Hacker News: nja

New comment by nja in "Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't"

nja — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:51:39 +0000

Wow, this is a lovely tool, and it's clearly built with a lot of your own knowledge! I'm in New England and this has some great recs for my land.

One slight piece of feedback: it's pretty clear a lot of the text was output of AI. IME (and just _my_ E, of course), this detracts somewhat from the authority of the page, as it makes it seem more like it just came from a conversation with Claude, rather than from your knowledge filtered through building an app. Might be worth doing a couple of passes to tighten up and human-ize it a bit :). (since it's open source, I suppose I could always PR myself if you'd be open to it)

New comment by nja in "A bug which affected only left handed users"

nja — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:05:33 +0000

sometimes I wonder if things like this are actually dark patterns to _encourage_ accidentally clicking 'like' etc.

similar to how in Threads, the '...' icon (under which 'save' is hidden) is so small that half the time clicking on it just clicks the entire thread (opening it to view replies) -- sometimes I suspect they make the target extra small on purpose

or how on FB, some of the options in the menu are now under the AI generated content, which pops in just slowly enough to encourage misclicks as items shift under your finger

all to make some PM's numbers go up, of course...

New comment by nja in "I Do Not Recommend Google Hardware"

nja — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:13:02 +0000

Another reason I'm so incensed that Google bought Fitbit. Every Fitbit I had prior to the Google acquisition worked extremely well and had battery life in the 5-7-day range. My favorite was the Sense which was basically a full (but svelte) smartwatch + full fitness tracker.

Now: just overpriced crappy Google hardware that lasts 12 hours because of AI and who knows what else they shoved on there.

And nobody else makes anything close to what Fitbit made...

New comment by nja in "Claude Code's "extended thinking" is a summary- not authentic thinking"

nja — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:26:54 +0000

Claude Code 2.1.68 seems to have been the last version (before the "ctrl-o" debacle) which actually shows thinking inline. That + Opus 4.6 has been working great as a daily driver for me... all the new "safety" / "preventing misuse" pain points in the newer models and harnesses are so frustrating in comparison.

New comment by nja in "VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare"

nja — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:53:46 +0000

Unpleasantly close to when Cloudflare bought BastionZero... the promises quickly fell away, the tool decayed (I found three serious bugs in one single week...and they had stopped even bothering to publish changelogs), and Cloudflare eventually gave us a "hey, we're actually shutting this down in a month, good luck" email prompting a scramble to rewire all of our infrastructure.

(Fwiw SDM ended up being a better alternative anyways... not looking forward to their eventual acquisition and shutdown :/ )

New comment by nja in "Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?"

nja — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:51:08 +0000

What is the latest way to show thoughts in Claude Code? I had to pin 2.1.68 since that seemed to be the last one with thinking shown (even though there wasn't anything about it in the following changelog), but I keep hearing that people using newer versions are still able to see it with some flag(s)?

New comment by nja in "BMW's Newest "Innovation" Is a Logo-Shaped Middle Finger to Right to Repair"

nja — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:57:15 +0000

And even for their older cars, most parts have gone NLA (no longer available), sending prices through the roof if you can find them at all! At least Porsche and Mercedes have programs to manufacture new parts for their old cars...

(My E39 M5 was one of the last user-repairable BMWs, but it's getting very expensive. On the other hand, it's driving a significant market for regular people designing and building replacement parts, whether 3D-printed, CNC'd, or homemade)

New comment by nja in "Remarkable Pro Colors"

nja — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:36:26 +0000

I have been wanting a pocket-notebook-size tablet since the day I got my RM2. I've been considering the Move since it came out, but the stylus change was worrying me, and the price is pretty high -- I feel like I would have bought release day if they offered a lower priced monochrome one in the same form factor, especially if it used the RM2 stylus...

It's encouraging to hear you have had a good experience with it. Maybe I'll grab one if they ever go on sale!

Is there anything beyond your minor nits that you would caution someone like me about before buying?

New comment by nja in "Don't click on the LastPass 'create backup' link – it's a scam"

nja — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:49:32 +0000

Has anyone migrated off of LastPass recently? How was it? I've been a user for decades, and though my frustration with them has been mounting for a long time, I've felt locked in. Migrating seems like a pain, especially for elderly relatives on my plan who will have difficulty picking up a new manager (it was hard enough for them to learn to use a manager in the first place), but every time I use 1Pass for work it blows me away how much better it is. Meanwhile LastPass continually makes their apps worse and more painful to use (and has the audacity to put me into "tutorial mode" every so often, as if someone using the app for the majority of its existence doesn't understand how a vault works), not to mention how many times failed vault syncs result in the losses of new passwords, and of course the data breach :/

So I'm wondering just how bad the experience of switching is now?

New comment by nja in "eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update"

nja — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:43:22 +0000

As someone who hasn't sold on eBay in a looooong time but was thinking about it for some stuff I haven't been able to sell on Marketplace, their pages and pages of fee structuring were intimidating. What was the breakdown of that $45, if you don't mind sharing?

New comment by nja in "Dell UltraSharp 52 Thunderbolt Hub Monitor"

nja — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 03:28:53 +0000

For some reason nobody makes 2K 24"s anymore -- that was my sweet spot. But now to get the pixel density you have to go way bigger :/ dreading the day the old monitors I have cease working. I like the 24" size but 1080 is just so annoying. I was using 2048x1156 20" monitors back in 2010 and they had better density!

New comment by nja in "It's hard to justify Tahoe icons"

nja — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:27:40 +0000

This makes me think of QGIS. I've recently been learning it for a couple different projects. It's an incredibly powerful and configurable tool, but its learning curve is incredibly steep. A big reason for this is that the UI is almost entirely toolbar+button based -- but the meaning of all of the button icons are completely opaque to a new user. And, making things worse, there's no way to change the UI to show text next to buttons. So every time a user wants to do something, even if following instructions that say "click the add feature button", they have to hunt around for it.

QGIS is free software, so it can be somewhat excused vs a billion dollar company. But they could really benefit from some UX expertise...

New comment by nja in "A Beginner's Two-Component Crystal-Style Wi-Fi Detector"

nja — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 08:51:22 +0000

Other than phones and laptops (i.e. "real computers"), most devices only support 2.4, no? I can't recall the last time I set up a non-computer device that didn't say "make sure you're using a 2.4GHz network"...

(I imagine it's a much lower cost to only handle 2.4GHz?)

New comment by nja in "Instacart's AI-enabled pricing experiments may be inflating your grocery bill"

nja — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 21:40:46 +0000

If only calling "representatives" still worked nowadays in the age of blatant corporate lobbying... it's really hard not to completely despair, because is there _anything_ we peons can do?

(I used to call my senators and house reps about things, but it never got more than a polite "thanks, but I don't care" and now they don't even bother to reply at all)

New comment by nja in "Modern cars are spying on you. Here's what you can do about it"

nja — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:37:51 +0000

Have you posted any writeups or other information about how you built this? I'm eyeing a Mazda as a next car (I've never owned a car newer than a 2014, and outside of that one, any newer than 2006, but family safety needs may lead to getting a newer car soon), and telemetry seems like one of the few downsides to an otherwise good carmaker. Would be very interested to learn more!

New comment by nja in "Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker"

nja — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 21:03:12 +0000

It's amusing that changing the altitude scale doesn't reset the "trails" -- when I dragged it around quickly (on mobile) it left vertical streaks behind all the in-flight planes

New comment by nja in "Kratos - Cloud native Auth0 open-source alternative (self-hosted)"

nja — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:38:52 +0000

The nice thing about the Java base here was that instead of trying to solve problems with a mess of configuration, we could just write our own code plugging directly into / replacing parts of Keycloak. Definitely don't disagree with you about the pain of XML, but that wasn't an issue for us here at all

New comment by nja in "Kratos - Cloud native Auth0 open-source alternative (self-hosted)"

nja — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 15:16:22 +0000

I've used [Keycloak](https://www.keycloak.org/) in the past for "open-source Auth0" -- though I'm not sure it has ever described itself that way.

Keycloak ended up being quite extensible and powerful, but the UI and data model both sometimes made things more difficult than they had to be... this could be an interesting project to look at.

One bonus (for us) for Keycloak was that it was JVM-based, meaning it was easier to integrate our existing JVM libraries. Though its use of Hibernate was frustrating at times, heh

New comment by nja in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

nja — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 02:35:11 +0000

Chromecast Audio still works! They just don't sell them anymore. I use mine every day, and have been keeping an eye out for anyone selling theirs...

New comment by nja in "GNU Health"

nja — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 21:08:20 +0000

And the 2.0 source: https://invent.kde.org/desiotaku/cleardental