Hacker News: lostdog

New comment by lostdog in "GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app"

lostdog — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:04:27 +0000

"a real balance sheet, assets against liabilities, not a spending feed dressed up with colours"

Ugh. Just write your own damn post already

New comment by lostdog in "C++: The Documentary"

lostdog — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:45:06 +0000

C++ was a superb language for its time. There was nothing faster with as-powerful abstractions. It showed how far you can change a language too, with C++11 being a massively better language with shared_ptr and company.

It took in almost every idea, and the battlefield showed us which do work and which don't. We get to keep RAII, move vs copy, smart pointers, placement-new, and generics. We get to drop auto_ptr, copy-by-default, its specific exceptions implementation (fight me), multiple virtual inheritance, and templates as full code substitution.

In my opinion the battles have played out, and Rust is the best sum-up of what worked (it even inherited the compile times! Lucky us!)

New comment by lostdog in "Ask HN: Why is AI use decried if it has been used without attribution?"

lostdog — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:19:10 +0000

AI code is often fine. The point of the code is for the computer to do a job. And code is supposed to be consistent and boring and straightforward in its structure. AI is pretty ok at this.

AI is terrible at writing. Its prose is awful and horrendous to read. Plus, the whole point of reading a written piece is to hear about the author's new ideas or experiences. If AI wrote your piece it's both bad and pointless. I can also prompt the AI to hear what it knows about.

New comment by lostdog in "Claude Opus 4.8"

lostdog — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:59:57 +0000

I haven't tried opus 4.8 yet, but I hope the writing quality has returned to the Opus 4.5 level. Anthropic really lost something, where 4.5 had this really crisp writing style that flowed really nicely and 4.6 and 4.7 sound much more "chatgpt-like." It feels like they tuned it to be too much of a problem solver, and when you do that you get this terse, clipped textual output that's more difficult to read.

New comment by lostdog in "When (if ever) it's appropriate to make jokes before the US Supreme Court"

lostdog — Sun, 24 May 2026 17:11:47 +0000

It is because they have power, and want to be addressed this way. And you are likely to lose your case if you don't follow their rules.

New comment by lostdog in "Did moving to new place have intended effect?"

lostdog — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:54:36 +0000

The major axis is urban+gritty to more suburby and spread out. It's a very personal preference where you want to be, but most people dislike the most gritty areas (tenderloin, most of soma). It's worth aiming for a neighborhood at the median as your first.

New comment by lostdog in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

lostdog — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:27:21 +0000

Yes, bbc had gone back to paywalling this month.

New comment by lostdog in "First tunnel element of the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel immersed"

lostdog — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:45:46 +0000

Is real, physical engineering that much better?

Take the new sf bay bridge span. It leaked, and had to be fixed to prevent critical parts from corroding. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Caltrans-was-warned-o...

Projects are consistently over budget, late, and shoddily done in the physical world too.

New comment by lostdog in "DeepClaude – Claude Code agent loop with DeepSeek V4 Pro"

lostdog — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:35:40 +0000

Yes, if you just list 3 more problems about the US then it means that China has no problems at all.

New comment by lostdog in "DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier"

lostdog — Sat, 02 May 2026 15:00:28 +0000

Grok is despised because it has more aggressive alignment.

New comment by lostdog in "Adding a team was the wrong strategic decision"

lostdog — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:28:59 +0000

The best managers I've seen would turn this situation into a headcount request.

The problem is leadership has priorities 1-5. Your team works on 1-3, but the PM keeps getting hassled about 4 and 5, so they look for levers to get them to happen.

In this situation, the PM scrounged up headcount from elsewhere, but if you present the option of adding headcount to the existing team, then you create a more harmonious option of getting these lower priorities accomplished.

Of course, this guy was taken fully by surprise by the suggestion. It's much harder to present a better option after the fact, and I agree that letting leadership feel the consequences of its decisions is a reasonable thing to do in this case.

New comment by lostdog in "C++26 is done: ISO C++ standards meeting Trip Report"

lostdog — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:59:38 +0000

And uv required some ground work, where the PEP process streamlined how you define a python project, and then uv could be built on top.

New comment by lostdog in "Automatically generate all 3D print files for organizing a drawer"

lostdog — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 05:13:57 +0000

Is there something mass-produced that's flexible and consistent like gridfinity? As a non 3d printer owner, I've been looking for something I can just buy that would work.

New comment by lostdog in "Every layer of review makes you 10x slower"

lostdog — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:59:27 +0000

Maybe it's time to do pair agentic engineering? Have two engineers at the screen, writing the prompts together, and deciding how to verify the results.

New comment by lostdog in "Should AI web agents skip sponsored/ad results by default?"

lostdog — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 01:47:24 +0000

Whoosh

New comment by lostdog in "MCP Is Dead; Long Live MCP"

lostdog — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 21:38:31 +0000

In MCP setups you do give the agent the full description of what the tool can do, but I don't see why you couldn't do the same for executables. Something like injecting `tool_exe --agent-usage` into the prompt at startup.

Great article otherwise. I've been wondering why people are so zealous about MCP vs executable tools, and it looks like it's just tradeoffs between implementation differences to me.

New comment by lostdog in "Should AI web agents skip sponsored/ad results by default?"

lostdog — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 05:35:34 +0000

Yes, sites should support a NoAds header that agents can provide, which ensures that the site doesn't provide any ads that the agent could accidentally click on.

New comment by lostdog in "Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down"

lostdog — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:54:05 +0000

And get it into a modern certification. Want LEEDS? Get the sound measurement people out.

New comment by lostdog in "San Francisco Graffiti"

lostdog — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:13:10 +0000

Please post your address. I'd like to help make your home "feel alive."

New comment by lostdog in "San Francisco Graffiti"

lostdog — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:11:45 +0000

They are oppressed by their neighbors, who can scribble all over their home without consequences.

Have you had to clean off graffiti?