Hacker News: reedlaw

New comment by reedlaw in "GLM 5.2 Is Out"

reedlaw — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:05:38 +0000

Since the Renaissance got started before the printing press, maybe you mean the press fueled it? The idea that the church found printing dangerous seems like a conflation with events that happened during the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church did censor works it found heretical, including unauthorized Bible translations.

One could argue the opposite conclusion, that technology helps break monopolies, but either view depends on reductionist historical readings. The truth is somewhere in between.

New comment by reedlaw in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

reedlaw — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:00:30 +0000

Good instinct. I did both. The script came out later.

New comment by reedlaw in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

reedlaw — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:49:08 +0000

I did the malware check using Claude, providing it with the same list (https://md.archlinux.org/s/SxbqukK6IA), and it did essentially the same things as this script does to verify. So either way should do the trick.

New comment by reedlaw in "AUR Packages Compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit"

reedlaw — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:16:10 +0000

I also had an affected package installed, fortunately it was from the official repo before it was dropped and became an AUR package.

New comment by reedlaw in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

reedlaw — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:21:26 +0000

Yeah, the README looks like slop to me.

New comment by reedlaw in "Show HN: Agent-skills-eval – Test whether Agent Skills improve outputs"

reedlaw — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:44:18 +0000

Codex is only slightly better, and that fluctuates so I switch back and forth.

New comment by reedlaw in "Show HN: Agent-skills-eval – Test whether Agent Skills improve outputs"

reedlaw — Thu, 07 May 2026 17:11:48 +0000

I tried to create a hook that would detect when token usage was running out and write HANDOFF.md so I could switch to another agent and finish the current task. It never worked reliably. To make a hook for db queries, it would need to run before each bash call, check if it looks like a query, and then exit with a new prompt, e.g.: "Use tidewave's execute_sql_query for DB access". But then it could just ignore the prompt the same as CLAUDE.me. What if I really wanted to use bash for a specific task? The real issue is that prompts are not tightly coupled with capabilities. If we admit that, then skills are over hyped.

New comment by reedlaw in "Show HN: Agent-skills-eval – Test whether Agent Skills improve outputs"

reedlaw — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:19:02 +0000

I'm skeptical skills will outperform training given that Opus 4.7 already ignores a 720-byte CLAUDE.md telling it to use tidewave (a Rails MCP server with 6 tools) for db queries. When I asked a new claude session about a record it called

> Bash(DATABASE_URL=$(grep -E '^DATABASE_URL=' .env 2>/dev/null | head -1) echo "ok")

even though I have in CLAUDE.md:

> For database queries, use tidewave first.

I then prompted:

> use tidewave as per CLAUDE.md. also diagnose why you failed to heed that

> ● Diagnosis first: I defaulted to shell habits (env grep → psql) instead of pausing to recall the CLAUDE.md rule that tidewave is the first-line DB tool. The trigger was "look at this record" — I should have read that as "run a SQL query" and reached for tidewave immediately.

If Opus 4.7 doesn't follow simple CLAUDE.md instructions, I'm not sure what benefits other markdown files could bring. I don't trust Opus's own explanation, but it could point to the fact that the system prompt for bash is much longer than CLAUDE.md with tidewave.

While LLM judging could be helpful, I think the tool-call assertions (https://github.com/darkrishabh/agent-skills-eval#what-you-ge...) may be the most useful thing in agent-skills-eval given that it's the only objective measure of compliance.

New comment by reedlaw in "Spinel: Ruby AOT Native Compiler"

reedlaw — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:01:13 +0000

Why do you say HashWithIndifferentAccess shows a lack of understanding? Like many Rails features, it's a convenience that abstracts away details that some find unpleasant to work with. Rails sometimes takes "magic" to the extreme through meta-programming. However, looking at the source [1], HashWithIndifferentAccess doesn't use eval, send, method_missing, or define_method. So I'm not sure how it seems weird to someone who works more with plain Ruby.

1. https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/fa8f0812160665bff083a089...

New comment by reedlaw in "Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick"

reedlaw — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:28:18 +0000

Chinese omits articles, verbs aren't conjugated, and individual characters carry more meaning than English letters, but other than those differences I don't have the impression that Chinese communication is inherently more concise. Some forms of official speech are wordy. Writing is denser, but the amount of information conveyed through speech is about the same. There are jokes about ambiguous words or phrases in both Chinese and English. So I was surprised at your take, but no objection to your points above. Ancient Chinese, on the other hand, is extremely concise, but so are other ancient languages like Hebrew, although in a different way. So it seems that ancient languages are compressed but challenging and modern languages have unpacked the compression for ease of understanding.

New comment by reedlaw in "Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick"

reedlaw — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:56:06 +0000

Are you saying Chinese is more concise than English? Chinese poetry is concise, but that can be true in any language. For LLMs, it depends on the tokenizer. Chinese models are of course more Chinese-friendly and so would encode the same sentence with fewer tokens than Western models.

New comment by reedlaw in "Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs"

reedlaw — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:35:06 +0000

I've come to the conclusion that Hacker News is the best aggregator out there. Substack knows my interests yet gives terrible recommendations. Youtube constantly recommends the same videos or exaggerates my interest in a topic based on a few views, spamming me with related content until I watch something unrelated. The only downside of Hacker News is that its focus is narrower than other sites. But perhaps because the focus is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting" there is a bias towards things I find interesting with less noise than more commercial offerings.

New comment by reedlaw in "Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens"

reedlaw — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:16:21 +0000

Claude has trained me on the use of the word 'invariant'. I never used it before, but it makes sense as a term for a rule the system guarantees. I would have used 'validation' for application-side rules or 'constraint' for db rules, but 'invariant' is a nice generic substitute.

New comment by reedlaw in "A sufficiently detailed spec is code"

reedlaw — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:29:53 +0000

Then I would say this is another proof that LLMs lack intellect or ability to reason about universals. See https://michaelmangialardi.substack.com/i/186405810/test-4-p...

New comment by reedlaw in "A sufficiently detailed spec is code"

reedlaw — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:30:23 +0000

Why is Haskell irrelevant to the argument that LLMs can't reliably permute programming knowledge from one language to another? In fact, the purity of the language and dearth of training data seems like the perfect test case to see whether concepts found in more mainstream languages are actually understood.

New comment by reedlaw in "Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system"

reedlaw — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:35:21 +0000

This is the second endorsement I've seen today. I gave OpenSpec a shot and was dismayed by the Explore prompt. [1] Over 1,000 words with verbose, repetitive instructions which will lead to context drift. The examples refer to specific tools like SQLite and OAuth. That won't help if your project isn't related to those.

I do like the basic concept and directory structure, but those are easy enough to adopt without all the cruft.

1. https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec/blob/main/src/core/te...

New comment by reedlaw in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

reedlaw — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:40:32 +0000

Do you have examples of the task maturation cycle? I'm not sure how it would work for tasks like extracting structured data from images. It seems it could only work for tasks that can be scripted and wouldn't work well for tasks that need individual reasoning in every instance.

New comment by reedlaw in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

reedlaw — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:37:15 +0000

How do you even begin to define objective measurements of software engineering productivity? You could use DORA metrics [1] which are about how effectively software is delivered. Or you could use the SPACE Framework [2] which is more about the developer experience.

1. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/using-the-...

2. https://space-framework.com/

New comment by reedlaw in "Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma"

reedlaw — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 13:59:12 +0000

Plasma Bigscreen has been around for 6 years: https://itsfoss.com/news/plasma-bigscreen-comeback/

New comment by reedlaw in "Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST"

reedlaw — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 13:14:11 +0000

https://github.com/mickeynp/combobulate