Hacker News: rcfox

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.

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

rcfox — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 21:03:40 +0000

Do most people? Not everyone is Google.

New comment by rcfox in "Live Stream from the Namib Desert"

rcfox — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 15:55:23 +0000

Just following the chat for a few minutes, people posted links to a couple of other locations:

Okaukuejo waterhole in Etosha National Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeMUdOPFcXI (at the time of posting, a herd of elephants are enjoying the water)

Kalahari Desert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME0dPuBtzug

New comment by rcfox in "I only use Google Sheets"

rcfox — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 18:21:15 +0000

I worked on creating a card game with a couple of my friends. We kept all of the cards in a Google Sheet, allowing everyone to easily edit or create new cards. Then, I wrote a script to compile the sheet into a card atlas so that it could be consumed by Tabletop Simulator. It worked amazingly well.

The only issue was that I had to run the script myself, since my friends were less technical. I'd probably see if I could setup a workflow in Github Actions to do it for me if I were to do this again.

New comment by rcfox in "Python developers are embracing type hints"

rcfox — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 23:28:43 +0000

In Python, every variable is either defined or imported in the file in which it's used, so you always know where to find it. (Assuming you don't do `from foo import *`, which is frowned upon.)

In C++, a variable might be defined in a header or in a parent class somewhere else, and there's no indication of where it came from.

New comment by rcfox in "Markov chains are the original language models"

rcfox — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 20:22:42 +0000

Is this just because LLMs don't have state?

As far as I understand it, as you have a back-and-forth conversation with an LLM, you have to provide the entire history of the conversation plus your new response each time.

New comment by rcfox in "A staff engineer's journey with Claude Code"

rcfox — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 02:49:38 +0000

With Typescript, I find it pretty eager to just try `(foo as any).bar` when it gets the initial typing wrong. It also likes to redefine types in every file they're used instead of importing.

It will fix those if you catch them, but I haven't been able to figure out a prompt that prevents this in the first place.

New comment by rcfox in "What's New with Firefox 142"

rcfox — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 14:44:52 +0000

These days, I'd say always start with the YouTube tabs.

New comment by rcfox in "Researchers find evidence of ChatGPT buzzwords turning up in everyday speech"

rcfox — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 23:13:01 +0000

I also went into that book blind. I was in grade 12 and some organization was offering scholarships to people who wrote an essay about the book. I had a twice-daily 45-minute bus ride to fill, so it seemed like an easy win.

I didn't end up finishing the book.

New comment by rcfox in "I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform"

rcfox — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 18:54:27 +0000

Ultimately, you need to decide who your target user is. Do you want to cater to the lowest common denominator, or do you want to want to make something power users can customize to fit their workflow?

Neither answer is necessarily wrong, you just need to make a choice.

New comment by rcfox in "Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels"

rcfox — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 15:29:28 +0000

I welcome being out of touch. The current trends seem ridiculous to me.

There's no practical difference between sending a message via Instagram vs via email. It's all just marketing. You probably can't even get an Instagram account without first getting an email account.

New comment by rcfox in "Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels"

rcfox — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 16:52:46 +0000

But why not just email?

New comment by rcfox in "Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything"

rcfox — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 17:24:16 +0000

I wonder if asking it to respond in the style of Linus Torvalds would be an improvement.

New comment by rcfox in "Ask HN: Would you get a CS degree today?"

rcfox — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 21:47:30 +0000

I graduated 15 years ago, so who know if my advice is worth anything anymore...

I think the best part of my computer engineering program at the University of Waterloo was the integrated co-op system. (Basically, internships.) It meant my degree was 5 years instead of 4, but I got work experience and professional connections at several companies and came out with a slight profit instead of a ton of debt. I even turned my last internship into a full-time job after I graduated.