Hacker News: npilk

New comment by npilk in "The End of Eleventy"

npilk — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:09:20 +0000

Yes, I find LLMs are great for taking loosely-structured text and turning them into formatted blog posts. https://notes.npilk.com/chatgpt-is-my-ssg

New comment by npilk in "Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found"

npilk — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 19:28:48 +0000

Wouldn't this mean we're even more cooked? I've seen this page cited a few times as evidence that Mythos is no big deal, but if true then the same big deal is already out there with other models today.

New comment by npilk in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

npilk — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:06:16 +0000

To be fair, I think Prime Air is real, but I've only heard about it when they've had drone crashes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGdOpR-Mv-E

AFAIK it's only available in a few very specific places (seemingly for good reason).

New comment by npilk in "The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here"

npilk — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:56:22 +0000

I like to read Ed (and Gary) as a counterbalance to the AI hype that is pervasive.

But Ed reads more and more like he has been personally wronged by the AI companies and is on a righteous crusade to destroy them. He has plenty of valid criticisms, but he comes across like he has his head in the sand when he can't seem to acknowledge any potential upside at all related to AI. It's starting to feel like he's just interpreting news and events to fit his worldview, which isn't that valuable as a reader (unless I want that worldview affirmed for me).

New comment by npilk in "The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here"

npilk — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:58:19 +0000

True, good point. I still think the piece goes too far with its claims.

New comment by npilk in "The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here"

npilk — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:05:37 +0000

I would respect Ed (and Gary Marcus) more if they would concede the occasional point. But everything AI is always a hyperbolic and unqualified disaster. I suppose that's what the audience wants.

"every bit of AI demand ... that exists only exists due to subsidies"

Really? NOBODY would pay whatever the fully-loaded cost is? What about people running local models on their own GPUs? Are they being subsidized too?

New comment by npilk in "Why Doesn't Anybody Realize We're Going Back to the Moon?"

npilk — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:04:46 +0000

To everyone saying "we've done this before" or "we're not even landing" - we have sent humans to the Moon a total of 9 times. This is the 10th. Nobody has been out there in 50+ years. We've only landed on the Moon 6 times, and this mission is a stepping stone to future manned landings.

Do people really feel like "yeah, we went 9 times, that's enough, no need to ever send anyone again"?

New comment by npilk in "Why Doesn't Anybody Realize We're Going Back to the Moon?"

npilk — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:00:56 +0000

The 1960s and 70s were extremely turbulent, chaotic times in the US - the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, multiple high-profile assassinations, etc. Apollo 8 launched at the end of 1968, which was a famously challenging year with many disruptive events.

Of course we have many challenges today as well, but I don't think the political environment is unprecedented. One could easily have argued in the 60s that we should be focusing on civil rights, ending the Vietnam War, etc. instead of going to the moon. In fact, much of the messaging around space in the 60s that allowed those missions to happen was based around "war weapons" and the Space Race with the Soviets.

One could argue the Apollo program itself was responsible for creating a lot of the hope you mention.

New comment by npilk in "What it's like to live in Portland, Oregon"

npilk — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:22:05 +0000

Portland has so much to offer (especially in terms of restaurants and neighborhoods) it's hard to sum up in an article like this! I'm sure that's true of any medium to large city, but I think Portland punches above its population culturally.

New comment by npilk in "Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'"

npilk — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:10:03 +0000

It seems pretty clear there is some sort of bug that only some people are experiencing (or, very cynically, perhaps an A/B test). My usage hasn't seemed to change much in the past few days, but then I see reports where people are hitting limits after one or two prompts. I doubt that could be user error or new limits.

Anthropic has said they are investigating. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7zgj0/investiga...

Show HN: Weejur – Paste HTML to Publish for Free with GitHub Pages

npilk — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:42:03 +0000

Hi HN - I know this community isn't the target user for this tool, but I think there are some likeminded folks here.

There's been a lot of recent discussion here and in other tech communities about encouraging people to make their own websites and advocating for the "small web" (e.g. [1], [2], [3]). A common point in these discussions is that most people don’t have the technical skill or motivation to make their own website.

These days, LLMs and AI tools have made it easier than ever for anyone to make a website, even without using a drag-and-drop builder. But there are still too many barriers for your average non-technical person to publish a site on the web. I'd bet most people don't know there are free ways to host a website, and even if they find an explainer, technical platforms like Cloudflare and GitHub (let alone the command line) can be intimidating.

So I made weejur, which is basically a super simple UI front-end for GitHub Pages. You log in with OAuth, and then you can just paste HTML or upload files to publish a website. If you don't have a GitHub account, you can sign up right in the OAuth flow. It's completely free, and you can view the source here [4].

My hope is this makes it easier for people who don't know anything about web hosting to create and share their own websites.

Feel free to try it out and please share any questions/ideas/feedback!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47421442 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457784 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410542 [4] https://github.com/weejur/weejur/

(Note: I'm not affiliated in any way with GitHub.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47589047

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by npilk in "Learn Claude Code by doing, not reading"

npilk — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:41:11 +0000

Strongly agree with the sentiment, but I'd say if you're familiar with the terminal you may as well just install it and truly 'learn by doing'!

I could see this being great for true beginners, but for them it might be nice to have even some more basics to start (how do I open the terminal, what is a command, etc).

New comment by npilk in "Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor"

npilk — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:22:53 +0000

Some discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555636

New comment by npilk in "Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor"

npilk — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 17:59:58 +0000

Just for competitive reference, note that e.g. BentoPDF has a website as well, not just a GitHub repo: https://www.bentopdf.com/

New comment by npilk in ""Al has joined your family""

npilk — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:53:18 +0000

Interesting - thanks for this info. I'll have to look into the certificates. I wonder why it eventually worked though if the issue is expired root certificates?

Realistically the laptop is pretty old even to run Catalina. I don't expect it would handle a more modern OS very well.

New comment by npilk in "Show HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search"

npilk — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:01:11 +0000

Multimodal AI will lead to an interesting arms race in ad detection vs ad insertion. I played around with AI ad removal with older Gemini models, but it seems like this would be even more powerful to instantly identify ads (and potentially mute or strip them out).

https://notes.npilk.com/experiments-with-ai-adblock

New comment by npilk in "Apple Business"

npilk — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:30:51 +0000

Can you not make two user accounts on a Mac and sign them into different iCloud accounts? I know you're limited to one on iPhone and iPad, though.

New comment by npilk in "So where are all the AI apps?"

npilk — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:13:02 +0000

How much longer will this be true, though? With improving computer use, it may be possible in the next ~year or so that agents will be able to wire up infrastructure and launch to production.

New comment by npilk in "So where are all the AI apps?"

npilk — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:22:58 +0000

I believe EVs also wear tires out faster (because they are heavier), so they need more frequent replacement.

New comment by npilk in "Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website"

npilk — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:34:12 +0000

So they are comparing to the conversion rate of people who click on a link in the chat and go to Walmart's website to view the product? Wouldn't that be a really strong intent-to-buy signal?

The better comparison might be conversion rate for those who searched on Walmart.com vs those who searched within ChatGPT. Or maybe that is what they're comparing and I misunderstood?