Hacker News: michaelmior

New comment by michaelmior in "Free SQL→ER diagram tool, runs in the browser, nothing uploaded"

michaelmior — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:16:23 +0000

I don't see a problem with the tool either really, it's just a pet peeve of mine to call what it produces an ER diagram when it's really a diagram of the relational model defined by the SQL.

New comment by michaelmior in "Free SQL→ER diagram tool, runs in the browser, nothing uploaded"

michaelmior — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:15:38 +0000

I think most successful ORMs have an additional layer of semantics beyond what can be directly expressed in SQL. For example, Active Record has multiple types of associations (belongs_to, has_one, has_many, etc.) that I would argue align more closely to the ER model than the relational model. Of course you can come up with a set of conventions to go from ER to relational when everything is fed through the ORM, but you are losing some semantic information in the process. (That is, if you just look at the SQL table definitions, you don't have the same information about relationships).

New comment by michaelmior in "Free SQL→ER diagram tool, runs in the browser, nothing uploaded"

michaelmior — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:10:41 +0000

Inheritance is one case. In an ER diagram, you may have Employee and Client entities which both inherit from a Person entity. You could choose to have these represented as a single table (with nullable fields where not relevant). They could be three completely separate tables with common fields duplicated across the tables. Or there could be three tables where one table has the common fields from Person with Employee and Client having foreign keys to this table along with whatever unique fields they have.

New comment by michaelmior in "Free SQL→ER diagram tool, runs in the browser, nothing uploaded"

michaelmior — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:07:52 +0000

Aside from what else is mentioned in the sibling comment, inheritance is another big one. Inheritance is not explicit in SQL and in fact, when going from ER to SQL, there are multiple choices you can make about how to materialize the inheritance hierarchy.

Another is that in ER diagrams, relationships themselves can have attributes. Personally I think it tends to make more sense to convert relationships to entities in this case most of the time, but it can be useful.

Finally, relationships in ER diagrams can be N-ary and connect more than two entities while foreign keys in SQL always reference one other table. Of course you can have multiple foreign keys on a table to represent this, but not without some loss of semantics.

New comment by michaelmior in "Free SQL→ER diagram tool, runs in the browser, nothing uploaded"

michaelmior — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 10:42:03 +0000

The tool looks very cool! But IMO you can't get an ER diagram from SQL since entities are fundamentally different from tables. They are certainly very similar, but SQL alone doesn't give you enough information to create an ER diagram.

That's not to say that the tool is useless or that diagrams of this sort are unhelpful. I'll admit I'm being pedantic and others will probably disagree.

New comment by michaelmior in "Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)"

michaelmior — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:36:50 +0000

MacOS, Ghostty, Neovim, Pi (with a fair bit of customization to each). I'm relatively new to Pi after using Codex pretty heavily, but it's nice to be able to customize things to how I want.

New comment by michaelmior in "Bun.Image"

michaelmior — Sun, 24 May 2026 13:37:49 +0000

I think that's a fair take. I think we definitely still need specs that describe the desired behavior as an artifact. But documentation describing the implementation definitely feels less important.

New comment by michaelmior in "Bun.Image"

michaelmior — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:02:22 +0000

Humans also tend to forget to update documentation and the same confusion happens. I don't think it's really a new problem.

New comment by michaelmior in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

michaelmior — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:57:57 +0000

That depends on what the software is. If you want to run a service that bonds to a privileged port for example, you need sudo.

New comment by michaelmior in "HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing"

michaelmior — Sat, 02 May 2026 01:22:42 +0000

I don't think it's that simple, but I do think a lot of the problems mentioned are not inherent to the use of AI.

New comment by michaelmior in "HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing"

michaelmior — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:44:32 +0000

We have some very heavy users of Codex in my org and we're very happy with the quality (politics aside).

New comment by michaelmior in "HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing"

michaelmior — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 12:10:49 +0000

The problem in most of those cases is not specifically AI. Many of the issues you cited are related to Anthropic specifically and many could have been avoided with better testing.

New comment by michaelmior in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

michaelmior — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:05:57 +0000

I'm not saying our experience is unimportant. I'm talking about how we communicate what colors are. I'm not an expert by any means, but it seems like the way we communicate a shared understanding of what colors are is based on observing things that are the same color. I just don't think we have a way of communicating our subjective view of what a color looks like without reference to some other color.

New comment by michaelmior in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

michaelmior — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 23:11:43 +0000

The scenario you're describing seems like more of a language thing than a perception thing. We generally learn names of colors by references to common objects. I would argue that if people agree something is "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple" then it doesn't really matter what you're seeing, that color is red.

New comment by michaelmior in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

michaelmior — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:21:20 +0000

> no reason why future devices couldn't bundle 256GB of mem by default

Cost is a pretty big reason.

New comment by michaelmior in "Ghostmoon.app – A Swiss Army Knife for your macOS menu bar"

michaelmior — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:12:41 +0000

This article[0] provides some details. Basically if you go through the lookup process on Apple's website and you don't have an existing D-U-N-S number, you can request one from D&B for free via Apple.

[0] https://support.pushpay.com/s/article/Acquire-your-D-U-N-S-n...

New comment by michaelmior in "Ask HN: Where have you found the coding limits of current models?"

michaelmior — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:07:54 +0000

At least part of that in my experience seems to be a desire to cover a number of edge cases that may not be practically relevant.

New comment by michaelmior in "Ask HN: Where have you found the coding limits of current models?"

michaelmior — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:00:01 +0000

On this note, one thing I've found Codex to do is worry more than necessary about breaking changes for internal APIs. Maybe a bit more prompting would fix this, but I found even when iteratively implementing larger new features, it worries about breaking APIs that aren't used by anything but the new code yet.

New comment by michaelmior in "Ask HN: Where have you found the coding limits of current models?"

michaelmior — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:58:20 +0000

One thing I've found that I've found super helpful for this is converting profiling results to Markdown and feeding it back into the agent in a loop. I've done it with a bit of manual orchestration, but it could probably be automated pretty well. Specifically, pprof-rs[0] and pprof-to-md[1] have worked pretty well for me, YMMV.

[0] https://github.com/tikv/pprof-rs

[1] https://github.com/platformatic/pprof-to-md

New comment by michaelmior in "Schedule tasks on the web"

michaelmior — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:08:14 +0000

I worry about the costs from an energy and environmental impact perspective. I love that AI tools make me more productive, but I don't like the side effects.