Hacker News: rcfox

New comment by rcfox in "Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility"

rcfox — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:08:41 +0000

New comment by rcfox in "Claude, change the "Add to Cart" button to blue"

rcfox — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:36:51 +0000

A Bot & Costello

New comment by rcfox in ".gitignore Everything by Default"

rcfox — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:54:01 +0000

I'm not convinced people acting on muscle memory would remember to unignore the files either. They're going to lose work or have giant "oops, I forgot to commit these files" commits.

New comment by rcfox in ".gitignore Everything by Default"

rcfox — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:46:47 +0000

This seems like bad advice. I've very rarely committed extra files by accident, but I would 100% forget to unignore files I meant to commit.

If you're doing an initial setup step to gitignore everything, why not just do an initial setup step to gitignore the usual files? Make a template that you copy into all of your repos.

New comment by rcfox in "Which tools do Claude, Codex and Cursor choose? We measured 17k runs to find out"

rcfox — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 02:29:44 +0000

I've noticed that too. Maybe the normal Write tool has to output the entire file and this is an attempt to reduce token usage?

New comment by rcfox in "Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code"

rcfox — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:17:23 +0000

Auto mode feels like a solution to a problem they created. Whitelisting commands used to work fairly well until the agents started generating complex bash commands that it gave up trying to classify.

"Oh you're piping grep into sed, I have no idea what the implications of that are!"

The more complex bash scripts are perhaps better or more efficient, but it feels like it's training us to give up more control to the agent.

I'd prefer to have an auto mode for read-only operations and go back to simpler commands for write operations that I can personally whitelist or manually accept.

New comment by rcfox in "We're extending access to Fable 5 on all paid plans through July 12"

rcfox — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 03:29:26 +0000

Huh, it's wild that they didn't send an email about this. I can't imagine people taking this well, especially as they don't seem to be giving notice about the end of it either.

New comment by rcfox in "We're extending access to Fable 5 on all paid plans through July 12"

rcfox — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 03:21:57 +0000

This is the first I'm hearing about a usage cut. Do you have a link to an announcement for this? Search hasn't shown anything.

New comment by rcfox in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

rcfox — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 01:31:10 +0000

Interesting that this showed up here now. I did it a week ago after hearing about it on The Rest Is Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t-5lQ2mzuw

New comment by rcfox in "Macaroni – a single HTML file messenger"

rcfox — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:44:51 +0000

Seems kind of similar (at least in purpose) to giscus, a commenting system powered by GitHub Discussions.

https://github.com/giscus/giscus

New comment by rcfox in "My domain got abused on GitHub Pages"

rcfox — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:33:50 +0000

You actually can do that. https://github.com/settings/pages

New comment by rcfox in "GCC 16 has been released"

rcfox — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:00:09 +0000

It looks like SARIF is JSON, with a formal schema. I'm guessing the JSON they used to output used their own, non-standard schema.

New comment by rcfox in "The Super Nintendo Cartridges (2024)"

rcfox — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:10:31 +0000

Could be to highlight their incompatibility?

New comment by rcfox in "Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7"

rcfox — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:17:27 +0000

There are communities of people who publicly blog about their eating disorders. I wouldn't be surprised if the laymen's discourse is over-represented in the LLM's training data compared to the scientific papers.

New comment by rcfox in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

rcfox — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:09:30 +0000

Maybe you need to make shorter PRs?

New comment by rcfox in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

rcfox — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:26:45 +0000

Yeah, my first thought (admittedly an absurd one) went to something along the lines of:

"I flipped a coin and the LLM called heads. I should have gone with tails..."

New comment by rcfox in "Productivity gains from AI coding assistants haven’t budged past 10% – survey"

rcfox — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:29:26 +0000

The title is misleading. Productivity isn't at 10%, it's at 110%.

New comment by rcfox in "Ask HN: Where to begin with "modern" Emacs?"

rcfox — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 17:54:34 +0000

> For Linux, just use the emacs that comes with the distro.

Are the major distros shipping packages with tree-sitter support yet?

New comment by rcfox in "Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support"

rcfox — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 21:15:52 +0000

Your comment heavily implied (to me) scaling databases horizontally. Yes, it's not necessarily "Google scale" either, but it's a ton of extra complexity that I'm happy to avoid. But a Google employee is probably going to approach every public-facing project with the assumption of scaling everything horizontally.

With multiple servers talking to a single database, I'd still prefer to let the database handle generating IDs.

New comment by rcfox in "Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support"

rcfox — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 21:08:57 +0000

"Distributed systems" doesn't have to mean some fancy, purpose-built thing. Just correlating between two Postgres databases might be a thing you need to do. Or a database and a flat text file.