<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: mickeyp</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mickeyp</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 20:27:47 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=mickeyp" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "The famous O3 "GeoGuessr" prompt did not work"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This test would be a lot more useful if the author used images the models obviously hadn't seen before. Pulling images from Wikipedia? They'll have seen 'em before, and the metadata, and all the pages they were casually linked to.<p>The premise that the long prompt only made the model think 'a second longer' may have more to do with the fact that it knows about the images. So why think harder if you know the answer?<p>At no point does the author contemplate that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 09:52:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48220126</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48220126</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48220126</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "Claude Design"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Indeed. Kitbashing is a thing, and it was always a thing. Designers I worked with would spend hours doomscrolling pinterest, google images, etc. looking for their, uh... 'spark' when they were given a briefing.<p>This is just a really cool way of building.<p>I'm impressed. I tried Google Stitch but it was slow and useless. Sad, because Gemini has a pretty good creative flair, ironically enough.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:06:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47808791</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47808791</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47808791</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "5NF and Database Design"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'll go one further and say that if you're reaching for DISTINCT and you have joins, you may have joined the data the wrong way. It's not a RULE, but it's ALWAYS a 'smell' when I see a query that uses DISTINCT to shove away duplicate matches. I always add a comment for the exceptions.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:02:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777392</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777392</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777392</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "5NF and Database Design"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Right. But faceting data is also part of what a good database designer does. That includes views over the data; materialisation, if it is justified; stored procedures and cursors.<p>I've never had to do 18 joins to extract information in my career. I'm sure these cases do legitimately exist but they are of course rare, even in large enterprises. Most companies are more than capable of distinguishing OLTP from OLAP and real-time from batch and design (or redesign) accordingly.<p>Databases and their designs shift with the use case.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:00:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777372</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777372</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777372</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You say that with the wisdom of experience.<p>But there's still value in people exploring new spaces they find interesting, even if they do not meet your personal definition of pareto-optimal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:47:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47727804</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47727804</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47727804</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you're ok with a model provider that goes down all the time and has such a poor inference engine setup that once you get past 50k tokens you're going to get stuck in endless reasoning loops.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:15:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652234</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652234</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652234</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "From zero to a RAG system: successes and failures"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The old joke Zawinski made about picking regex "and now you have two problems" applies here.<p>If you pick Elasticsearch, useful as it is, you now have more than two problems. You have Elastic the company; Elasticsearch the tool; and also the clay-footed colossus, Java, to contend with.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:33:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532603</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532603</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532603</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "From zero to a RAG system: successes and failures"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It doesn't help that academia loooves ColBERT and will happily tell you how amazing -- and, look, for how tiny the models are, 20M params and super fast on a CPU, it is -- they are at seemingly everything if only you...<p>- Chunk properly;<p>- Elide "obviously useless files" that give mixed signals;<p>- Re-rank and rechunk the whole files for top scoring matches;<p>- Throw in a little BM25 but with better stemming;<p>- Carry around a list of preferred files and ideally also terms to help re-rank;<p>And so on. Works great when you're an academic benchmaxing your toy Master's project. Try building a scalable vector search that runs on any codebase without knowing anything at all about it and get a decent signal out of it.<p>Ha.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:30:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532551</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532551</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532551</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "The Oracle of Bacon: Thirty Years Later"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Such a fun site back in the day, and novel. There's the Erdos number version for academia.<p>There was that other site that tried to guess what you were thinking. It'd ask you a series of questions to try and guess --- that one was eerily good at it, too. Feels like a similar sort of thing: how quickly you can converge on a solution.<p>Having said that, that article seems more interested in talking about things adjacent to the Oracle of Bacon and what its author finds interesting rather than the site itself. Not sure why?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:57:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47121166</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47121166</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47121166</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "Web Components: The Framework-Free Renaissance"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Indeed. I've gradually adapted a server rendered jquery and HTML site to react by making react render a component here and there in react and gradually convert the site. Works great.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:33:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47091053</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47091053</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47091053</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "FreeCAD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can never leave Solid Edge. Synchronous editing is simply the best for 3d printing and fast iteration when you're experimenting with designs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 07:20:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47084781</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47084781</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47084781</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sure it's $24/hour, but it'll crank through tens of thousands of tokens per second --- those beefy GPUs are meant for large amounts of parallel workflow. You'll never _get_ that many tokens for a single request. That's why the mathematics work when you get dozens or hundreds of people using it.<p>No. The sauce is in KV caching: when to evict, when to keep, how to pre-empt an active agent loop vs someone who are showing signs of inactivity at their pc, etc.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:21:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072649</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072649</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072649</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "Step 3.5 Flash – Open-source foundation model, supports deep reasoning at speed"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mean, is it possible the latter models used Search? Not saying Stepfun's perfect (it is not.) Gemini especially and unsurprisingly uses search a lot and it is ridiculously fast, too.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:21:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47071762</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47071762</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47071762</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "Show HN: I built a "Socratic" AI to stop my daughter from copy-pasting homework"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Incidentally, telling an AI you want to talk socratically and never to reveal the outright answer unless asked is a fantastic way to learn.<p>You can dial in on the difficulty: "you must be pedantic and ask that I correct misuse of terminology" vs "autocorrect my mistakes in terminology with brackets".<p>Super duper useful way to learn things. I wish I had AI as a kid.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:40:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059582</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059582</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47059582</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "Ghidra by NSA"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sounds like `strings' on the binary would've sufficed if it's just hardcoded.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:11:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036009</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036009</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036009</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I disagree. This is great for bulk tasks: renaming, finding and searching for things, etc</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:26:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46992891</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46992891</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46992891</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No I'm saying use Makefiles, which work just fine. Mark your targets with PHONY and move on.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 14:34:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46913313</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46913313</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46913313</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not an unachievable dream. It's a trade-off made by people who may or may not have made the right call. Some things just don't run on a local machine: fair. But a lot of things do, even very large things. Things can be scaled down; the same harnesses used for the development environment and your CI environment and your prod environment. You don't need a full prod db, you need a facsimile mirroring the real thing but 1/50th the size.<p>Yes, there will always be special exemptions: they suck, and we suffer as developers because we cannot replicate a prod-like environment in our local dev environment.<p>But I laugh when I join teams and they say that "our CI servers" can run it but our shitty laptops cannot, and I wonder why they can't just... spend more money on dev machines? Or perhaps spend some engineering effort so they work on both?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 08:15:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910354</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910354</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910354</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The winning strategy for all CI environments is a build system facsimile that works on your machine, your CI's machine, and your test/uat/production with as few changes between them as your project requirements demand.<p>I start with a Makefile. The Makefile drives everything. Docker (compose), CI build steps, linting, and more. Sometimes a project outgrows it; other times it does not.<p>But it starts with one unitary tool for triggering work.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 07:24:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910061</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910061</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910061</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by mickeyp in "Show HN: Micropolis/SimCity Clone in Emacs Lisp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why not just use the best known emacs lisp core, then? Like say emacs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:40:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901532</link><dc:creator>mickeyp</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901532</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901532</guid></item></channel></rss>