Hacker News: macNchz

New comment by macNchz in "GitHub down again? no PR access"

macNchz — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:31:40 +0000

I don't have data for it, but I have been a Github user since 2012 and have found it to be down often for pretty much that entire time. I always figured it's cultural to a degree–new features always seem pretty buggy/underbaked, and often continue to long term but remain unloved and incomplete.

New comment by macNchz in "Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast"

macNchz — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:59:55 +0000

This is foundationally similar to a lesson I've found from years of pre-LLM software development: builds that turn around in 500ms instead of 5 minutes fundamentally change the way you can work as a software engineer. I think a lot of the same applies to working with LLMs. I'm not sure, though, what the path from where we are today to some future state of high speed token abundance actually looks like...I think there's plenty of chance that we see the bubble pop in the near term over token costs and complexities of today's infrastructure, then some totally different landscape of LLM use in 5-10 years that looks quite unlike what we have today, similar to how waiting 30 minutes for an MP3 of a single song to download on a 28k modem in 1999 seems quaint today.

New comment by macNchz in "Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"

macNchz — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:36:59 +0000

It does, for whatever reason the marketing page doesn’t advertise it but the docs have Linux instructions: https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/

I’ve been using this pretty extensively for a few months on Mac and Linux and have been super happy with it.

New comment by macNchz in "Turn And Face The Strange"

macNchz — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 23:39:18 +0000

I operate an app that orchestrates code running on a bunch of Sprites. A few months ago it was an exceptionally buggy service, frequently just fully broken or losing data (had to get support involved to recover one that got into a fully broken state), but from what I've seen at least they've become much more reliable in the past two months or so.

I evaluated Fly.io itself several years ago and found it unacceptably buggy as well for any real use case at the time, but I kept an eye on it and today I operate a few production workloads on it that are very stable and reliable—I figured the same would be true for Sprites and it seems to be taking shape that way.

New comment by macNchz in "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"

macNchz — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:29:38 +0000

Yes this is a blame-your-politicians situation more than anything else.

New comment by macNchz in "Claude Code: Anatomy of a Misfeature"

macNchz — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:30:04 +0000

I am a longtime and heavy Claude Code user, but Anthropic's product management overall (including for their Desktop/web products) has been really baffling me. I agree that these things often have the air of having been vibe coded without enough human input, and change so quickly (often without a particularly compelling reason for the change) as to be aggravating.

The most recent one that's had me annoyed is the "Fullscreen" TUI feature, which is super unintuitive, implementing its own text highlighting and copy-on-select mechanics, overriding your terminal's native right click. Easy to disable but terrible defaults, IMO. It's not even really clear to me what problem it was actually supposed to solve.

New comment by macNchz in "Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool"

macNchz — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:02:47 +0000

An outdoor heated pool that’s open all winter in a cold climate would be a destination worth a drive. A rather decadent use of energy otherwise, it’d be a good use for waste heat. There’s prior art in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, a destination spa that uses water from a geothermal power plant.

New comment by macNchz in "Potential session/cache leakage between workspace instances or consumer accounts"

macNchz — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:55:29 +0000

The person posting this claims to have reproduced in a separate context down the thread:

> Same thing just happened on a Claude Mobile session in same Enterprise account. Common theme in both is Sonnet 5, first response after more than 5 minutes (cache miss).

New comment by macNchz in "Potential session/cache leakage between workspace instances or consumer accounts"

macNchz — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:51:30 +0000

Caching is not supposed to work like that, but that doesn’t preclude the cache key computation function from having bugs.

New comment by macNchz in "Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)"

macNchz — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 22:46:28 +0000

One of my first real DIY projects during a summer in college nearly 20 years ago was replacing the rotted out basement bulkhead doors on the ~120 year old house I grew up in. I took measurements of the old ones, bought some nice tongue-and-groove cedar and high-quality hardware, and built the new doors in the garage. When they were fully assembled, I carried them over to install on the old stone frame. I took off the old ones, put mine in their place...and they didn't fit properly at all.

Momentarily baffled, I realized that, despite appearances, the old frame was actually not square, in fact it was a parallelogram. I'd measured the height and width and assumed it was square. The previous (experienced) carpenter who'd built the doors I was replacing had clearly noticed this, and simply allowed for the misalignment in his design. He built perfectly square-appearing doors that mounted to the not-square frame. I had to go back and rework mine considerably for them to fit without looking ridiculous. They're still there and holding up well, but I also still think of this lesson on a regular basis in my day to day life now.

New comment by macNchz in "5k menus from the New York Public Library’s Buttolph Collection (1880-1920)"

macNchz — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 17:12:52 +0000

Still pretty common at least in places near where oysters are grown, I think. My guess would be also that tastes changed over time as oyster fisheries were overfished and/or polluted by growing cities. There have been numerous waves of oyster collapse on the US east coast over hundreds of years, and places that once had them in incredible abundance now have none (though efforts to restore them have emerged).

There are a variety of parallels in the history of overfishing where a given seafood that was once abundant was then seen as undesirable and served to servants or prisoners (lobster, salmon), but today is somewhat of an expensive delicacy.

New comment by macNchz in "Doing nothing at work"

macNchz — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:38:15 +0000

I’ve had a half-written blog post in this vein for a while now using a fantasy RPG analogy: if you play a character that uses mana in any of these games, you’ll learn fairly quickly that using it all up all the time on trivial battles and running around empty leaves you with none when you genuinely need it.

Your mental energy deployed at work is not so dissimilar: keeping some in the tank gives you the option to deploy it strategically, rather than risking your health (burnout) when something unexpected comes up.

If you join a group in one of these games with a player who is bad at managing their mana, you’ll also find that they’re not such great teammates, either.

New comment by macNchz in "The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44"

macNchz — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:26:53 +0000

That's the thing that jumped out to me here—iPhones themselves and everything you could actually do with one during that period were way different from today. There were effectively no endless feeds of content to consume, the phone screens were way smaller and less vibrant, push notifications only came out about halfway through.

I was age 19-23 during that period (in the "highest impact" age group from the article), and I think I used my phone more for coordinating in-person social activity than anything else at the time. Additionally on that—iPhones were not widespread in my cohort at the time, even at an expensive private college with many students from upper income families.

New comment by macNchz in "Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux"

macNchz — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:00:41 +0000

Using a largely-stock Ubuntu desktop for work the past 6 years, Zoom has also been one of the most broken mainstream apps I've every used on any system ever. I appreciate they provide a native Linux option, but it has consistently been barely functional—often fully unusable to where I'd join important calls from the browser instead.

New comment by macNchz in "S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic"

macNchz — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 23:16:58 +0000

Because that doesn't force tons of passive investment dollars to participate. Being a part of the S&P500 doesn't require heavy promotion, they'd just get a slice of the investment from the millions of people who auto-invest money each month in retirement programs that buy S&P500 funds (among other things). There are already other indexes and funds where you can invest in high-tech/growth companies, but the people who are interested in that level of risk are already investing in them. These companies want to slip into the S&P because they'd get investment from people who are not specifically investing in high-risk/high-growth companies.

New comment by macNchz in "Azure Linux Desktop"

macNchz — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:11:23 +0000

I used Macs my whole life until I built a PC in 2020 and put Linux on it. Recently I’ve started using a Mac again for work (and KVM switching between it and my Linux box), and I really do prefer Linux at this point. I have a variety of gripes, but Apple’s popup based “{App} wants to do {thing}” permissions model drives me bonkers, in particular.

New comment by macNchz in "India's surprise baby bust"

macNchz — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:43:39 +0000

You have a huge confluence of societal changes over the course of the 20th century to explore here, that each ultimately contributed to women having actual choices and options in life other than just getting married and being a homemaker.

New comment by macNchz in "India's surprise baby bust"

macNchz — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:39:27 +0000

My impression was that the term arose out of a desire to communicate it as more of a chosen state of being, where "childless" may imply or at least allow some sense of undesired absence.

New comment by macNchz in "New York just passed a one-year temporary ban on data centers"

macNchz — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:23:08 +0000

To my understanding Apple's supply contracts have allowed them to keep prices flat compared to other brands, but the price of non-Mac desktops and laptops are absolutely ballooning right now because of the supply of memory chips. Apple themselves just last month increased the base price of the Mac Mini by 33% from $599 to $799.

The smartphone market appears to be affected as well: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/global-smartphone-market...

New comment by macNchz in "Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies"

macNchz — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:47:17 +0000

Most of the packaged pre-sliced bread in the bread aisle (as opposed to the bakery area) of American supermarkets is full of ingredients not traditionally used in bread, or used in food at all until recent decades. Bread made with flour, water, salt, and yeast (plus maybe olive oil, butter, eggs, sugar, herbs etc) is not considered ultra processed.