<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: macNchz</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=macNchz</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:09:32 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=macNchz" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah there's a weird thing where people would get <i>really</i> focused on whether something is "actually doing RAG" when it's pulling in all sorts of outside information, just not using some kind of purpose built RAG tooling or embeddings.<p>Now, the pendulum on that general concept seems to be swinging the opposite direction where a lot of those people just figured out that you don't <i>need</i> embeddings. That's true, but I'd suggest that people don't overindex on thinking that means embeddings are not actually useful or valuable. Embeddings can be downright magical in what you can build with them, they're just one more tool at your disposal.<p>You can mix and match these things, too! Indexing your documents into semantically nested folders for agents to peruse? Try chunking and/or summarizing each one, and putting the vectors in sidecar files, or even Yaml frontmatter. Disks are fast these days, you can rip through a lot of files indexed like that before you come close to needing something more sophisticated.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:43:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631996</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631996</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47631996</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’ve created a bunch of fresh Azure accounts over the past few years and each time I’ve found myself sitting there dumbfounded anew at how garbage the  experience is.<p>There has been weird broken jank at just about every step of the process at one point or another. Like, I’m a serious person trying to set something up for a production workload, and multiple times along the way to just having a working account that I can log into with billing configured, I’ll get baffling error messages like [ServiceKeyDepartureException: Insufficient validation expectancy. Sfhtjitgfxswinbvgtt-33-664322888], and the whole thing will simply not work until several hours later. Who knows why!?<p>I evaluated some Azure + Copilot Studio functionality for a project recently, which required more engagement with their whole 365 ecosystem than I’d had in a long time and it had many of the same problems but worse. Just unbelievably low quality software for the price and how popular it is. Every step of the way I hit some stupid issue. The people using this stuff are <i>clearly</i> not the people buying it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 02:39:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47622665</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47622665</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47622665</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Beyond just invasive/annoying, ad networks explicitly spread malware and scams/fraud. There's not much incentive for them to clamp down on it, though, as that would cost them money both in lost revenue and in paying for more thorough review.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:16:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47617241</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47617241</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47617241</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It’s kind of baffling to me that laptops in classrooms took off the way they did, as it seemed like a distraction machine to me even 25+ years ago, as a kid myself! My school got some carts of laptops that would move from classroom to classroom in ~2000—they were heavily used for flash games and other nonsense, and were strictly worse for that than in the dedicated computer lab classroom, where all of the monitors faced into the center of the room where the teacher could see them.<p>When I got to college a few years later I’d sit in the back of classrooms and see that a majority of students who’d brought a laptop (ostensibly for notes) were consistently distracted and doing something else, be it games or StumbleUpon. I can only imagine these decisions were made by groups of adults sitting around conference rooms, each staring at their own laptop and paying 20% attention to the meeting at hand.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:44:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613123</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613123</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613123</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Men are ditching TV for YouTube as AI usage and social media fatigue grow"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I find that all of Google’s ad products are under-moderated for malicious ads. It’s a choice on their part to not tightly control this—they certainly could, though it would harm their incredible profitability if they did more scrutiny on the ads they show. I personally don’t especially care to pay a premium not to see deepfakes of celebrities promoting crypto scams.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:28:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612977</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612977</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612977</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's definitely a productivity curve element to getting it to behave effectively within a given codebase. Certainly in the codebases I work with most frequently I find Claude will forget certain key aspects (how to run the tests or something) after a while and need a reminder, otherwise it gets into a loop like that trying to figure out how to do it from first principles with slightly incorrect commands.<p>I think a lot of the noise about letting Claude run for very extended periods involves relatively greenfield projects where the AI is going to be using tools and patterns and choices that are heavily represented in training data (unless you tell it not to), which I think are more likely to result in a codebase that lends itself to ongoing AI work. People also just exaggerate and talk about the one time doing that actually worked vs the 37 times Claude required more handholding.<p>The bigger problem I see with the "leave it running for the weekend" type work is that, even if it doesn't get caught up on something trivial like tabs vs spaces (glad we're keeping that one alive in the AI era, lol), it will accumulate bad decisions about project structure/architecture/design that become really annoying to untie, and that amount to a flavor of technical debt that makes it harder for agents themselves to continue to make forward progress. Lots of insidious little things: creating giant files that eventually create context problems, duplicating important methods willy nilly and modifying them independently so their implementations drift apart, writing tests that are..."designed to pass" in a way that creates a false sense of confidence when they're passing, and "forest for the trees" kind of issues where the AI gets the logic right inside a crucial method so it looks good at a glance, but it misses some kind of bigger picture flaw in the way the rest of the code actually <i>uses</i> that method.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:20:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545578</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545578</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47545578</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've been wondering if we'd see a cyber campaign emerge in this conflict. To my knowledge Iran seems to have pretty advanced cyber capabilities and increasingly fewer reasons to hold back. Gloves-off cyber war doesn't sound good to me. The US CISA already been cut back, has lost "virtually all of its top officials"^, doesn't have a permanent director, and is operating at a further reduced capacity because of the DHS shutdown.<p>^ <a href="https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/cisa-senior-official-departures/748992/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/cisa-senior-official-...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:22:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47543786</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47543786</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47543786</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Opus 4.5 to 4.6 was pretty incremental, I didn't see much of a difference.<p>The big coding model moments in recent recollection, IMO, were something like:<p>- Sonnet 3.5 update in October 2024: ability to generate actually-working code using context from a codebase became genuinely feasible.<p>- Claude 4 release in May 2025: big tool calling improvements meant that agentic editors like Claude Code could operate on a noticeably longer leash without falling apart.<p>- Gemini 3 Pro, Claude 4.5, GPT 5.2 in Nov/Dec 2025: with some caveats these were a pretty major jump in the difficulty and scale of tasks that coding assistants are able to handle, working on much more complex projects over longer time scales without supervision, and testing their own work effectively.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:06:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47543542</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47543542</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47543542</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Watching over shoulders as elderly people watch YouTube with ads and engage with clips of deepfake celebrities selling fraudulent nonsense is both enlightening and painful.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 21:43:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536185</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536185</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47536185</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Show HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not claiming to have hit on something unique here, but I think it’s realistic and often drowned out in favor of sci-fi nonsense.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Mar 2026 02:24:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512423</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512423</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512423</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Show HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's definitely creeping into things, though most of the features I've seen are fairly simplistic compared to what would be possible if the video was being reviewed + indexed by current SoTA multimodal LLMs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:26:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510388</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510388</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510388</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Show HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Presumably the ideal is some kind of a fusion. Upload or tag some images/videos and link someone's social profiles and the system can look out for them based on facial recognition, gait recognition, vehicle/pets/common wardrobe items in combination.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:22:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510328</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510328</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510328</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Show HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a really cool implementation—embeddings still often feel like magic to me. That said, this exact use case is sort of also my biggest point of concern with where AI takes us, much more so than most of the common AI risks you hear lots of chatter about. We live in a world absolutely loaded with cameras now but ultimately retain some semblance of semi-anonymity/privacy in public by virtue of the fact that nobody can actually watch or review all of the video from those cameras except when there is a compelling reason to do so, but these technologies are making that a much more realistic proposition.<p>The presence of cameras everywhere is considerably more concerning than the status quo, to me at least, when there is an AI watching and indexing every second of every feed—where camera owners or manufacturers or governments could set simple natural language parameters for highly specific people or activities notify about. There are obviously compelling and easy-to-sell cases here that will surely drive adoption as it becomes cost effective: get an alert to crime in progress, get an alert when a neighbor who doesn't clean up after his dog, get an alert when someone has fallen...but the potential implications of living in a panopticon like this if not well regulated are pretty ugly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:56:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506611</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506611</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47506611</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Was curious—good number of projects out there with an un-pinned LiteLLM dependencies in their requirements.txt (628 matches): <a href="https://github.com/search?q=path%3A*%2Frequirements.txt%20%2F%5Elitellm%24%2F&type=code" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/search?q=path%3A*%2Frequirements.txt%20%2...</a><p>or pyproject.toml (not possible to filter based on absence of a uv.lock, but at a glance it's missing from many of these): <a href="https://github.com/search?q=path%3A*%2Fpyproject.toml+%22%5C%22litellm%5C%22%22&type=code" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/search?q=path%3A*%2Fpyproject.toml+%22%5C...</a><p>or setup.py: <a href="https://github.com/search?q=path%3A*%2Fsetup.py+%22%5C%22litellm%5C%22%22&type=code" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/search?q=path%3A*%2Fsetup.py+%22%5C%22lit...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:05:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47505844</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47505844</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47505844</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Our commitment to Windows quality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I dunno, I thought about this before switching to Linux, when I gave my wife a Linux box I had sitting around in a pinch during the pandemic laptop shortage—a lot of people these days just need a browser, and there’s not really much to go wrong with that. If something does go wrong you can just nuke the whole thing and start over pretty easily.<p>I’ve certainly run into some odd situations on my desktop Linux machine over the past 6 years since I started using it full time, but I think most of them were related to the nature of how I use the machine more than inherent instability. I think I’ve spent many more hours of my life unwinding piles of malware and bloat from non-technical folks’ Windows machines than debugging this one.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Mar 2026 04:29:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463985</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463985</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463985</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Our commitment to Windows quality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Great point. Just last week I used AI to build a minimal replacement for a SaaS tool I’ve used in the past that has obnoxious feature gating/price tiers. My version isn’t nearly a complete replica, but it has the base functionality I want without having to feel like someone spent hundreds of hours perfecting price tiers with artificial limitations that annoy me just enough to upgrade.<p>Getting a tool that did exactly what I wanted with no fuss was delightful.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Mar 2026 04:03:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463866</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463866</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463866</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The only places I've heard of losing water during power outages are houses that use a private well (no power, no well pump), which would be the case anywhere. Municipal water systems may or may not use power to provide pressure, but are going to have generator power outside of the most severe outages.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:14:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47456727</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47456727</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47456727</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Astral to Join OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I use uv here and there but have a bunch of projects using regular pip with pip-tools to do a requirements.in -> requirements.txt as a lockfile workflow that I've never seen enough value in converting over. uv is clearly much faster but that's a pretty minor consideration unless I were for some reason changing project dependencies all day long.<p>Perhaps it never grabbed me as much because I've been running basically everything in Docker for years now, which takes care of Python versioning issues and caches the dependency install steps, so they only take a long time if they've changed. I also like containers for all of the other project setup and environment scaffolding stuff they roll up, e.g. having a consistently working GDAL environment available instantly for a project I haven't worked on in a long time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:19:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47441879</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47441879</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47441879</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There’s a name for that, SLAPP: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...</a><p>Many states in the US have laws to try to limit them by making them easier to dismiss etc.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:21:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438959</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438959</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438959</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by macNchz in "Nvidia NemoClaw"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No maliciousness or injection required, even the newest and most resistant models can start doing weird stuff on their own, particularly when they encounter something failing that they want to work.<p>Just today I had Opus 4.6 in Claude Code run into a login screen while building and testing a web app via Playwright MCP. When the login popped up (in a self-contained Chromium instance) I tried to just log in myself with my local dev creds so Claude would have access, but they didn't work. When I flipped back to the terminal, it turned out Claude had run code to query superadmin users in the database, picked the first one, and changed the password to `password123` so it could log in on its own.<p>This was a sandboxed local dev environment, so it was not a big deal (and the only reason I was letting it run code like that without approval), but it was a good reminder to be careful with these things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:32:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47433194</link><dc:creator>macNchz</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47433194</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47433194</guid></item></channel></rss>