Hacker News: nlawalker

New comment by nlawalker in "Everybody's Lost Their Minds"

nlawalker — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 22:08:13 +0000

I assume that they don’t have time to do that, and are lamenting the fact that exercising those capabilities is no longer on the critical path to getting paid work done.

New comment by nlawalker in "OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads with Sponsored Agents"

nlawalker — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:14:24 +0000

Just wanted to say thanks for this rec, I'll be picking it up. Unaccountability - generally, everywhere in society, the workplace, government etc. - has been on my mind a lot recently.

New comment by nlawalker in "The Wormhole Hall of Shame"

nlawalker — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 03:54:34 +0000

If you’re inclined to add any more, consider Outer Wilds! “Black holes technology” is a major plot point and shows up as a neat gameplay mechanic in a couple places.

New comment by nlawalker in "Ok, but does it scale?"

nlawalker — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:42:36 +0000

Been a meme for a long time!

Mongo DB is web scale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

New comment by nlawalker in "A Society of Cheats"

nlawalker — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 05:39:31 +0000

Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/ai-use-college-che...

New comment by nlawalker in "Claude Session URL appended to commit messages and PR descriptions by default"

nlawalker — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:46:20 +0000

>This is attribution.

I think a lot of people interpret it as trying to foist additional burden on reviewers. As in "here's my PR, I would like to take credit for this idea, it's now on you to review. If you find a problem with it, I expect you to call out exactly what my incorrect assumptions were, which you are able to do because they're all buried somewhere in this Claude session. Let me know what they are and I'll paste them into a new session and submit again."

New comment by nlawalker in "Bug Blindness"

nlawalker — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 02:24:27 +0000

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.

New comment by nlawalker in "Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role"

nlawalker — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 23:12:47 +0000

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 any kind of activity or impact as positive impact than it is to spin inaction as positive impact.

New comment by nlawalker in "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"

nlawalker — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 05:08:18 +0000

I see “this matters,” “XYZ matters,” “the last two are what matter” etc. everywhere now in all sorts of workplace documents.

New comment by nlawalker in "Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it"

nlawalker — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:35:40 +0000

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.

New comment by nlawalker in "Slack Code"

nlawalker — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 02:44:04 +0000

I can’t hear what they’re saying, they drop the mic every other sentence!

New comment by nlawalker in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

nlawalker — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:02:18 +0000

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.

New comment by nlawalker in "Process as a Proxy for Motivation"

nlawalker — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 01:52:36 +0000

> Both of these examples demonstrate a process, or a decision made in advance

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 discipline - the actual substitute for motivation - to execute in a meaningful way that ensures actual progress.

New comment by nlawalker in "No Meat Proxy"

nlawalker — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:49:03 +0000

We should have called it smog.

New comment by nlawalker in "Don't credit the LLM"

nlawalker — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 05:17:32 +0000

It’s #3, it’s a disclaimer, you’re helpful if it’s right and not to blame if it’s wrong.

When I see it, it always makes me want to respond “weird, I asked Claude too and it said ”.

New comment by nlawalker in "Diátaxis"

nlawalker — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 23:35:01 +0000

Please post some kind of visible change notification (and something here) when you do!

New comment by nlawalker in "The session you cannot take with you"

nlawalker — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:41:02 +0000

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.

New comment by nlawalker in "Ghost Cut – or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere"

nlawalker — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:35:33 +0000

This is what Windows Explorer does when you cut a file, except it does also place it on the clipboard.

>pressing ctrl+x fades the selected text and makes it inert [...] Nothing is placed in the clipboard at this point

>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.

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.

New comment by nlawalker in "Why I am not going to buy a computer"

nlawalker — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:19:45 +0000

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.

Now, if you write it with tender loving care and bake all that stuff into it, then 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.

New comment by nlawalker in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"

nlawalker — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:30:48 +0000

My problem with passkeys is that "don't have to" is actually "don't have to, and couldn't if I wanted to".