Hacker News: patwolf

New comment by patwolf in "Unlocking any car from X brand in most of the world"

patwolf — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 13:07:33 +0000

I received an email from Toyota asking me to connect to a newly-purchased vehicle in their app. I hadn't actually purchased a Toyota, but I went ahead and installed the app to see what it would do, and I ended up having full access to someone's car. I could see the car's location, lock/unlock it, and even start the engine remotely. I did try to contact Toyota about the issue through various channels and never got a response.

If they can't get the simple parts of security right, like verifying a user's email before creating an account and linking it to a vehicle, then I have little confidence in the security of other parts of their systems.

New comment by patwolf in "Lemmings CSS Animation"

patwolf — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 13:37:01 +0000

I remember having Lemmings and messing with the animation sprites from the game--I don't recall if they were saved in a bmp format or if it required a tool to extract. I'd try to recolor their hair or change their outfits pixel by pixel, but there were a lot of animations and a lot of frames. I always wanted to use them to build a Tetris/Lemmings hybrid game (the two games with the best music), but never got around to it.

New comment by patwolf in "Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?"

patwolf — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 16:39:09 +0000

1) Claude code (Max) at work. Claude code (Pro) personal account for side projects. I do still have a ChatGPT subscription. I'm tempted to cancel it, but I like their app. Gemini is bundled somehow into my google subscriptions. I use it occasionally, but I'd be just as happy to not be paying for it.

2) I do use Openrouter for side projects that need an embedded AI. For example, on Halloween I made a talking pumpkin to greet trick or treaters as they came to the porch.

3) Mostly code. I've tried muse, grok, gemini, codex, and pi w/ openrouter, but I always come back to code.

4) no

5) I have a grok bot account I use to manage personal stuff. It organizes my email and calendar, keeps me up-to-date on news, does health tracking, trip planning, and shopping research. As an example, there's a website where I order lunch for my kids. I like to know each morning if I need to pack their lunch, so I have grok bot log into the website and sync it to my calendar. I then get a notification in the morning with everything I need to start the day, like whether to pack lunches, what the weather will be, or if I need to help my kids study for a test.

New comment by patwolf in "Casio Watches of the 1980s"

patwolf — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 22:55:38 +0000

Personally I like it more with the labels. Reminds me of web design where sometimes you have to add some unnecessary text or icons or else it looks too bare.

New comment by patwolf in "Apple Music 404 Not Found"

patwolf — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 13:20:55 +0000

It's funny seeing "The Dixie Chicks" listed under "The Chicks", given they didn't change their name until 2020. I get it, but it's amazing how thorough they were retroactively updating content.

New comment by patwolf in "New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing"

patwolf — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:36:05 +0000

I had a Withings watch and absolutely loved it. I considered buying another one after my old one got water damage. However, it was becoming evident from changes to the app that it was getting more and more locked down and ultimately was going to require a subscription for anything useful. At the same time, the app was getting buggier. At one point I lost multi years worth of data when I had to re-sync my watch to a new phone.

It's a shame because I liked their spin on a hybrid smart watch which looked like a traditional analog watch. Garmin does make hybrids, but to me they all look too sporty or tactical.

New comment by patwolf in "Redesigning source control at Anthropic"

patwolf — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:08:13 +0000

I was hoping for something more novel. There must be dozens of companies out there working on rethinking what repos and workflows look like in the agentic era. It feels like we're all riding around in horseless carriages but haven't yet figured out the ergonomics of a modern automobile.

New comment by patwolf in "Show HN: How random are you?"

patwolf — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:58:31 +0000

I only have a few digits of pi memorized, so I had better luck using digits from fibonacci's sequence. I can derive them in my head, albeit slowly as the numbers get large.

New comment by patwolf in "Show HN: An experimental pattern-first DAW that supports MCP"

patwolf — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:47:21 +0000

I've been experimenting with AI powered DAWs. I finally settled on using Pi Durable to embed the prompting directly in the UI.

I've also found AI good at building synths. I now have a bunch of synths, samplers, and drum machines that my DAW can configure through MCP. For example, I can tell it to configure a 303, generate a 4-bar arp pattern, slowly increase the resonance across the pattern, and add it to the song.

New comment by patwolf in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

patwolf — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:53:56 +0000

One of the reasons I use OpenRouter is because they offer zero data retention. As far as I can tell, DeepSeek's own API doesn't support ZDR.

New comment by patwolf in "Reverse Engineering of the M-VAVE FM-1 Pocket Synthesizer Firmware"

patwolf — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:27:31 +0000

I grabbed one of these since I didn't have a hardware FM synth. While playing around with a web-based patch editor and seeing how well synths can run in a web, I started using AI to build out my own synths, and it's been a lot of fun. I've done FM, granular, samplers, 303 and 808 clones, and a bunch of others. So yeah, if you don't care about the experience of having a bespoke device, you could probably one-shot something much more sophisticated than this.

New comment by patwolf in "Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery"

patwolf — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:46:28 +0000

This is the same argument from when Sirius and XM radio merged. It didn't matter that they were monopolizing satellite radio because the real competition was terrestrial radio and internet radio.

New comment by patwolf in "JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025"

patwolf — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:10:27 +0000

I used to use Claude inside of a terminal within Webstorm until I realized I rarely looked at the code in the IDE. Instead I was creating draft PRs and reviewing the code in github. Now I use claude inside of herdr, and I appreciate having more screen real estate devoted to claude. As a long-time Jetbrains subscriber it pains me to stop using it. But at this point, I'm not sure what they could come up with that would be compelling enough for me to switch back.

New comment by patwolf in "Web Search API"

patwolf — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 11:59:23 +0000

I've been using the web search in OpenRouter, which is similar in that it's a wrapper around other search engine providers. It's really convenient to be able to experiment with new models and new search engines without having to go through corporate hoops to subscribe to a new service.

New comment by patwolf in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

patwolf — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:16:21 +0000

I've worked with developers that were reduce maximalist. During PR reviews, anything that could be rewritten with reduce was flagged. One of the benefits of AI is not having to care as much about things like that.

New comment by patwolf in "JEP 544: Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation"

patwolf — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:07:13 +0000

IBM's J9 had AOT for a long time too. I wonder how JEP 544 compares.

New comment by patwolf in "Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools"

patwolf — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:54:32 +0000

I played around with codegraph. I did a quick experiment where I gave claude code a feature to implement, and I had it perform the same task with and without codegraph. This wasn't scientific, so take it all with a grain of salt.

The codegraph implementation used fewer tokens. However, I performed an automated code review on each implementation, and there were more issues with the codegraph version. These weren't major issues, more like it re-implemented a function that already existed, or used styling that wasn't consistent with the rest of the codebase. My theory is that there's useful information an LLM gleans while grepping through code that is missed when it uses codegraph instead.

New comment by patwolf in "The Helicopter with Radioactive Blades"

patwolf — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:48:10 +0000

Often in software development I encounter code that seems overly complex. It's not always obvious at first glance whether that complexity is because it's solving a really difficult problem, or because the developers made it more complex than it needed to be.

Having no domain knowledge of the problems of detecting cracks in blades, this sounds like either a genius solution to a super hard problem, or unnecessary complexity.

New comment by patwolf in "Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?"

patwolf — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:30:25 +0000

I don't use MCPs much for personal use, but I've come to see the benefits of having a standardized mechanism for distributing tools across non-dev teams, especially when they're using a hodgepodge of agents.

I'm also excited about the upcoming SEP-2640 extension to MCP, which will be allow skills to be delivered via MCP. While the skill format has been standardized, skill distribution hasn't. I know there are tools like Vercel skills CLI, but that's not a good option for non-devs.

New comment by patwolf in "I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again"

patwolf — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:06:44 +0000

My experience with Cognito matches the author's experience exactly. I mostly used Auth0 in the past, but we switched to Cognito for a new project because it would be cheaper.

Don't like that email addresses are case sensitive, and now you want to change that? Sorry, you gotta create a new user pool from scratch--no way to migrate.