Hacker News: philbo

Top FEMA official said he once teleported to Waffle House

philbo — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:39:31 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/20/politics/fema-official-gregg-phillips-violent-rhetoric-teleported-kfile

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47465217

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Can pumping chemicals into the ocean help stop global heating?

philbo — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 06:40:07 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/10/sodium-hydroxide-ocean-global-heating-solution

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47319783

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by philbo in "Show HN: Pawno, multiplayer chess in your terminal"

philbo — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:17:28 +0000

I began this project as an exercise to learn Go before starting a new job, then continued it as an exercise to mess about with Claude Code. So development was LLM-assisted: the UI is 100% vibe-coded, the model is 100% vim-typed, the rest is a mix of both.

Online play does not require signup etc. Instead I create an ephemeral session when network games are created/joined and those sessions are deleted at the end of the game. Leaderboard state is entirely local.

Because the backend runs on a small instance, I've been quite aggressive with connection management. If the server goes a minute without hearing from a client (turn or heartbeat), it ends the game and awards the win to the opposing player.

It was a pretty fun project to work on, and I definitely wouldn't have finished it without the crutch of Claude Code to push me through some of the schlepp.

Show HN: Pawno, multiplayer chess in your terminal

philbo — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:07:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.playpawno.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46870516

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by philbo in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

philbo — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:54:55 +0000

https://philbooth.me/

New comment by philbo in "Network of Scottish X accounts go dark amid Iran blackout"

philbo — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:49:36 +0000

Russia was allowed to inherit the USSR seat on 3 conditions:

- It took on all the sovereign debt from the newly independent nations.

- It relinquished nukes that were left behind in Ukraine.

- The United Nations collectively agreed to it.

I don't think any of those things would happen in the UK's case. But of course it doesn't matter what you or I think. It only matters what _Iran_ thinks will happen if Scotland gains independence.

New comment by philbo in "Network of Scottish X accounts go dark amid Iran blackout"

philbo — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 12:31:30 +0000

It's for the Scottish. It's in Iran's interests for Scotland to become independent because that would enforce change on the United Nations Security Council. The UK ceases to exist and loses its veto, then what happens on the UNSC after that is anyone's guess.

KdK part 2: a medical mystery from postwar Germany

philbo — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 07:33:49 +0000

Article URL: https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/kdk-part-2-a-medical-mystery-from

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46418296

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

KdK (Kinetik der Kontinua) part 1: Introduction

philbo — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 07:20:04 +0000

Article URL: https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/kdk-kinetik-der-kontinua-part-1-introduction

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46418212

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets

philbo — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 06:01:57 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/the-closer-we-look-at-time-the-stranger-it-gets

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201750

Points: 84

# Comments: 107

New comment by philbo in "Why we migrated from Python to Node.js"

philbo — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 22:47:57 +0000

https://status.posthog.com/history

New comment by philbo in "JSON River – Parse JSON incrementally as it streams in"

philbo — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 11:21:11 +0000

A nice thing about the SAX approach is it lets you layer other APIs on top too. I did something like that in BFJ:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/bfj

New comment by philbo in "Root cause analysis? You're doing it wrong"

philbo — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 06:35:46 +0000

It sounds like there’s another failure here, which you could have documented. If the test team didn’t understand what they were meant to test, that’s a failure of communication. Simply saying “they were wrong” is not sufficient exploration of the failure so, if that’s the point your manager was making, I agree with them. Blaming a third party for misunderstanding is less useful than seeking to improve the clarity of your own communication.

New comment by philbo in "Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025"

philbo — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 16:31:11 +0000

I think this and other recent posts here hugely overcomplicate matters. I notice none of them provides an A/B test for each item of complexity they introduce, there's just a handwavy "this has proved to work over time".

I've found that a single CLAUDE.md does really well at guiding it how I want it to behave. For me that's making it take small steps and stop to ask me questions frequently, so it's more like we're pairing than I'm sending it off solo to work on a task. I'm sure that's not to everyone's taste but it works for me (and I say this as someone who was an agent-sceptic until quite recently).

Fwiw my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md is 2.2K / 49 lines.

New comment by philbo in "Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Passed Mars Last Night"

philbo — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 21:38:30 +0000

Does he though? Honestly I haven't seen it.

I've been through the last ~10 or ~15 posts on his Medium this evening, to check. Sentence-by-sentence I don't see anything that goes beyond "what if". Can you share some of the quotes you have in mind?

I think this is an interesting phenomenon, because it seems that lots of people throw personal insults at him (not saying that's you btw) without addressing the meat of whatever they're reacting to.

And lest we forget! One of the founding essays [1] of this very website discusses it: if you're slinging ad hominem attacks or personal insults around, you're by definition losing the "argument" (not that I think this qualifies as an "argument").

[1]: https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

New comment by philbo in "Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Passed Mars Last Night"

philbo — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 08:05:54 +0000

Every confirmation is a data point.

New comment by philbo in "Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Passed Mars Last Night"

philbo — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 06:32:00 +0000

I think 3I/Atlas is a comet.

But I also think the question "what if it wasn't" is useful to consider.

I'd label anyone unwilling to discuss that topic a crank, not the other way round.

New comment by philbo in "Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Passed Mars Last Night"

philbo — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 06:19:32 +0000

Not much, but just confirmation that it's in the expected part of the sky is quite exciting. There's a probable capture of it from Perseverance here (it's just a tiny faint smudge):

https://bsky.app/profile/stim3on.bsky.social/post/3m2aqnbwlw...

New comment by philbo in "6 weeks of Claude Code"

philbo — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 07:52:40 +0000

I don't disagree with any of that. But as long as there are companies willing to pay me to write code the old-fashioned way, I'll keep doing it.

New comment by philbo in "6 weeks of Claude Code"

philbo — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 06:05:37 +0000

As one of the curious minority who keeps trying agentic coding but not liking it, I've been looking for explanations why my experience differs from the mainstream. I think it might lie in this nugget:

    > I believe with Claude Code, we are at the
    > “introduction of photography” period of
    > programming. Painting by hand just doesn’t
    > have the same appeal anymore when a single
    > concept can just appear and you shape it
    > into the thing you want with your code review
    > and editing skills.

The comparison seems apt and yet, still people paint, still people pay for paintings, still people paint for fun.

I like coding by hand. I dislike reviewing code (although I do it, of course). Given the choice, I'll opt for the former (and perhaps that's why I'm still an IC).

When people talk about coding agents as very enthusiastic but very junior engineering interns, it fills me with dread rather than joy.