Hacker News: sandcat_

New comment by sandcat_ in "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub"

sandcat_ — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:59:06 +0000

I recently set this up on my homelab, not really expecting to switch to it, more out of interest. But wow, after I saw how unbelievably fast it was, I’ve moved everything over. I’ve now set it up to mirror things automatically to Github if I want to make them public.

Using Github at work is painful in comparison. (Also literally just this morning we’ve had to delay a release due to Github being down.)

New comment by sandcat_ in "Has the hallucination problem in AI been solved?"

sandcat_ — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:52:57 +0000

Gemini is the only model that I still see regularly flat-out hallucinate, e.g. the other day it told me we were using a particular technology (Fivetran) on a project when we aren’t and I have literally no idea where it could have gotten that from. No mention of it at all, etc.

Claude will make mistakes but they’re largely “reasonable”. In some ways that’s worse as they’re more believable.

GPT I can’t comment on too much, except to say we run a chatbot using it at my work and when extracting data from the conversation (contact info and such) it will occasionally make up an email address that wasn’t entered into the chat. We have guardrails around it, so it’s not a big deal, but it does happen.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Were Touch Bar's problems software rather than hardware?"

sandcat_ — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:32:46 +0000

Battery life was more what I was getting at. You’d basically have to have it plugged in and I couldn’t see Apple going for that.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Were Touch Bar's problems software rather than hardware?"

sandcat_ — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:22:34 +0000

It allows iPad apps to run natively on macOS. Before Catalyst and later Apple Silicon, there were no touch-native apps for macOS.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Were Touch Bar's problems software rather than hardware?"

sandcat_ — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 03:23:12 +0000

The main objection to touch on MacBooks so far is the software, by far. Apple may now, just about, be in a place where they could support it due to Catalyst, Apple Silicon and some of the latest UI changes in Tahoe. Back then, when they released the touch bar, they weren’t even close. Neither was Windows, though they shipped it anyway.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Were Touch Bar's problems software rather than hardware?"

sandcat_ — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 03:14:09 +0000

The immediate problems were software, but the hardware was what doomed it and I don’t see how they didn’t see that from the start. It could never be in all their products (e.g. iMac, well, without requiring a wired keyboard but that was never going to happen) so it could never be more than an accessory.

I think they realized that too late. It’s a shame though. In a MacBook-only world, I wonder what would have become of it.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Ask HN: How do you keep up with HN these days?"

sandcat_ — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:09:17 +0000

I have a proxy for HN which I redirect all HN links to, across all my browsers. It gives me the ability to block users, domains and keywords (with an exception if a post hits a certain threshold). It also removes karma, allows me to mark a post as “done” (i.e. I don’t need to see this again), that sort of thing. Oh and gives me stats too, just for fun.

It’s both cut down my HN time and made what remains far more valuable. I won’t share it, it’s nothing special and nothing that you can’t build yourselves in 30 minutes of prompting.

On a technical level, it works remarkably well. It simply proxies the HTML direct from HN and fiddles with it. I do wonder if it makes my upvotes worthless but I also don’t really care if it does. A browser extension could probably do much of the same but then I’d have to maintain it across Chrome, Safari, etc.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Why space is a terrible place to cool a data center"

sandcat_ — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:56:08 +0000

Not defending the logic, but a key premise behind it is the use of Starship supposedly reducing cost of launch by 10-100x. Again, not saying that's feasible, but that's the goal.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Let’s take apart your phone"

sandcat_ — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:46:20 +0000

Been expecting this. An AI slop equivalent of the likes of https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ etc. A similar style or approach in theory, but without any of the care or attention to detail or humanity as what they’re mimicking. No interest in teaching, or accuracy, just prompt out the slop, get the views, move on.

> I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes, please shout them and I'll fix!

Depressing.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Ask HN: Is Traditional SaaS Dying?"

sandcat_ — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:18:33 +0000

I sorta expect the opposite. Anyone can build some small, niche SaaS themselves now. It's the giant, hulking behemoths (Salesforce, as one example) that can't be vibe-coded away easily. I suspect we'll see far more consolidation, and SaaS will also shift towards focusing far more on the enterprise. And so cost per seat will in fact increase, is my guess. But we'll see.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Tell HN: Old.reddit.com Requires Login"

sandcat_ — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:30:45 +0000

Honestly, probably time to move off it regardless. Perhaps I visited the wrong subreddits but these days, whenever I show up, it's all largely AI slop. Or bot accounts, reposting things. Even on smaller or more niche subreddits too.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's"

sandcat_ — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:49:19 +0000

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-100-beef/

New comment by sandcat_ in "Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code"

sandcat_ — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 05:51:44 +0000

The classifier runs Sonnet so I doubt it contributes too much.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code"

sandcat_ — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 05:35:03 +0000

Worth mentioning as I think at least a few of the commenters are mixing them up: auto mode is different from --dangerously-skip-permissions / YOLO mode. In auto mode, there's a classifier that runs before any command is executed and theoretically blocks any dangerous commands from running. I've found it to be quite annoying and overly zealous, but probably pretty effective.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code"

sandcat_ — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 05:20:38 +0000

I'd use a hook to forbid that.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]"

sandcat_ — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 03:45:46 +0000

There were so many comments[1][2][3] at the time saying that Uber has no moat, there’s no switching cost, the only value is the $3 rides, etc, etc.

I suspect it’ll play out the same.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8987827

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6137542

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9984619

New comment by sandcat_ in "Everything you do is being recorded"

sandcat_ — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:22:18 +0000

Vietnam?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/world/asia/vietnam-traffi...

New comment by sandcat_ in "Is it all just vapourware?"

sandcat_ — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:58:33 +0000

Wait, only six weeks ago? That's not long enough to be reporting success, genuinely. Come back in a few months, bare minimum. I'm far from a skeptic, but I've also personally had a number of moments over the past 12 months where I've declared "this is the future!" about some new app I vibe-coded, or some new workflow I started following, only to abandon it a few weeks later. And it's not just me. Check back in on many of the vibe-coded projects or AI tools you see shared and you'll see the same. It's happened at my work too — people taking over entire meetings to discuss their new revolutionary AI workflow and then, a week later, nothing...

A big problem is that these codebases rot. Agents move incredibly fast at first, but then as you pay less attention (or perhaps no attention at all) to the architecture, they slowly fall to bits. So then you decide, I'll use AI to rewrite it! And it gets better for a while until, well, you get it.

That's not to say there isn't value here, there absolutely is, just — chill. A little.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Ask HN: What paid tools have you now replaced with personalized AI-coded tools?"

sandcat_ — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 05:51:27 +0000

Not quite what you asked, but I’ve swapped out a lot of paid software for open-source self-hosted software recently. I wouldn’t have started self-hosting if it wasn’t for Claude reducing the maintenance and configuration burden. MCP helps too (I’d take a janky tool that integrates with Claude over something polished that requires me to install their app any day).

A few examples: Obsidian, 1Password, Monarch (finance app), Netflix, Spotify. At work, Pendo.

Of course I’m also paying for a Max plan so I’m not really saving any money :-) sure is nice to be in control of my data though and be able to extend, add new features and integrate as I please.

New comment by sandcat_ in "Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery"

sandcat_ — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:39:00 +0000

Posts? Fair. But adverts? There is literally no reason they cannot all be human moderated. Every single one. People are paying to have their adverts placed. Put a small fee on each ad, if they must, for the initial review. Done.

Don’t buy into Meta’s narrative that there’s nothing that can be done while they continue to make money hand over fist.