwa.

Highlights:

- The freshwater beach was delightful (Biwako Omi-Maiko Nakahama) - There’s a public onsen that’s not listed on the official onsen association’s site (which only lists resorts you have to book long in advance and pay lots for): Spa Resort Ogoto Agaryanse. It has strip mall vibes from the outside but is a great local onsen on the inside. - If you’re an American and want to experience cultural appropriation: take a cruise on the Michigan paddle boat

And, of course, it’s close enough to Kyoto that you can bop in and out.

New comment by klabetron in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

klabetron — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:47:37 +0000

Gawker.

New comment by klabetron in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

klabetron — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:38:47 +0000

Probably didn’t have the level of adoption needed for the nefarious types to justify spending time finding Silverlight exploits.

New comment by klabetron in "Pdoc – Generate API documentation for Python projects"

klabetron — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 07:48:46 +0000

Love MkDocs* even for non-Python. But, wasn’t aware it could auto-generate from code comments like pdoc? I’d assume one would use pdoc for the API section of a hot mkdocs layout.

*not just because my initials are MK

New comment by klabetron in "Structured Procrastination (1995)"

klabetron — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 09:08:26 +0000

> Next time I'll see such a response, I probably will quit on the spot; this is unbelievably cruel.

Let me guess: you’d quit but your résumé’s out of date because you, like me, procrastinate updating it?

(Sounds like a manager trying to manage you out; make things miserable enough for you that you’ll quit without having to go through the redundancy process…)

New comment by klabetron in "Track which Electron apps slow down macOS 26 Tahoe"

klabetron — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 08:42:05 +0000

omg remember when we all had to install Java separately at the system level?

New comment by klabetron in "Safe zero-copy operations in C#"

klabetron — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 09:19:21 +0000

For the op, awesome article. Quick question: what’s the definition of your `swap(array, i, pivotIndex)` function? Am I missing something? Or just assumes it’s the standard set temp to a, set a to b, and set b to temp?

New comment by klabetron in "Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement"

klabetron — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 09:14:16 +0000

My CV is still in LaTeX which gives me the opportunity to procrastinate updating it (rather than actually applying for jobs) because of all of the tweaking I do.

If nothing else, typist is going go give me more opportunities to procrastinate! Nice.

New comment by klabetron in ""Your" vs. "My" in user interfaces"

klabetron — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 08:34:42 +0000

Agreed; if I’m writing help text or instructions, regardless of the use of “my” or “your”, I put pages or features in quotes or bold or italics or whatever format helps it stand out.

‘Click on your “My Cases” tab’

‘Click on “Account”’

etc

Reducing my/your in features is a good start (My Pictures → Pictures, as mentioned in this thread), but always treat specific concepts as proper nouns.

New comment by klabetron in "iPhone dumbphone"

klabetron — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 08:33:15 +0000

I’m in denial about needing to curb some pretty bad habits so won’t comment on that.

But! I have a fairly “smart” home for controlling my lights, etc. I control it with Siri and the Home app. When friends/family with iPhones stay with me, I just add them as a guest.

Just left town for a few weeks leaving my home & dog to a sitter… with an android. I’ve got an old iPhone that I ended up doing all of the Screen Time/Parental Controls hacks to lock down to must a smart remote. I didn’t love the result. I’m looking forward to using the OP’s post to guide me in making a better dumbphone/smart remote. Thanks!

New comment by klabetron in "Tufte CSS"

klabetron — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 07:19:59 +0000

Author calls this out in the document. It’s intentional.

New comment by klabetron in "The Last of Us Part II – Seattle Locations Tour"

klabetron — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 08:16:00 +0000

I think you’re missing the power plant/damn: https://maps.app.goo.gl/dy3wfsnHPQDys1Fo6?g_st=com.google.ma...

I visited Snoqualmie Lower Falls with a friend a few years ago and had this weird feeling I’d seen the place before… and then it hit me: it was clearly modelled in the game.

(It’s a bit of a drive to get there but so worth it.)

New comment by klabetron in "Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly"

klabetron — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 09:11:26 +0000

Odd choice that the example text on the homepage is almost all obvious typos that a standard spell check would pick up.

New comment by klabetron in "TikZJax: Embedding LaTeX Drawings in HTML"

klabetron — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 07:55:50 +0000

lol yep