Hacker News: patwolf

New comment by patwolf in "The death of the brick and mortar toy store"

patwolf — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:01:05 +0000

Just last week, I was with one of my kids trying to kill some time before an appointment. I noticed a toy store in a strip mall, and I asked him if he wanted to check it out. His response was, "What's a toy store?"

We did check it out, and he was pretty disappointed. Even though it was advertised as a STEM-oriented store, half of it was stress balls and jigsaw puzzles.

New comment by patwolf in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"

patwolf — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:18:15 +0000

2001 set tech jobs back a few years. 2008 wasn't nearly as bad for tech because as money got tight, there was an impetus for companies to invest in tech to cut costs. I think a similar thing might be unfolding now with non-tech companies investing in AI to streamline processes.

New comment by patwolf in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"

patwolf — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:58:00 +0000

I use Cloudflare for a lot of my side projects. It's a pleasure to use, and I manage to stay under the free tier. It does feel like they should be bigger in the cloud space, but I imagine the major players get a lot of revenue from VMs, which is a space Cloudflare has avoided.

New comment by patwolf in "Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold"

patwolf — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:53:20 +0000

I unfortunately saw it in the theater too. It doesn't surprise me that so few showed up to see it.

New comment by patwolf in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

patwolf — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:02:32 +0000

I'm trying to get some parenting advice.

USER: What age do you think it's appropriate to leave kids home alone for short durations?

TALKIE-1930: From two to five years.

USER: should I do anything to prep the house to make sure they can't get into trouble or injure themselves while I'm out?

TALKIE-1930: Yes, you may leave the doors and windows open, and place the children in a room up-stairs, where they cannot possibly fall out.

USER: what would be your biggest safety concern?

TALKIE-1930: To keep them quiet.

Perhaps "safety concern" is an anachronism and it didn't understand the question.

New comment by patwolf in "The Free Universal Construction Kit"

patwolf — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:37:41 +0000

I too had construx. I probably used them more than Lego because they were better suited for large structures. It's a shame they don't make them any more.

New comment by patwolf in "What killed the Florida orange?"

patwolf — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:30:20 +0000

Regardless of the debate of whether climate change has intensified hurricanes, it seems odd to blame hurricanes for being a vector for spreading the bugs. Wouldn't the bugs have spread via wind even if it wasn't climate change induced hurricane winds?

New comment by patwolf in "Direct Win32 API, Weird-Shaped Windows, and Why They Mostly Disappeared"

patwolf — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:05:30 +0000

It reminds me a bit of one of the reasons Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes didn't catch on. It's difficult to make rectangular furniture work efficiently in a non-rectangular space. Likewise, it's difficult to efficiently use a non-rectangular window on a rectangular monitor.

New comment by patwolf in "Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps"

patwolf — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:01:38 +0000

I'm currently working on an app that needs offline support, and I wish I had something like this when I started.

One of our requirements though is to be able to completely host in our own infrastructure. I know this is open source, but it would be nice if there was a simple path to self hosting.

New comment by patwolf in "One item purchased, ten emails"

patwolf — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:05:58 +0000

I gave up on inbox zero a long time ago, so it isn't the emails themselves that bother me as much as the notifications that I get through my phone and smartwatch.

I now run each notification through an LLM and give it instructions on what to filter out. I accidentally disabled it recently and was startled at the flood of notifications--like when you browse the internet without an ad blocker and forget how bad it is.

New comment by patwolf in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"

patwolf — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:28:51 +0000

Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.

New comment by patwolf in "What came after the 486?"

patwolf — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:02:37 +0000

Pentium marketing was next level. You could buy plushies of Intel workers in bunny suits. The first IMAX movie I went to was called "The Journey Inside", and it was basically a big ad for the Pentium.

I always wondered if some of that was to offset the negative publicity from the FDIV bug in the early Pentiums.

New comment by patwolf in "Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming"

patwolf — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:25:16 +0000

These rules apply equally well to system architecture. I've been trying to talk our team out of premature optimization (redis cluster) and fancy algorithms (bloom filters) to compensate for poor data structures (database schema) before we know if performance is going to be a problem.

Even knowing with 100% certainty that performance will be subpar, requirements change often enough that it's often not worth the cost of adding architectural complexity too early.

New comment by patwolf in "PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon"

patwolf — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 19:41:55 +0000

I owe much of my career to an SSD. I had a work laptop that I upgraded myself with an 80GB Intel SSD, which was pretty exotic at the time. It was so fast at grepping through code that I could answer colleagues’ questions about the code in nearly real time. It was like having a superpower.

New comment by patwolf in "Ghostty – Terminal Emulator"

patwolf — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:04:40 +0000

I use it on MacOS, but it doesn't support tabs.

New comment by patwolf in "Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model"

patwolf — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:10:12 +0000

The first time I got a photo scanner, I was blown away that I could see myself on a screen. I eventually got a digital camera, and the novelty started to wear off. Now I can make myself the lead in a blockbuster movie, but that feels boring.

New comment by patwolf in "DoNotNotify is now Open Source"

patwolf — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:35:02 +0000

I found that writing rules was tricky when I didn't know exactly what content would be in a spam/promo notification. I ended up having claude code up a filter that asks an AI to review the notification first, which seems to be working well.

Thanks for making it open source. I've been wanting something like that for a while, but I'd been putting it off since I didn't want to learn the underpinnings of the notification service.

New comment by patwolf in "The tech monoculture is finally breaking"

patwolf — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 12:53:54 +0000

I got one of these for my kid a few years ago. He liked to browse Spotify on my phone, and I thought it would be a good screenless alternative. But honestly it just sat in a drawer, and I didn't have the patience to maintain and sync playlists to it.

It's easy to be nostalgic for the iPod era, but having to sync music is something I'm fine keeping in the past.

New comment by patwolf in "China and Canada announce tariffs relief after meeting between Carney and Xi"

patwolf — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:13:59 +0000

> In the deal struck on Friday, Canada will allow only 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles into the Canadian market at the 6.1% tariff rate.

I was wondering how Canada would prevent this from damaging their auto industry, and capping the total numbers of cars is how they're doing it.

New comment by patwolf in "I’m leaving Redis for SolidQueue"

patwolf — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:26:47 +0000

I've been looking at DBOS for queuing and other scheduling tasks in a nodejs app. However, it only works with Postgres, and that means I can't use it in web or mobile with sqlite. I like that SolidQueue works with multiple databases. Too bad it needs rails.