Hacker News: relistan

A Mermaid Planning Tool for AI

relistan — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:28:38 +0000

Article URL: https://relistan.com/mermaid-tool-for-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47429490

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by relistan in "Unpowered SSD data retention test:no data corruption on USB sticks after 6 years"

relistan — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:31:52 +0000

I found a similar (though much smaller! 1GB) Kingston drive from about 2008 that had been in storage since I moved overseas. 14 years later it still had all the data on it.

New comment by relistan in "EU mandates replaceable batteries by 2027 (2023)"

relistan — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 09:27:08 +0000

It’s not clear to me from this, but I hope that the “removability” component of this means the end of “disposable” vapes with a fixed lithium battery installed. I can’t even count the number of these I’ve seen littering the roadside. Ideally this raises the cost of that business model enough to also eliminate some vendors from that product category (“disposable” vapes), which is primarily aimed at/used by children anyway.

New comment by relistan in "Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists"

relistan — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:24:06 +0000

While some things are doing great, there's a not insignificant amount of inertia in government for the last decade. This is actively being discussed in the Irish press. And Ireland has a long history of cronyism. I suspected (author clarified below) that is what was leading to the cynicism in the original post.

New comment by relistan in "Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists"

relistan — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:32:57 +0000

Alternatively, it's successful and is expanded to support more artists in the future. Cynicism with governance not unjustified in Ireland, but here we are looking at some actual progress.

New comment by relistan in "I doubt that anything resembling genuine AGI is within reach of current AI tools"

relistan — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 09:31:40 +0000

These things work well on the extremely limited task impetus that we give them. Even if we sidestep the question of whether or not LLMs are actually on the path to AGI, Imagine instead the amount of computing and electrical power required with current computing methods and hardware in order to respond to and process all the input handled by a person at every moment of the day. Somewhere in between current inputs and handling the full load of inputs the brain handles may lie “AGI” but it’s not clear there is anything like that on the near horizon, if only because of computing power constraints.

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

relistan — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:32:34 +0000

Way back, Perl got off the ground really because, in contrast to the C compilers of the era, code written on one Unix ran on the others, usually unmodified. In my first jobs, where we had heterogeneous mixes of commercial Unixes, this was unbeatable. It also wrote like higher level shell, which made it easy to learn for systems people, who really were the only ones that cared about running things on multiple platforms most of the time anyway.

As things became more homogeneous, and furthermore as other languages also could do that “one weird trick” of cross platform support, the shortcomings of both Perl and its community came to the fore.

New comment by relistan in "I know when you're vibe coding"

relistan — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 09:39:14 +0000

My guess is that you're letting the context get polluted with all the stuff it's reading in your repo. Try using subagents to keep the top level context clean. It only starts to forget rules (mostly) when the context is too full of other stuff and the amount taken up by the rules is small.

New comment by relistan in "I know when you're vibe coding"

relistan — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 09:32:20 +0000

I actually had Claude and Gemini both do it and revise each other's work to get to the final doc. Worked surprisingly well.

New comment by relistan in "I know when you're vibe coding"

relistan — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 07:42:39 +0000

To a certain extent you are probably still not using it optimally if you are still doing that much work to clean it up. We, for example, asked the LLM to analyze the codebase for the common patterns we use and to write a document for AI agents to do better work on the codebase. I edited it and had it take a couple of passes. We then provide that doc as part of the requirements we feed to it. That made a big difference. We wrote specific instructions on how to structure tests, where to find common utilities, etc. We wrote pre-commit hooks to help double check its work. Every time we see something it’s doing that it shouldn’t, it goes in the instructions. Now it mostly does 85-90% quality work. Yes it requires human review and some small changes. Not sure how the thing works that it built? Before reviewing the code, have it draw a Mermaid sequence diagram.

We found it mostly starts to abandon instructions when the context gets too polluted. Subagents really help address that by not loading the top context with the content of all your files.

Another tip: give it feedback as PR comments and have it read them with the gh CLI. This is faster than hand editing the code yourself a lot of times. While it cleans up its own work you can be doing something else.

New comment by relistan in "LibreOffice slams Microsoft for locking in Office users w/ complex file formats"

relistan — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 07:39:05 +0000

As AI tools become more dominant, businesses are going to want their documents to be fully read by their AI in whatever format they are in. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fight over all of this brewing in the next couple of years.

New comment by relistan in "DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI"

relistan — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 13:51:53 +0000

All of this is a mess. But it should never even have been possible for it to fall to a single developer to screw up and commit a key like that.

If there were anything like proper processes in place, controls would have made that very difficult.

Then there are the weird issues about why obvious close ties to xAI here....

New comment by relistan in "Calling Go from Elixir with a CNode in Crystal"

relistan — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 09:51:14 +0000

Try googling for the solution you would have used here and report back ;)

New comment by relistan in "Calling Go from Elixir with a CNode in Crystal"

relistan — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 09:49:23 +0000

Author here. Nearly 30 years as a UNIX sysadmin. Yes, I know about POSIX ipc. It's not well supported on the BEAM, and anyway would violate most of what makes Erlang/Elixir apps so robust. Not really an option worth even considering.

New comment by relistan in "Calling Go from Elixir with a CNode in Crystal"

relistan — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 09:47:46 +0000

Author here. I know all about POSIX IPC (nearly 30 years UNIX admin here). It's not supported on the BEAM in a sensible way. Not to mention that if it were implemented, it would almost certainly violate the sensible failure domain management of the Erlang/BEAM ecosystem and OTP.

As for GRPC: we don't use it anywhere else. So we'd have needed all of the tooling on two stacks, calling patterns without native error handling that we'd have had to implement, and instead we have a thin wrapper that allows the Elixir app to call Go like native Elixir code. GRPC would have been worse in almost every way.

Calling Go from Elixir with a CNode (In Crystal)

relistan — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 14:56:44 +0000

Article URL: https://relistan.com/calling-go-from-elixir-with-a-cnode

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44248338

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by relistan in "Critical Warning for External Purchases in Apple App Store"

relistan — Thu, 15 May 2025 07:36:25 +0000

Bad for everyone, but not surprising at this point.

New comment by relistan in "Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk"

relistan — Thu, 08 May 2025 07:44:21 +0000

These brands face massive competition from Chinese no-brand electronics on one end, and Apple, Sonos, and many others at the other end.

Basically any time a market changes drastically you see older players consolidate. Too often that leads to one big collapse of the consolidated entity. We’ll see what happens in time.

New comment by relistan in "RIP Skype"

relistan — Tue, 06 May 2025 13:08:28 +0000

:shrug: who knows

New comment by relistan in "RIP Skype"

relistan — Tue, 06 May 2025 09:33:09 +0000

Seems hard to believe that no one would have bought this brand at least.