Hacker News: mattkevan

New comment by mattkevan in "Berthd"

mattkevan — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:33:54 +0000

Claude 5 hitting developers and product managers like 4o hit people who thought ChatGPT was their boyfriend or they were inventing a new branch of science.

New comment by mattkevan in "Berthd"

mattkevan — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:24:25 +0000

It's so obvious on projects like this that everything's generated.

"One line. A worktree, a box, an agent." Fuck does that mean?

Have some pride and actually write the text yourself. Tell my why it's interesting. What problems are you trying to solve?

If you can't be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it.

New comment by mattkevan in "Google ending ChromeOS support two years early"

mattkevan — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:06:50 +0000

I would very much like one of those, and have done for years. Like the old PowerBook Duos, where you slotted the laptop into a docking station for extra ports, graphics etc.

Maybe they could call it an iPhone Duo. Oh wait…

New comment by mattkevan in "Gemini 4 Argon"

mattkevan — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:37:00 +0000

Another anecdote: Gemini is the only model that’s flat out lied to me, then accused me of lying when I provided evidence that it was wrong.

Many other models get things wrong, but Gemini is the only one to go on the defensive.

New comment by mattkevan in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

mattkevan — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:30:55 +0000

Yeah I’ve done that, and added a list of banned words and phrases to AGENTS. It regularly forgets and lands load-bearing seams worth my eye.

New comment by mattkevan in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

mattkevan — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:21:58 +0000

I hate Opus 5’s writing style. It’s exhausting. Really hoping there’s a release that fixes it soon as I can feel my sanity slipping away as I try and parse what the hell it’s trying to say.

New comment by mattkevan in "Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash"

mattkevan — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:42:02 +0000

Maybe if employers offered better working conditions and salaries people wouldn’t feel the need to go on strike?

New comment by mattkevan in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra"

mattkevan — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:26:51 +0000

From what I remember, they bought Danger which had a popular product that worked, but some VP made them rewrite all their software on a Microsoft stack. This took years and didn’t work very well. By the time they were finally released they were woefully outdated and only on the market for a few weeks before being killed.

New comment by mattkevan in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra"

mattkevan — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:18:27 +0000

It’s easy to forget what a difference multitouch capacitive touchscreens made to mobile devices. As far as I’m aware, the iPhone was the first device to use it at scale. Apple also spent years designing a new interaction paradigm for it, taking multitouch from cool tech demo (Fingerworks) to the mainstream.

Microsoft had Windows Mobile and WinCE for years before iOS, but typically they got the UI wrong and tried to jam a desktop interface on a mobile OS (a few years later they overcompensated and jammed a tablet interface on a desktop OS). By the time the iPhone was out it was too late to rework Mobile into a multitouch OS.

Famously, the BlackBerry guys thought it was impossible to put a full desktop os on a phone, and that Apple must have faked the initial demo. Again, by the time they could respond by ditching their existing software and buying QNX it was too late for them too.

Android only survived because it was a new OS and the team immediately ditched their Blackberry clone UI and built an iOS clone instead. Even then it took until at least v5 before it was as smooth as iOS, and the tablet story is still poor.

New comment by mattkevan in "Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out"

mattkevan — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:03:15 +0000

Ha yeah you're right. It wasn't a proper homepage if it didn't have an animated traffic cone 'Under construction' gif.

New comment by mattkevan in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

mattkevan — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:58:27 +0000

It's really annoying. I've had to write a CLAUDE.md file that specifically bans particular phrases and tries to keep narrative out of comments. Also the I have ADHD skill [1] helps to force Opus to get to the point.

It's also the case when using Claude Design - it loves to fill the UI with little labels that describe how everything works. I think it's been trained on both UI microcopy and functional annotations and can't tell the difference. It's extremely obvious when a website has been one-shotted with Claude. I like the Oh My Pi harness, but the site's insufferable [2]. Reasonix is another one - interesting app, but the UI is awful due to the amount of unnecessary crap.

[1] https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd

[2] https://omp.sh

[3] https://reasonix.io

New comment by mattkevan in "Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out"

mattkevan — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:33:16 +0000

I’m old and it’s definitely not the old web. I consider the old web to be when PNGs were sliced with Fireworks and laid out in tables.

2009-2014 is Web 2.0, back when people still thought social media was a good idea.

New comment by mattkevan in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

mattkevan — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:54:00 +0000

Ha, openlibrary and google books for now. And yes, the covers are not great. Currently just pleased to get it working, will add better providers later.

New comment by mattkevan in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

mattkevan — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:26:44 +0000

I’m making Stacks, an open source ebook manager and server, as a lightweight alternative to Calibre.

Written in Swift, it consists of a SwiftUI browser and a Mac/Linux server and CLI. Shares are automatically discovered via Bonjour/avahi and also published as OPDS feeds.

It can import Calibre libraries and has basic support for managing books on Kindles, but I’ve only tested it with a MTP Paperwhite as that’s all I’ve got.

https://github.com/MattKevan/Stacks

New comment by mattkevan in "Twenty Years of RISC OS Open"

mattkevan — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 23:00:23 +0000

I had that same model, except I fitted the chips myself. The first time I’d really ever looked inside a computer and very exciting for me age 11. The old Arthur ROMs were a prize possession for quite some time afterwards.

New comment by mattkevan in "NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook"

mattkevan — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:37:19 +0000

I reckon the same dipshits responsible for Microsoft’s product naming in the early 2000s all moved on to Google to wreak the same havoc there.

New comment by mattkevan in "Show HN: Are You in the Weights?"

mattkevan — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:37:04 +0000

I once had a model insist that I was a web designer living in Brighton who ran an agency called 'Guerilla Futures' and was the author of a series of UX design for babies books.

Obviously it was a hallucination, but a very detailed and consistent one. Especially as if things had gone slightly differently there's a good chance I could have ended up in Brighton. Plus it's a pretty good name and the books are a fun idea too. Was this my Sliding Doors moment?

New comment by mattkevan in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

mattkevan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:29:13 +0000

• A social ebook reading app where you can create reading groups and have realtime discussions.

• A visual moodboard and notes app that uses local models to link and surface content, a bit like an AI powered Memex.

• A new UI design tool for Mac/iOS with deep support for design systems and AI agents.

• A CMS and static site generator that runs entirely in the browser. Download the site as a zip or publish directly to GitHub/Netlify.

https://github.com/sparktype-project/sparktype

New comment by mattkevan in "WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access"

mattkevan — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:29:37 +0000

Where are we on the embrace/extend/extinguish curve right about now?

New comment by mattkevan in "Sergey Brin told Google staff that working 60 hours a week is the 'sweet spot' (2025)"

mattkevan — Sun, 31 May 2026 17:57:25 +0000

What an arsehole.

Multi-billionaire says to work harder to make him richer faster. The sooner this attitude is recognised as a sickness the better.