Hacker News: pomatic

New comment by pomatic in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

pomatic — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 13:31:57 +0000

I don't think your sign up process is GDPR compliant - you need to say why you are collecting the information you are asking for, what you are going to do with that information, how long you are going to retain it for and how one can request for it to be deleted.

New comment by pomatic in "Perl's decline was cultural"

pomatic — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 18:44:58 +0000

How old are you now? Mid fifties here. And 'vibe coding' in what exactly - it is not of interest from a programming perspective, but from a 'what does the AI know best perspective'? I've followed a similar, but not identical trajectory and now vibe in python/htmx/flask without needing to review the code in depth (NB internal apps, not public facing ones), with claude code max. Vibe coding in the last 6-8 weeks now also seems to make a decent fist of embedded coding - esp32/arduino/esp-32, also claude code.

New comment by pomatic in "Ask HN: Hearing aid wearers, what's hot?"

pomatic — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:06:23 +0000

I had a Naida, now have a Marvel. The difference is night and day. The Marvel is hands-down the best hearing setup I have ever had (I am mid 50's, have worn aids of one type or another since I was 3 yo). Bluetooth is a game changer. The Roger On is fabulous in meetings and with computers (it appears as a USB sound device, it's far more reliable than BT for that). Battery life is fantastic, it lasts more than a day, and there's a fall back to disposable cells if required. Mobile app is a bit 'meh', but the rest is so good I can't complain!

New comment by pomatic in "How AWS is losing the younger generation with complexity"

pomatic — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:55:18 +0000

Quite sure the complexity of AWS is forcing the SME types out - even the most basic operations require reference to chatGPT to find the details buried in the UI. It's gone from being 'good enough' - I mean the UI 15 years ago was basic, but adequate to labyrinthine. We don't have complex needs, they're met by AWS, but the combo of premium pricing and a diabolical UI will force our migration eventually.

New comment by pomatic in "Use Plaintext Email (2019)"

pomatic — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 21:08:58 +0000

I'm sure markdown email has been done? But just didn't gain traction?

New comment by pomatic in "Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser"

pomatic — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 16:00:30 +0000

What is Dia (perhaps provide a link)? I'm aware of the diagramming tool, but that's clearly not what you mean here?

New comment by pomatic in "Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal"

pomatic — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 21:35:28 +0000

Lister diesel generators are much the same - half a dozen cranks, restore compression and off they go. The hand cranking can easily break your arm if you get it wrong though.

New comment by pomatic in "Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?"

pomatic — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 08:08:23 +0000

This is patently wrong - as an experiment, I've vibe coded* four apps in the last 10 days. I did not write one line of code myself. Two are crud style, one is DNS related and one is for an embedded device. They were non-trivial use cases, built using claude desktop with various MCP tools. I was blown away by just how good it was.

*the original definition of vibe coding involved using voice to dictate the prompts to AI, I prefer to type.

New comment by pomatic in "How I install personal versions of programs on Unix"

pomatic — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 13:54:34 +0000

The only time my home directory gets cleaned up (it is littered with random binaries) is when I get a new machine... It feels very wrong, but also quite cathartic at the same time!

New comment by pomatic in "Tailscale has raised $160M"

pomatic — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 10:57:32 +0000

What is tailscale going to do with GPUs? It's about as far removed from NL interaction as you can get, I really don't see any sane AI fit. Maybe they are using them for AI driven dev work? Probably need to think more laterally.

New comment by pomatic in "Tailscale has raised $160M"

pomatic — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 17:38:42 +0000

When they raised the 100M three years ago, I'm pretty sure they said they didn't need it and were saving it for a rainy day (or words to that effect), always seemed very odd at the time. Two q's for anyone who cares to speculate: have they burnt the original investment already? And if not, why would they need more funding? AFAICS there's no real competition in the market place for their product today, the only thing I can conceive is that they have a secret 'tailscale 2' project in the wings which is massively developer or capital intensive. Let's hope it is nothing related to AI band wagoning :-)

New comment by pomatic in "Reintroducing Capsul"

pomatic — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:51:38 +0000

Just wondered if the vm provising frontend is opensourced in all or part? Not looking to clone your business, just for a provisioning framework that allows for fiddling (as opposed to say something like proxmox, which allows for provisioning via a friendly UI but can't practically be tweaked behind the scenes).

New comment by pomatic in "AI Blindspots – Blindspots in LLMs I've noticed while AI coding"

pomatic — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 21:39:50 +0000

This is the way, small bite-sized pieces of the elephant. Unfortunately it means you do need to understand programming concepts, composition and to a lesser degree, architecture. On the positive side - these are new tools, and we need to learn how to work with them. They do have the power to nX times the person who has a bit of knowledge and can also adapt to their ways.

New comment by pomatic in "Bypass DeepSeek censorship by speaking in hex"

pomatic — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 20:23:34 +0000

The open source model seems to be uncensored, lending weight to the separate filter concept. Plus, any filter needs to be revised as new workarounds emerge - if it is baked in to the model that requires retraining, whereas it's reasonably light work for a frontend filter.

New comment by pomatic in "Operating System in 1,000 Lines – Intro"

pomatic — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 11:56:40 +0000

Symbian is anything but simple!

New comment by pomatic in "Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?"

pomatic — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 16:19:06 +0000

I think the biggest concern for a would-be employer would be: can you take instruction. After a decade of being in-charge, that's going to be a really tough call. I'd suggest consultancy might be the easiest way to transition in to full time employment - at some point you'll find a great fit and they'll offer you a permie role.

New comment by pomatic in "CodeMic: A New Way to Talk About Code"

pomatic — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 20:56:45 +0000

It's rare to stumble across a completely original take on something that is well established - I think this is a clever idea that really has legs, good luck to codemic, I look forward to engaging content, as a step up from the current live-stream et al quagmire.

New comment by pomatic in "UK's Online Safety Act comes into force"

pomatic — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 13:03:08 +0000

The biggest issue is that legislation seems to be drafted by people who have little or no expertise in their area. We've seen other examples of poorly drafted legislation in the UK - eg Computer Misuse Act 1990, which is intended to address hacking but can be read in such a way as to outlaw firewalls, and so on. Parliament as a whole is in desperate need of reform, it's based on archaic principles that just don't work anymore, but those in a position to enact reform seem to prefer the status quo.

New comment by pomatic in "My company has banned the use of Jetbrains IDEs internally"

pomatic — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 19:57:56 +0000

Can you offer up a .emacs that provides the same functionality as say, PHPstorm? I've tried, and not been able to reach that level of functionality.

New comment by pomatic in "Traveling with Apple Vision Pro"

pomatic — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 13:56:17 +0000

Actually historically they are pretty finicky about resolution and refresh rate - it's only with the last firmware update or two that they work with RPi reliably for example - I couldn't come up with a working X config for a long time.