Hacker News: samspot

New comment by samspot in "Small Models Have Arrived"

samspot — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:14:12 +0000

I received access to AI in May of this year and used smaller models a lot in May, June, and July. Haiku 4.5 is terrible for coding. This month Luna was added and it's incredibly capable. I have to reach for a better model 1/50 times instead of 1/2 or 1/3 with Haiku. Luna is better and cheaper than the Haiku and Sonnet models I've been spending most of my time with.

It's safe to say I didn't come to this conclusion because I was "addicted to chasing frontier models"

New comment by samspot in "Stop Making TUIs"

samspot — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:40:03 +0000

At least with a TUI you know 100% it works with the keyboard. This is not something you can safely assume about any GUI, on the web or otherwise. Our accessibility team is kept very busy by this fact.

New comment by samspot in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

samspot — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:55:14 +0000

Do you actually manage devices for kids? It's a massive pain fine tuning all the controls on Apple, and the only way to really be sure is to completely ban the web browser and the app store (and probably more things I have missed). Now do this for multiple kids.

Most parents can't be bothered, especially if they are non-technical and intimidated by settings. And so they give their kids unrestricted devices. I think I read the average first exposure to pornography is now age 7. I'm speaking from experience as many parents I've talked to have thrown up their hands because they can't keep their elementary aged kid from using the ipad all night, despite there being an extremely easy screen time fix for that very problem.

I am technical enough to understand how to do all this, but even then I encounter many bugs in the parental controls, for example one kid is able to use Safari despite my blocking, even though they are on an identical device to another child who is successfully blocked.

There are infinite content sources now, and it's not possible to manage them all 1-by-1.

All that being said, broadcasting device user age should be completely opt-in for those who want it, and not mandated for every customer.

New comment by samspot in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

samspot — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:27:26 +0000

Your comment is also an attack aimed to manipulate my worldview and actions. The only difference is the corporate ad is more sophisticated.

New comment by samspot in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

samspot — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:41:28 +0000

Your comment is shockingly low in the rankings. Anyone who upvoted the parent is being absolutely ravished by confirmation bias. Yes the US has big problems, but that doesn't mean anyone should unthinkingly approve of any thought that's critical of it.

HS history is more than enough dispel any notion that this is anything like the Roman Empire.

Very dissapointed in the HN community in this moment.

New comment by samspot in "Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'"

samspot — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:27:35 +0000

There's a cool site I like: news.ycombinator.com

New comment by samspot in "Substack writers, you need a website"

samspot — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:14:51 +0000

Ok, so if you want to read https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/, which is now publishing less than once a month, you prefer to refresh the website once a week hoping there's an article to read?

That's unimaginable to me. Most of the writers I read publish infrequently. Email is great. I don't have to be on any social media. Articles come in and I can read them at my leisure.

New comment by samspot in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

samspot — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:48:30 +0000

This is like saying that because some (or many) people are bad at taking notes and highlighting, taking notes and highlighting is a bad idea. It's a skill like anything else. You get better at it the more you do it.

I don't know about you, but when I re-read a book 20 years later it's unlikely I'll have that trapper keeper handy. Re-reading something later and seeing my younger thoughts is magical.

New comment by samspot in "I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets"

samspot — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:47:06 +0000

The purpose of the fake birthday is not to protect random website credentials. It's to prevent someone with that data from walking into my bank and impersonating me. I started giving a fake birthday after being shocked by how little info some organizations needed to authenticate me.

New comment by samspot in "Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke"

samspot — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:56:10 +0000

Alternatively, you can easily add the bloat, discover if it has real value, and then strip it without the bad feeling of having sunk countless hours creating it. Vibe coding is excellent for making the first prototype to throw away.

New comment by samspot in "Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made"

samspot — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:25:26 +0000

You can also reduce team size by employing insane, life-destroying crunch time.

New comment by samspot in "Amazon without the knockoffs"

samspot — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:26:31 +0000

The no hassle returns from Amazon mitigate everything. I recently bought direct from someone and had to return because they didn't send the advertised item. I had to pay return shipping and a restocking fee, costing me $40 and a lot of my time. I tried to work it out with the seller not realizing that I only had 30 days to dispute with Paypal, so I was screwed there. My overwhelming takeaway was I should have bought from Amazon. (and, if you use paypal open a case with them asap instead of talking to the seller first).

I don't particularly like Amazon and would like to shop somewhere else, but it is sooooo convenient that it's hard to quit.

New comment by samspot in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

samspot — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:52:02 +0000

You are not wrong, but I just don't have time. My choices are pay someone or throw my hands up. I have been paying backblaze. But I recently had a drive die, and discovered the backups are missing .exe and .dll files, and so that part of the restore was worthless.

What time I do have, I've been using to try and figure out photo libraries. Nothing is working the way I need it to. The providers are a mess of security restrictions and buggy software.

New comment by samspot in "Apple Just Lost Me"

samspot — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:43:21 +0000

You can get by just fine in the US without a credit card too. At least if you have a debit card (which can pretend to be a credit card in most situations). We were actually unscored by the credit bureaus for several years when we didn't own a house.

New comment by samspot in "Ask HN: How to be alone?"

samspot — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:13:54 +0000

They said go every day, not do intense workouts every day. Plenty of things you can do at a gym that don't require recovery days. Being there so much should confer some social benefits too.

New comment by samspot in "I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard"

samspot — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:37:26 +0000

I envy your life of peaceful routine. For me every evening is a trip into the unknown. Sure some things repeat on the same days. But there is always something new. This week the one I'm aware of is daily Soccer tryouts. I have to check my spouse's paper calendar every day to keep up.

New comment by samspot in "Claude Code is being dumbed down?"

samspot — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:36:25 +0000

Posting like this is an anti-pattern. "Everyone wants what I want, and if you don't build it my way you are stupid." Props to teams that can find some value in feedback like this, but I think I would have stopped reading. If you have really valuable feedback for a product the last thing you want to do is deliver it wrapped in ignorance and entitlement.

New comment by samspot in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

samspot — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:15:39 +0000

I read the bug as notepad can launch unsafe links by delegating them to the OS to open.

New comment by samspot in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

samspot — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:41:00 +0000

I think we overestimate the amount of reading, writing, and thinking that occurred before LLMs.

New comment by samspot in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

samspot — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:35:18 +0000

It's hard for me to imagine anyone balking at this feature. My core note taking workflow frequently involves:

1. Note about blah 2. Paste link to blah 3. Open that link later when reviewing my notes.

Blah is sometimes a web link, sometimes a link to a doc on my system, and sometimes a link to an item in my todo tracker. The better analogy is this is like a pencil having an eraser built in.

I use Drafts instead of Notepad, but if I used Notepad I would want to be able to easily open links in my notes. When I do find myself in Notepad, it's because I double clicked on a readme file that often contains links to resources I need.