Hacker News: mckn1ght

New comment by mckn1ght in "Expanding Swift's IDE Support"

mckn1ght — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:34:02 +0000

If you could reimplement Emacs in Swift that’d be great

New comment by mckn1ght in "A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC"

mckn1ght — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:48:44 +0000

Any way to know how many buildings were demolished and a newer one built in its place over that 20 year period? Wonder what he used for a reference. Is the model representative of a single moment in time, or is there some clock drift?

New comment by mckn1ght in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"

mckn1ght — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:45:42 +0000

At an abstract enough level, not really. I treat them with care and try to give them whatever they need to do their thing. I want them to last as long as possible.

But in asking this question you must have some differences in mind. Could you speak to some of those?

New comment by mckn1ght in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"

mckn1ght — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 04:59:13 +0000

I think humans are machines, they are just vastly more advanced than any machine invented by humans. This is something I thought long before the current AI hype cycle.

What do you think are some important differences between machines and humans?

New comment by mckn1ght in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

mckn1ght — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:32:20 +0000

I like Tesler’s Theorem, which I recently heard about:

> AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet

New comment by mckn1ght in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

mckn1ght — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:05:15 +0000

Maybe just the circles I run in but these are not evergreen questions in my experience. I don't even know what "go back" is supposed to mean here, or for that matter what it would mean in a Windows application. Is there a system level "go back" in WinAmp/Excel/SimCity/Photoshop I've never seen before?

New comment by mckn1ght in "SpaceX files to go public"

mckn1ght — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:58:48 +0000

I guess the unspoken part of a Mars colony is that it would be penal.

New comment by mckn1ght in "I quit. The clankers won"

mckn1ght — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:52:13 +0000

I love playing lost and found: get yourself lost and then find your way back home without GPS.

New comment by mckn1ght in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

mckn1ght — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:46:26 +0000

True, using a library in a cheap coffee maker you can maybe set it and forget it. I have an old TI-85 calculator that’s never needed to update its OS, while Apple has obsoleted multiple generations of applications in its never ending upgrade cycle.

But for mission critical applications the bar is a little higher. Isn’t this why we have the ongoing dialogue about OTA updates for Teslas etc and the pros and cons of that approach? Because if you can’t OTA patch a bug, you have to issue a recall [0]. But if you have internet connectivity, as you rightly point out, then you have a whole new attack surface to consider.

I just don’t think it’s all that simple.

[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ford-recall-lincoln-explore...

New comment by mckn1ght in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

mckn1ght — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:01:37 +0000

Software packages are more complicated than you make them out to be. Off the top of my head:

- license restrictions, relicensing

- patches, especially to fix CVEs, that break assumptions you made in your consumption of the package

- supply chain attacks

- sunsetting

There’s no real “set it and forget it” with software reuse. For that matter, there’s no “set it and forget it” in civil engineering either, it also requires monitoring and maintenance.

New comment by mckn1ght in "Where things stand with the Department of War"

mckn1ght — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:15:07 +0000

It’s at least an option for consideration. I shouldn’t have spoken normatively.

Is your position that compassion is only possible via religion?

New comment by mckn1ght in "Where things stand with the Department of War"

mckn1ght — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 05:05:41 +0000

You don’t need religion for ethics or worldview. How about: we all appear here on this rock, none of us know why, we’re all in it together, we all struggle, none of us know if we’re alone in this universe or what the universe really is. This unifies us all and puts us on an even playing field. We should be compassionate to one another as we all come from the same circumstance. We can create a concept of god to explain it, or accept that we don’t know for sure and maybe never will. God is a choice, but not the only one.

New comment by mckn1ght in "Show HN: Deff – Side-by-side Git diff review in your terminal"

mckn1ght — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:40:48 +0000

I use delta for quick diffs in a shell (along with the -U0 option on git-diff), but in my claude workflow, i have a 3 pane setup in tmux: :| where the right side is a claude session, the top left is emacs opened to magit, and the bottom left is a shell. Magit makes navigating around a diff pretty easy (as well as all the other git operations), and I can dive into anything and hand edit as well.

New comment by mckn1ght in "Facebook is cooked"

mckn1ght — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:05:05 +0000

What does this mean here? The first several cities outside the US that I tried on craigslist were direct hits, with postings. People could use craigslist, they just don’t.

New comment by mckn1ght in "Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode"

mckn1ght — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:36:42 +0000

I still open Xcode for every branch after having Claude do an initial implementation, to review the changes using its version editor, step through code using the IDE’s various code navigation features, and build/run to manually validate the changes. I do have claude analyze and test, though.

New comment by mckn1ght in "Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors"

mckn1ght — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 05:27:26 +0000

IMO the ethical response should be positive disengagement with entities with which you disagree, instead of negative engagement.

See something in the release notes of an app you don’t like? Go use a different app, give your money to a different entity. Don’t spend your time and resources messing with the producer or user of the thing you don’t like.

This of course runs the risk of maximal polarization once everyone has filtered themselves into their neat and tidy little bubbles. What happens then, everybody leaves each other alone? Or do the echo chambers slide into further radicalized detachment from each other?

New comment by mckn1ght in "Employers, please use postmarked letters for job applications (2025)"

mckn1ght — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:14:51 +0000

The one where the google results page would open up and show an application to apply was cool.

New comment by mckn1ght in "Employers, please use postmarked letters for job applications (2025)"

mckn1ght — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 01:00:20 +0000

At least for me, I'd still rather mail a letter versus input all my personal details and job experience into yet another CRM with a crappy data entry interface.

New comment by mckn1ght in "Employers, please use postmarked letters for job applications (2025)"

mckn1ght — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:58:54 +0000

Do FAANG, FAANG wannabes, or startups do this for software development roles? I've never heard of that.

New comment by mckn1ght in "Apple, What Have You Done?"

mckn1ght — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:23:20 +0000

It sounds strange that someone could go from lofty Apple engineer to homeless (though it certainly wouldn’t be the first fall from grace in human history).

I read the brief wikipedia page about Smith, which states he has bipolar disorder and has at least one incident that was publicized in the early 90s. Was your encounter with him before or after that?

Sadly, with some people it doesn’t matter how much money they have or how much help you give them behind the scenes. I’m not saying Jobs went to the end of the earth for him, I don’t know. But I know people from my own life where it didn’t matter, so it’s in the realm of imagination at least.

The stock bs sounds dickish though.