Hacker News: mfro

New comment by mfro in "Warm up your MacBook (2019)"

mfro — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:41:14 +0000

It was a truly ridiculous idea to put an i9 in any laptop. That generation of i9 is difficult to cool even with liquid cooler systems in big ATX cases.

New comment by mfro in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"

mfro — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:20:35 +0000

FWIW VScode can be used in a docker container or remote server from the local client. See devcontainers and VSCode over ssh.

New comment by mfro in "Security researcher says Microsoft built a Bitlocker backdoor, releases exploit"

mfro — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:47:29 +0000

Please let me know when finding a job in software engineering in 2026 is feasible for everyone with ‘computer skills’.

New comment by mfro in "Bitwarden scrubs 'Always free' and 'Inclusion' values from its site"

mfro — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:32:32 +0000

Great heads up! I will work on self-hosting this month.

New comment by mfro in "Claude Platform on AWS"

mfro — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:06:07 +0000

Builder credits apply to every AWS service I've tried.

New comment by mfro in "Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan"

mfro — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:25:47 +0000

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...

New comment by mfro in "Let's talk about LLMs"

mfro — Tue, 05 May 2026 00:56:31 +0000

As much as that’s true it’s clear a huge amount of people have accepted the current state and are working around it, successfully(in terms of ticking an executive’s checkbox) in a lot of cases. And it’s worth considering we’re seeing strong strides outside of model quality in the tooling and integration

New comment by mfro in "Let's talk about LLMs"

mfro — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:30:51 +0000

While I think the author is entirely right about 'natural language programming' in the current day, if LLMs (or some other AI architecture) continue to improve, it is easy to believe touching code could become unnecessary for even large projects. Consider that this is what software co. executives do all the time: outline a high level goal (software product) to their engineering director, who largely handles the details. We just don't yet know if LLMs will ever manage a level of intelligence and independence in open-ended tasks like this. And, to expand on that, I don't know that intelligence is necessarily the bottleneck for this goal. They can clearly tackle even large engineering tasks, but often complaints are that they miss on important architectural context or choose a suboptimal solution. Maybe with better training, context handling, documentation, these things will cease to be problems.

New comment by mfro in "Let's talk about LLMs"

mfro — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:21:50 +0000

I think you're misunderstanding the paradigm shift completely -- AI does not just generate code N(x) more quickly. It thinks N(x) faster, it researches N(x) faster, it tests N(x) faster. There are hundreds of tasks that you'll find engineers are offloading to AI every day. The major hurdle right now is actually pivoting LLMs from just generating code: integrating those tasks into workflows. This is why tool-use and agentic workflows have taken engineering by storm.

New comment by mfro in "Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused"

mfro — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:51:30 +0000

When someone says passwords are ‘stored’, the assumption will always be ‘stored on disk’. ‘stores in memory’ is not an accurate representation because memory is inherently volatile and they are loaded there temporarily. Plaintext on disk is egregious, plaintext in memory is considerably less so.

New comment by mfro in "Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused"

mfro — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:41:21 +0000

To be fair, 'loads into memory' and 'stores' are not the same thing.

New comment by mfro in "Brave Origin"

mfro — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:42:22 +0000

I have found literally 0 incentive to switch from firefox to anything else.

New comment by mfro in "Show HN: MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh"

mfro — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:43:55 +0000

I think they're going for more of a 'monkeys will eventually produce shakespeare' thing here. Which you can apply the same argument to - monkeys do not know english, don't know what they're typing, and theoretically english could devolve to a state where every sentence could be qualified as shakespeare, right? Your argument just seems unnecessarily pedantic.

New comment by mfro in "Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs"

mfro — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:35:51 +0000

Not sure why all the other commentors are failing to mention you can spend considerably less money on an apple silicon machine to run decent local models.

Fun fact: AWS offers apple silicon EC2 instances you can spin up to test.

New comment by mfro in "Claude Opus 4.7 costs 20–30% more per session"

mfro — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:31:41 +0000

yeah it seems like sonnet 4.6 burns thru tokens crazy fast. I did one prompt, sonnet misunderstood it as 'generate an image of this' and used all of my free tokens.

New comment by mfro in "Do you even need a database?"

mfro — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:30:27 +0000

Neat, what happened to the original system? Last I checked multiplayer was working in DR2.

New comment by mfro in "Backpacks got worse on purpose"

mfro — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:38:47 +0000

Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

New comment by mfro in "Google Gemma 4 Runs Natively on iPhone with Full Offline AI Inference"

mfro — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:16:10 +0000

Strangely, it is super fast on my 16 Plus, but with longer messages it can slow down a LOT, and not because of thermal throttling. I wish I could see some diagnostic data.

New comment by mfro in "The best seat in town"

mfro — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 20:16:04 +0000

You're reading way too far into it. Private spaces are simply easier targets.

New comment by mfro in "LittleSnitch for Linux"

mfro — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:20:10 +0000

It just depends on the UI frameworks available to developers and their interest in building something good-looking. Different UI frameworks are available for different platforms, and there are only a few good ones that are cross-platform. Qt and GTK are pretty common for linux apps and typically don't look great.