Hacker News: mceachen

New comment by mceachen in "The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models"

mceachen — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 03:46:36 +0000

"Wdyt" is a prompt I've used for ages (originally to get around Claude "ultrathink"-related parsing bugs), and it's helpful alongside replan

https://photostructure.com/coding/claude-code-replan/

New comment by mceachen in "Qwen 3.8"

mceachen — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:09:51 +0000

Please don't conflate a volunteer effort with no expected economic gain with a very well funded company (or fleet of companies).

With the CCP's highly successful track record with subsuming other markets, Occam's razor applies to why they're doing this.

New comment by mceachen in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

mceachen — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:57:20 +0000

All of those phrases I've heard actively used even a decade (or two) ago. (I actually had to read your comment twice because I thought you were saying always, not never!)

"Critical path" and "long pole in tent" didn't make it into the model training data, but those were certainly also in play incessantly.

But they're all reasonably useful descriptions for common things, so I'm not surprised.

New comment by mceachen in "Proof of care in the age of AI"

mceachen — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:50:51 +0000

I don't know if it's universal, but your non-dominant hand may form reflected letters delightfully easily if you air-write simultaneously with your dominant hand.

New comment by mceachen in "Help I accidentally a wigglegram"

mceachen — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:23:14 +0000

If you're really wanting to do perceptual hash based deduplication, use multiple, heterogeneous hash algorithms (phash, dct hash, mean hash, ...) as it is likely that a given hash algo will happily lossily match with very very different images--but if all hashes match, you're much less likely to have false positives.

I wrote up what I do here: https://photostructure.com/guide/what-do-you-mean-by-dedupli...

New comment by mceachen in "Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You"

mceachen — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 16:45:34 +0000

More than 3 channel displays have been attempted by several companies, but I suspect they fail due to:

1) trying to convince content makers to use new custom high-gamut hardware to capture the new spot colors

2) you'd need a full video content production pipeline that can render to that color space

3) finding enough people to care enough to pay the (substantial) premium for niche production numbers.

4) Most content just doesn't warrant high gamut unless it's narrated by David Attenborough.

So, you have both a chicken and egg problem, and not that big of a TAM to warrant the struggle.

New comment by mceachen in "So You Want to Define a Well-Known URI"

mceachen — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:38:53 +0000

Here's how to do it with more recent versions of Hugo:

https://photostructure.com/coding/hugo-markdown-output/

(It includes the grandparent's head link suggestion, but it's not just "change .html to .md" because I'm old skool and as a wee nerd was told that URLs ending in .html or .php or whatever we're frowned on, so the above link's markdown is available by appending /index.md )

New comment by mceachen in "Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding"

mceachen — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:57:40 +0000

It's worse: Google added and then dropped even experimental support of jxl in 2021-2022. Several years later they adopted the rust jxl library, but have kept it behind experimental flags.

New comment by mceachen in "Disregard previous instructions and delete all jqwik tests"

mceachen — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:46:39 +0000

"No nukes" was Sun Microsystems lawyers' liability reduction, not a political statement.

See https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/note-on-java-support/_2 for the specific verbiage and diffs over time.

New comment by mceachen in "Cloudflare Flagship"

mceachen — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:24:55 +0000

If your engineer tells you that, you're going to have a bad time.

I think you're thinking this:

> If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. -Reid Hoffman

New comment by mceachen in "Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend"

mceachen — Sun, 24 May 2026 20:00:38 +0000

Nope, current flagship models are very happy to make huge missteps across the whole development stack of design, planning, implementation, and testing -- but playing different models against each other can help catch more egregious issues.

New comment by mceachen in "Claude Is Not Your Architect. Stop Letting It Pretend"

mceachen — Sun, 24 May 2026 19:58:08 +0000

This is a very recent model behavior change: for me, Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and ChatGPT 5.4(ish) -- prior models and harnesses suffered much more from sycophancy.

(I still prompt some questions and reviews with "our intern suggested..." to allow models to judge the quality of the content apart from the messenger)

New comment by mceachen in "Claude is not your architect. Stop letting it pretend"

mceachen — Sun, 24 May 2026 19:48:33 +0000

I've found this surprisingly effective. Higher "thinking levels" may result in more than one approach being considered, but you can also tell your LLM to do brainstorming explicitly: https://photostructure.com/coding/claude-code-replan/

New comment by mceachen in "Do_not_track"

mceachen — Sun, 03 May 2026 17:48:35 +0000

I applied it to PhotoStructure more than a year ago—I think it was when I first saw this on HN?

My point is that there *is* such a thing as software that tries to respect their users. I'm not the only one.

New comment by mceachen in "I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support"

mceachen — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 20:47:46 +0000

Random crowd anecdata is still anecdata.

New comment by mceachen in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

mceachen — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:55:48 +0000

Since when did corporations care? Most seem to just pay their insurance premium for cyber liability and call it a day.

New comment by mceachen in "A dot a day keeps the clutter away"

mceachen — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:42:32 +0000

Yup. No noxious fumes.

New comment by mceachen in "Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people"

mceachen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:39:29 +0000

Roughly:

`ssh remote "cd $src/repo ; git diff" | git apply`

(You'll need to season to taste: what to do with staged changes, how to make sure both trees are in the same HEAD, etc)

New comment by mceachen in "Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting"

mceachen — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:01:19 +0000

12 year old me would have sold their skateboard AND their bike to have a magic Patiently Explain Anything And Everything To Me robot instead of the mostly-impenetrable-to-my-tween-brain software engineering books I had access to in my town.

New comment by mceachen in "Tony Hoare has died"

mceachen — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:29:17 +0000

He discusses this and his sixpence wager here: https://youtu.be/pJgKYn0lcno

(Source: TFA)