Hacker News: mceachen

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)

New comment by mceachen in "Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team"

mceachen — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:20:34 +0000

No mention of auto renewal is made as far as I (and Claude) could determine.

Their OSS offer is first-hit-is-free.

New comment by mceachen in "Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability"

mceachen — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:25:47 +0000

At the same time, at least to me, the text reads like a transcript from one of their YouTube tear downs.

New comment by mceachen in "Welcome (back) to Macintosh"

mceachen — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:08:35 +0000

Before anyone downvotes this guy, spend some time on the official Apple support forum.

I can't point at a bug that I've seen addressed in subsequent OS releases.

Seizure-inducing HDMI flickering from Night Shift. Finder Trash not supporting put-back _sometimes_. Printers becoming permanently "paused" sporadically, or worse, very consistently. Mouse lag/stuttering because you used "the wrong USB port." Apple photos libraries corrupting themselves with no recovery paths.

It would be strictly better to just not have the forum, then shouting sorrows into the void would feel more solitary.

New comment by mceachen in "Should everyone be taking statins?"

mceachen — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:28:03 +0000

Currently profitable? Many are old enough to have a generic, and are close to the cost of aspirin at this point.

The LLM Sycophancy Antidote

mceachen — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:20:40 +0000

Article URL: https://photostructure.com/coding/sycophancy-antidote/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185029

Points: 12

# Comments: 1

New comment by mceachen in "AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet"

mceachen — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 04:56:06 +0000

I suspect an LLM would read the instructions more thoroughly than a human.

So if there are only brown M&Ms greeting you in your dressing room, most likely they were put there by a robot.

New comment by mceachen in "Zvec: A lightweight, fast, in-process vector database"

mceachen — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:53:13 +0000

FWIW "You're absolutely right" broadly declares "a human is not piloting the keyboard"

New comment by mceachen in "Shades of Halftone"

mceachen — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:00:33 +0000

I drove a Scitex RIP (raster image processor) as my part time job in college. The CMYK (and if you were rich, N more spot colors) rotation degrees were held in religious fervor. Me: "These degrees seem random." Boss: "You are not to ever digress from those, they are the Only True Values" (and if you play with them in TFA you'll see it indeed becomes a moire mess with tiny tweaks, which would cost a ton in reprinting and delays).

It was mildly humorous that stochastic dithering (even with dot-gain compensation) was an option back in 1990, and produced much higher grade color reproductions, but clients wouldn't have any part of it, because it wasn't "the look" that I think they expect their readers expected.

New comment by mceachen in "Zvec: A lightweight, fast, in-process vector database"

mceachen — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 03:47:50 +0000

I maintain a fork of sqlite-vec (because there hasn't been activity on the main repo for more than a year): sqlite-vec is great for smaller dimensionality or smaller cardinality datasets, but know that it's brute-force, and query latency scales exactly linearly. You only avoid full table scans if you add filterable columns to your vec0 table and include them in your WHERE clause. There's no probabilistic lookup algorithm in sqlite-vec.