Hacker News: paularmstrong

New comment by paularmstrong in "A Modern Web App in C"

paularmstrong — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:45:57 +0000

> Everything about marketyour.games is modern

I can't read any of the text on that page other than the headings. Is that what makes it modern? I assume the stack mentioned in the blog post is vibe-slop as well.

New comment by paularmstrong in "Incident with Actions"

paularmstrong — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:23:46 +0000

That site design is definitely a choice.

New comment by paularmstrong in "The Four Horsemen of Agentic Coding"

paularmstrong — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:20:27 +0000

My work Slack channels are ghost-towns. People are logged in, but they're never saying anything. I often find myself wondering if anyone is even working. PRs have their names on them, even the review comments are posted from _their_ accounts, but it is obvious that Claude wrote everything from the code, the unnecessarily verbose change summary, to their comments. Even their replies to my change requests start with "You're right — …".

I miss the days when the engineering Slack channels had long threads of new and interesting ways to do things, discussions of something we could do next to make work easier or fix long-standing issues. We used to build up our own knowledge of who was good at specific things, what they'd be interested in working on. Now everyone just has their slop-machine spit out every piece of a change for the entire stack without paying any attention to the details.

New comment by paularmstrong in "I Don't Want to Interact with Stochastic Parrots"

paularmstrong — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:21:20 +0000

If only it were so simple to block all of my coworkers.

New comment by paularmstrong in "“It works better in the app”"

paularmstrong — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:32:59 +0000

The article you linked is about social media as the proxy for information discovery as opposed to search.

> …clear that mobile is the future…

And also, "mobile" is tangential to "app" vs "website".

New comment by paularmstrong in "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub"

paularmstrong — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:51:13 +0000

I've used git-bug[1] for issues and it works pretty well. The web-ui is lagging behind and PR support would be everything you'd need to ditch a central-hosted web instance.

[1] https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug

New comment by paularmstrong in "Bike Bureau: Report Bike Lane Obstructions"

paularmstrong — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:16:43 +0000

I really wish this weren't the case, but I'm afraid that we're heading to a place where if we flood reports to officials, they'll just jump on calling bike lanes "DEI" and take them out.

New comment by paularmstrong in "GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability"

paularmstrong — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:39:12 +0000

Four of them were regarding AI/Copilot. So that's really just one long running incident and will probably continue to be 50/50 chance of being down.

New comment by paularmstrong in "Designing emoji for the way we communicate today"

paularmstrong — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:52:03 +0000

I also like that the article uses whatever system emoji you have, so everything is just showing apple emoji in text for me. All I see are a few 3D video renders of theirs.

New comment by paularmstrong in "Decoy Font"

paularmstrong — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:39:39 +0000

Can someone explain the actual use-case here? I'm struggling with this because it also hides the message from myself, making it incredibly hard to type because I have no confirmation that I hit the right keys on the keyboard.

New comment by paularmstrong in "Show HN: One More Letter"

paularmstrong — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:54:31 +0000

Also some instructions. I had no idea what I was supposed to do at first.

New comment by paularmstrong in "The git history command"

paularmstrong — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 01:53:57 +0000

`git history split` is really going to help me help juniors break up their large PRs into smaller more concise changes. If only it had the option to split an entire branch in two easily.

New comment by paularmstrong in "Odyssey Linux"

paularmstrong — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:58:39 +0000

I closed the page and gave up figuring out what this was about because of the poor contrast ratio and tiny font.

[edit] apparently the contrast ratio is technically okay. But this is one of those cases where raw contrast ratio isn't actually a good measure of accessibility. Just because some text has 5.92:1 contrast ratio, doesn't mean that at 11px font-size it's legible.

New comment by paularmstrong in "What's the best way to do authentication in modern applications"

paularmstrong — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:54:26 +0000

localStorage is not sent to the server when you request a document. So now you threw out the ability to do server-side rendering. This is only fine if you've got a application that always requires authentication, otherwise you risk server vs client mismatch, needless roundtrips, and DOM rewrites.

New comment by paularmstrong in "PostHog FOSS"

paularmstrong — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:27:44 +0000

It's all the AI bloat for me. It keeps getting shoved in my face and they _really_ want me to use it. But I neither want nor need it. The product itself was so good that it doesn't need this whole guessing-machine-layer on top of it.

I also agree that the nav, structure, and defaults changing keep being un-intuitive and are making it harder to find the things that I use and that matter to me and my orgs.

New comment by paularmstrong in "PostHog FOSS"

paularmstrong — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:49:50 +0000

They've been using AI to shove a lot of AI into their product and trying to force everyone to use AI. I really don't understand the why of any of it. The product was working great for what it needs to do. I don't need AI to make guesses about data for me and I especially do not want _yet another product_ trying to write features in my codebase (which is their latest push).

New comment by paularmstrong in "What any website can see about you"

paularmstrong — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 01:50:26 +0000

Wait till they find out what information native/installed apps can find out about you.

New comment by paularmstrong in "macOS needs its grid back"

paularmstrong — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:59:39 +0000

Zen has been working as a full replacement for Arc for me since the Atlassian acquisition. There are only minor things that I miss from Arc ("development mode").

New comment by paularmstrong in "[dead]"

paularmstrong — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:09:03 +0000

/me click "Jobs"

> Internal Server Error

I should have assumed this would happen based on how "vibey" the main page looked.

New comment by paularmstrong in "Incident with Actions and Pages"

paularmstrong — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:20:31 +0000

What's wrong with codeberg for private repos?