Hacker News: marcellus23

New comment by marcellus23 in "Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders"

marcellus23 — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 16:46:15 +0000

But it's not available to anyone anyway. My point is that the title is clickbait. There's simply no data available to draw a conclusion one way or the other.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders"

marcellus23 — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 05:21:19 +0000

What point are you making?

New comment by marcellus23 in "Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders"

marcellus23 — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 20:23:13 +0000

> DoorDash only rolled out its Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector less than a month ago. ... Without that kind of linkup—which is still only available to a small number of “early beta partners” and mainly used to streamline corporate lunch orders

So it's available to almost no one anyway. Misleading title.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Ask HN: Design My YouTube Feed"

marcellus23 — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 18:48:40 +0000

> I clicked on a bearded sales guy by mistake and my feed is now full of this guy.

I make copious use of the "Not Interested" and "Don't Recommend Channel" menu items on suggested videos. And I also frequently thumbs-down videos that I watch that I don't want influencing my ranking. Doesn't help completely but I'm generally satisfied with my YT recommendations.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Show HN: To Honor Sir Patrick Stewart, Enjoy the TNG Episode Guessing Game"

marcellus23 — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 18:29:59 +0000

> The latter episode hasn’t aged well because of one unnecessary romantic/sex scene

Not trying to be intentionally obtuse but — what is this referring to? I watched this episode recently and it seemed fine.

New comment by marcellus23 in "WorldTUI: I trained a 360M model to pretend to be a terminal"

marcellus23 — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 14:27:55 +0000

The article mentions that explicitly and links to it: https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/

New comment by marcellus23 in "New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing"

marcellus23 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:27:23 +0000

Developers can only write data into Apple Health from the local phone SDK.

Cloud import is only supported from health providers and laboratories.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Blindsight (Watts Novel)"

marcellus23 — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:48:54 +0000

> IIRC, wasn't the vampires' dominance ended by the invention of architecture, given they had some sort of right-angle-based susceptibility to seizures?

Yeah, exactly. I think that was his way of answering "if human-level consciousness is such a waste of resources, why did humans become dominant on Earth".

New comment by marcellus23 in "Blindsight (Watts Novel)"

marcellus23 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:52:48 +0000

> Forget the galaxy, if consciousness had no benefits (or was actively detrimental), then a sapiens variant without it on earth might easily out-compete the conscious variant and spread

Isn't this pretty much what happens with the vampires? I know they're not completely non-conscious but they're clearly supposed to be somewhere between humans and Rorschach.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Blindsight (Watts Novel)"

marcellus23 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:45:46 +0000

> It is not hard sci-fi at all

What do you consider hard SF? That term doesn't have a real definition and everyone's conception is different. But I think it's unreasonable to say that Blindsight is not hard at all. On the spectrum of SF, it clearly leans way more towards the hard side.

Or, put another way, if Blindsight is not hard science fiction to you, then I think your criteria for hardness is far beyond almost everyone else's.

New comment by marcellus23 in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

marcellus23 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:30:08 +0000

Hm, you should generally be able to hit Return to close a message box on Mac. Or, more specifically, to activate the default action in a dialog (the button whose background is the tint color of the application). Spacebar activates the button that has the focus ring around it, which may or not be the default button, but you can use Tab to move the focus around.

At least, this is the way it's always been on OS X and later. I'm not sure about classic Mac OS.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Parody Hacker News (2013)"

marcellus23 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:11:31 +0000

I still miss n-gate so much. I wonder where that guy went. Hope he's okay.

New comment by marcellus23 in "This blog is written in en-GB"

marcellus23 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:51:37 +0000

as an American this is my favorite format. Sortable, and the mm-dd order reflects the standard American way of writing month+day, and yyyy is unambiguously the year since it's 4 letters. Best of both worlds.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers"

marcellus23 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:58:29 +0000

That hasn’t been my experience in the US, either personally or from talking to others who took CS degrees.

Keep in mind that plenty of people on HN and in the industry did not take CS degrees in college. We did learn about PIDs, if briefly.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal"

marcellus23 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:30:49 +0000

If I picked a human off the street and asked them to "count first two hundred numbers in reverse while skipping every third number and check if they are in sequence", I bet most would screw up.

my point is not that current LLMs are sentient, or even that LLMs ever could be. My point is that it's very difficult to come up with a way to test consciousness, and it makes me a bit nervous to see people suggesting that something could never be conscious just because it's technological and not biological.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal"

marcellus23 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:06:14 +0000

It's very easy to say, "well, of course, a thing that looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, is not necessarily a duck." But when you're presented with something indistinguishable from a duck in every way, how do you determine whether it's a duck? You can't just say "well I know it's not a duck". It's dodging the question.

New comment by marcellus23 in "A brief history of instant coffee"

marcellus23 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:12:07 +0000

> I drink more coffee than 99% of the population

How much is that?

New comment by marcellus23 in "Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide"

marcellus23 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:01:06 +0000

AI-generated UIs, at least ones aimed at an engineering audience, have a very distinct appearance. They seem to always have the following attributes:

- Dark mode design with lots of colors

- Buttons that have vibrant, bright borders and duller backgrounds

- Excessive (IMO) usage of monospace fonts for stylistic reasons

None of this proves that it's AI (the other comments have covered that) but in my experience it's always correct.

New comment by marcellus23 in "The future of version control"

marcellus23 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 19:11:55 +0000

That's kind of the simplest case, though, where "theirs" and "ours" makes obvious sense.

What if I'm rebasing a branch onto another? Is "ours" the branch being rebased, or the other one? Or if I'm applying a stash?

New comment by marcellus23 in "How people woke up before alarm clocks"

marcellus23 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:55:24 +0000

The other comments make good points but also want to point out that that quote was written 37 years ago.