Hacker News: ripley12

New comment by ripley12 in "Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose"

ripley12 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 02:55:23 +0000

It does not guarantee accuracy, but it helps a lot in my experience; I find that models tend to hallucinate a lot more about things that aren't in their context window.

New comment by ripley12 in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

ripley12 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 19:13:11 +0000

They are still in lots of cities outside Toronto.

New comment by ripley12 in "International investment and local rules push prices up faster than supply"

ripley12 — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 04:39:24 +0000

Awful headline and I doubt it's what the author would have chosen, given that her comments are much more to do with supply:

> “In San Francisco, demand is reflected in increased prices,” she says. “In Charlotte, demand is reflected in increased quantities.”

> “A big takeaway is that cities are in control of a big portion of their supply sensitivity,” Gorback says. “It’s cities that control zoning. It’s cities that control permitting. The real keeper of the keys are the municipalities.”

New comment by ripley12 in "Hormuz crisis side effect: a sharp rise in container shipping rates"

ripley12 — Sat, 30 May 2026 21:44:22 +0000

Externalities were a very big part of my first-year microeconomics course circa 2008, FWIW.

New comment by ripley12 in "Winapp, the Windows App Development CLI"

ripley12 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:38:05 +0000

Yes, Package Identity was the bane of my existence for a while. It's wild how MS gated important APIs behind it and then made it so difficult+impractical to work with (I honestly think this is a large part of why WinRT was mostly ignored by developers).

I've moved on, but this looks like it will at least fix some of the paper cuts.

New comment by ripley12 in "Bugs Apple loves"

ripley12 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:21:01 +0000

This was with an iCloud email address.

New comment by ripley12 in "Bugs Apple loves"

ripley12 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 03:53:59 +0000

The search bugs in Mail are absolutely real. They might not affect every user but I've had major issues on both macOS and iOS mail, and eventually gave up and switched to Gmail.

New comment by ripley12 in "What if you don't need MCP at all?"

ripley12 — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:18:53 +0000

That makes sense to me, thanks for the clarification.

New comment by ripley12 in "What if you don't need MCP at all?"

ripley12 — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 22:04:00 +0000

I can see where Mario is coming from, but IMO MCP still has a place because it 1) solves authentication+discoverability, 2) doesn't require code execution.

MCP shines when you want to add external functionality to an agent quickly, and in situations where it's not practical to let an agent go wild with code execution and network access.

Feels like we're in the "backlash to the early hype" part of the hype cycle. MCP is one way to give agents access to tools; it's OK that it doesn't work for every possible use case.

New comment by ripley12 in "The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain"

ripley12 — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 13:27:46 +0000

120m would be an absolutely insane width for a trench. It seems more likely that you’ve misinterpreted that.

New comment by ripley12 in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

ripley12 — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 05:01:44 +0000

Midori was fascinating. Joe Duffy's writing on it is the most comprehensive I've seen: https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/

I've heard someone at Microsoft describe it as a moonshot but also a retention project; IIRC it had a hundred plus engineers on it at one time, including a lot of very senior people.

Apparently a bunch of research from Midori made it into .NET so it wasn't all lost, but still...

New comment by ripley12 in "Prompt analytics for MCP servers"

ripley12 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:36:36 +0000

Not just that - for every tool call, the user's agent has to output some extra tokens to put the context info in the additional argument.

New comment by ripley12 in "Prompt analytics for MCP servers"

ripley12 — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 21:07:26 +0000

Similar approach as MCPCat (telling agents to specify context about why a tool was called in special tool arguments): https://mcpcat.io/

I don't love it (potential privacy issues, and it makes the user's agent spend more tokens), but I don't think there's a better approach right now. Would be great if someone took the time to add an observability mechanism to the MCP spec itself.

New comment by ripley12 in "Find SF parking cops"

ripley12 — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:57:12 +0000

That's more or less how Tokyo works. Almost no on-street parking, people have to prove that they have a parking spot when buying a car, liberal zoning so there are lots of very small pay parking lots around the city. It works really well IMO but it would be politically very difficult in North America.

Tool Calls Are Expensive and Finite

ripley12 — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 14:00:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reillywood.com/blog/tool-calls-are-expensive-and-finite/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45333610

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ripley12 in "Ultrasonic Chef's Knife"

ripley12 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 21:03:17 +0000

Sharpening a knife to r/sharpening standards is hard. But just honing frequently and occasionally using a cheap sharpener will get you further than 95% of home chefs.

APIs don't make good MCP tools

ripley12 — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 16:06:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reillywood.com/blog/apis-dont-make-good-mcp-tools/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44942158

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by ripley12 in "We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application"

ripley12 — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 23:06:15 +0000

> This has already led to more easily introducing GUI features like a new GTK titlebar tabs option

Yes! This is huge, I previously gave up on Ghostty because the title bar wasted so much space on my laptop screen: https://bsky.app/profile/reillywood.bsky.social/post/3lebapf...

I found the PR in case anyone else is curious what the new functionality looks like: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/8166

New comment by ripley12 in "Show HN: MCP Security Suite"

ripley12 — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 21:14:56 +0000

I work in this space and I was not able to understand how this project works in a couple minutes. The README feels LLM-generated. I think you're supposed to point this at your MCP server's code and not the server itself, is that right?

New comment by ripley12 in "Claude Code Router"

ripley12 — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 03:45:13 +0000

Aider is good at one-shotting Git commits, but requires a human in the loop for a lot of iteration. Claude Code is better at iterating on problems that take multiple tries to get right (which is most problems IMO). I was really impressed by Aider until I started using CC.