<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: nlawalker</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nlawalker</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2026 08:57:08 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=nlawalker" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Bug Blindness"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sounds like credit card sites. Most everything is pretty creaky; “redeem rewards” is broken or offline for maintenance; “pay bill” is greased lightning all the way through.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2026 02:24:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495121</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495121</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495121</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think a bias towards inaction often creates better outcomes for everyone, but a bias towards action creates better career results. Most of these places evaluate performance based on impact, and it's way easier to spin <i>any</i> kind of activity or impact as positive impact than it is to spin inaction as positive impact.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2026 23:12:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494153</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494153</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494153</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I see “this matters,” “XYZ matters,” “the last two are what matter” etc. <i>everywhere</i> now in all sorts of workplace documents.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 05:08:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49460011</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49460011</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49460011</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My favorite is the info icons that show a tooltip on hover, but if you click them, they disappear the tip if it’s showing and never show it if it hasn’t appeared yet.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:35:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49443940</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49443940</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49443940</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Slack Code"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can’t hear what they’re saying, they drop the mic every other sentence!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 02:44:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383089</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383089</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383089</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It’s the TED Talk playbook: the crafting of a lecture given by an expert to laypeople to maximize attention, engagement and satisfaction. Every piece of prose is built to pack in as many TED Talk mic-drops/expectation-subverting insight bombs as possible.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:02:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49306903</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49306903</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49306903</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Process as a Proxy for Motivation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><i>> Both of these examples demonstrate a process, or a decision made in advance</i><p>A decision made in advance is not a process. Unlike all the other real-world examples of committed processes in the article, premade decisions don't require <i>discipline</i> - the actual substitute for motivation - to execute in a meaningful way that ensures actual progress.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2026 01:52:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49280960</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49280960</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49280960</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "No Meat Proxy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We should have called it <i>smog</i>.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:49:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49177655</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49177655</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49177655</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Don't credit the LLM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It’s #3, it’s a disclaimer, you’re helpful if it’s right and not to blame if it’s wrong.<p>When I see it, it always makes me want to respond “weird, I asked Claude too and it said <different answer>”.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 02 Aug 2026 05:17:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141344</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141344</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141344</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Diátaxis"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Please post some kind of visible change notification (and something here) when you do!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 01 Aug 2026 23:35:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49139647</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49139647</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49139647</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "The session you cannot take with you"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Reasoning, external context, compaction, subagents, etc. are all things that these service providers don't really want you to know about, care about or have any insight into, they want them to be implementation details. It's incredibly inconvenient to them that their customer base is in the business of prying into implementation details and trying to use the individual pieces of what they want to offer as an end-to-end product.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:41:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49125471</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49125471</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49125471</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Ghost Cut – or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is what Windows Explorer does when you cut a file, except it does also place it on the clipboard.<p><i>>pressing ctrl+x fades the selected text and makes it inert [...] Nothing is placed in the clipboard at this point<p>>What if you want the original semantics of cut? Ghost cut makes that two keys rather than one: copy to clipboard (control-C or command-C) followed by Backspace to remove it from the original document. I so rarely use cut without paste, that this is a clear win for me.</i><p>This is just as "broken" as the existing functionality, just in a way that the author prefers. It's a neat idea though, I like it, makes you wonder what would have happened in other apps if cut/paste was never developed as a system-wide, cross-app capability.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:35:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009509</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009509</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009509</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Why I am not going to buy a computer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, this right here. Generated content that's based on sources that readers already have access to has no value beyond what they can ask an LLM to generate themselves.<p>Now, if you write it with tender loving care and bake all that stuff into it, <i>then</i> will humans read it directly? Maybe not, but the information that their agents read and then pass on to them at least has a better chance of being correct and useful. If the success criteria for your documentation was "measurable count of human eyeballs" and not "better outcomes", your docs aren't going to be good anyway.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:19:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009202</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009202</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009202</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My problem with passkeys is that "don't have to" is actually "don't have to, <i>and couldn't if I wanted to</i>".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:30:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008409</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008409</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008409</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><i>> handwriting docs adds less value than writing high quality instructions to your agent</i><p>Are the instructions not docs?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 04:00:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987893</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987893</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987893</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "AI advice made people 3x less accurate but 2x confident, researchers found"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And that’s a net win for a lot of people in a lot of situations; that’s the part that needs acknowledgment and study, sociologically.<p>You can’t say it didn’t warn us, it’s on the tin: “AI might be wrong.”</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:09:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48972537</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48972537</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48972537</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "What's the deal with all the random weekly quota resets for agents lately?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Software engineering has always been kind of a game for the people who love it; it turns out that making it a game-as-a-service with lootboxes is just as effective for driving engagement as with other kinds of games.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:08:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968843</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968843</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968843</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Accretive Editing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Humans working on documentation who are not set up for success and not incentivized to do the right thing exhibit exactly the same behavior.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2026 03:11:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915794</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915794</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915794</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "Proof of care in the age of AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Proving care still leaves the audience to determine if the care is in the message or in attracting attention.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:17:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908169</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908169</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48908169</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nlawalker in "In defense of not understanding your codebase"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The premise of understanding a <i>codebase</i> distracts from the actual issue in the debate about AI in software engineering, which is how well you have to understand the <i>problems you're solving</i>. I think most people who advocate for understanding the codebase actually mean to advocate for understanding the problem, they're just using the codebase as a concrete representation of it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:07:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873249</link><dc:creator>nlawalker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873249</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873249</guid></item></channel></rss>