Hacker News: samcollins

New comment by samcollins in "CrabTrap: An LLM-as-a-judge HTTP proxy to secure agents in production"

samcollins — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:36:48 +0000

Why do you say that? I thought this pattern was well established, or are you aware of known issues with it?

New comment by samcollins in "Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode"

samcollins — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:52:50 +0000

Yep, I suspect this is the rationale/driver too.

New comment by samcollins in "Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode"

samcollins — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:50:58 +0000

The business driver I assume is not lock-in on UX (as some say here) but the additional signal Anthropic gets when using their harness vs a 3P one. It makes sense to discount the price if that signal helps you improve your models, but that discount makes no sense if the user is running your model in another harness and you just get regular API usage signal.

New comment by samcollins in "Show HN: Minimalist editor that lives in browser, stores everything in the URL"

samcollins — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 20:00:32 +0000

Nice! I made a similar thing but the html for the text editor fits in a data uri, so it can be a bookmark or new tab page for taking quick notes

https://gist.github.com/smcllns/8b727361ce4cf55cbc017faaefbb...

New comment by samcollins in "AI tools I wish existed"

samcollins — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:50:08 +0000

Re 19, I made this with an iOS Shortcut a few weeks ago

  > A minimal voice assistant for my Apple Watch. I have lots of questions that are too complicated for Siri but not for ChatGPT. The responses should just be a few words long.

Use Dictate Text action to take voice as input, pass the text to OpenAI API as the user message with this as the system prompt:

“CRITICAL: Your response will only be shown in an iOS push notification or on a watch screen, so answer concisely in <150 characters. Do not use markdown formatting - responses are rendered as plain text. Do use minimalist, stylish yet effective vocabulary and punctuation.

CRITICAL: The user can not respond so do not ask a question back. Answer the prompt in one shot and if necessary, declare assumptions about the users questions so you could answer it in one shot, while making it possible for the user user to repeat ask with more clarity if your assumptions were not right.”

It works well. The biggest annoyance is it takes about 5-20s to return a response, though I love that it’s nearly instantaneous to send my question (don’t need to wait for any apps to open etc)

New comment by samcollins in "Ask HN: How do I know that I am autistic?"

samcollins — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 02:16:25 +0000

YMMV but a few things that helped me debug myself:

1. I got tested as an adult for ADHD

2. I experimented with diet, and found that a low carb diet reduced my symptoms quite noticeably. I continue to be shocked by what an affect my diet has on my experience and behavior.

3. I experimented with sleep, and having consistent sleep and wake hours also helped.

4. I started to meditate, do yoga, lift weights, get traditional Thai massage, do cold plunges. This helped me connect more with my body and get out of my head. I found that I needed to practice connecting with my body and my emotions because my analytical/cognitive voice was so dominant I wasn’t so aware of another way of experiencing reality.

5. I’m currently reading about Internal Family Systems therapy which I’m pretty sure will help a great deal but I haven’t yet found a therapist and started applying it.

6. I realized most of my friends and the people I connect with best are neuro-atypical in some way, and I love them for being quirky and unusual. It made me feel less embarrassed or ashamed to have weird aspects to my character, and embrace my strengths and accept my weaknesses (and add some systematic mitigations).

New comment by samcollins in "Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2016 Results"

samcollins — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 08:45:55 +0000

Nice

New comment by samcollins in "Finland will hand out cash to 2000 jobless people to test universal basic income"

samcollins — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 20:55:42 +0000

I agree. The implementation here will still enable us to learn about some aspects of UBI. The question of how benefits affect the motivation to gain re-employment will still need to be studied in further experiments.

I think it's worth celebrating that Iceland is doing controlled tests to explore this way. To really understand the best design for UBI, we need more of this.

Ask HN: What would you ask a perfect AI teacher to teach you?

samcollins — Sat, 26 Nov 2016 07:52:36 +0000

I work at Udacity and am interested in seeing how AI will end up playing a big role in education. I'm just curious -- if a perfect AI we're created that could teach you any concept, what would you prioritise learning? It would still take learning time on your part but the AI would understand your current level and coach and motivate you to learn the necessary concepts to meet your learning goal.

So, you've downloaded the app.

What are the top three things you would ask it to teach you?

Optional: how much time would you give to learning them?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13042391

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by samcollins in "What I Learned about Community from Sending 300+ Emails Manually"

samcollins — Wed, 06 May 2015 17:54:55 +0000

I've done this. It's very strange how growing instead of learning can feel like the right thing to do sometimes. It seems, at least in my mind, like some instinctive reaction to develop a position of strength (dumb animal), rather than to pursue a valued purpose (intelligent animal). In the times when I've made this mistake, it matches closely with when I'm simply trying to make something popular, rather than when I'm pursuing of a deeper purpose I really care about.

This article makes me think that the founder here has essentially identified a fundamental litmus test for the motivations of startup founders (purpose/fame).

New comment by samcollins in "Zocial CSS3 Buttons"

samcollins — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:30:46 +0000

This is fixed in the latest version. Alternatively you could just ensure zocial.css is the referenced below bootstrap.css to make sure it takes priority on styling.

New comment by samcollins in "Zocial CSS3 Buttons"

samcollins — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:29:11 +0000

personal bias, sorry :-)

New comment by samcollins in "Zocial CSS3 Buttons"

samcollins — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:28:51 +0000

Screenshots in Safari just captured the FOUT (http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/). Not sure I'm totally convinced about those IE8 + IE9 screenshots - I've tested those and 9 is pretty good, 8 is a bit lame and anything below 8 is appalling. What version of Windows was that?

It really takes the fun out of a project like this to make it not die in IE.

APIs in your Product - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

samcollins — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:01:06 +0000

Article URL: http://mindtheproduct.com/2011/12/apis-in-your-product/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3343525

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Product Manager's lessons learned - iPad app

samcollins — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 14:39:19 +0000

Article URL: http://mindtheproduct.com/2011/12/the-week-ipad-app-lessons-learned-from-a-product-manager/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3329193

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Classic example of how Google screws up design

samcollins — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:49:51 +0000

Article URL: http://mindtheproduct.com/2011/09/a-classic-example-of-how-google-screws-up-design/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029649

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Customer-focused vs product-focused product management, what's the difference?

samcollins — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:54:03 +0000

Article URL: http://mindtheproduct.com/2011/09/product-focused-vs-customer-focused-product-management-what%E2%80%99s-the-difference/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2990998

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

@mention notifications for Skype Chat (OSX)

samcollins — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:23:52 +0000

Article URL: http://smcllns.com/notifications-for-mentions-in-skype-chat

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886529

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Designing a CSS3 Button Set

samcollins — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 08:30:16 +0000

Article URL: http://smcllns.com/designing-a-css3-button-set

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886027

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by samcollins in "Fix Your Inaccurate Google Analytics Bounce Rate and Time on Site"

samcollins — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:18:53 +0000

Yeah the timer is a bit crude, working on a better script which considers an interaction as a click, scroll, or keydown and sends minimal events to GA.