Hacker News: sbrother

New comment by sbrother in "Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?"

sbrother — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:16:19 +0000

I strongly agree on that being the release where these tools got good enough to substantially speed up my professional work. I have to admit I was super skeptical of AI coding until then.

New comment by sbrother in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

sbrother — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:06:01 +0000

Oh hey, I'm building something loosely related to this too. Can I ask what need isn't being met by say, Forscore?

New comment by sbrother in "Erlang/OTP 29.0"

sbrother — Sat, 16 May 2026 03:12:06 +0000

I was about to say "what, we've had records for decades" but then I read the changelog.

Interesting. I wonder if there a world where Elixir starts compiling maps to "native records"?

New comment by sbrother in "Googlebook"

sbrother — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:13:14 +0000

I went all in on the Nest ecosystem when I bought my house eight years ago, and Google absolutely ruined it with the botched acquisition. Half the stuff is Google branded, half is Nest branded, a different half has Google branded software and a different half has Nest branded software. None of it really works reliably anymore. The lock to my front door is completely incompatible with modern "Google Home" and I'm unable to change its passcode.

It's a total disaster and I will never buy Google hardware again.

Love their SaaS offerings though!

New comment by sbrother in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

sbrother — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:50:08 +0000

Oh dude, I love this. I've been working on an interactive music thingy (https://trebel.la, it's sort of gamified but more designed to structure practice sessions for serious classical musicians) and struggling with the ABC vs. MusicXML choice.

Like most people in the space I'm using ABC for LLM generation (e.g. generating sightreading exercises and etudes) but MusicXML for processing and rendering the output. Would be nice to have something somewhere in between the over-simplified ABC and overly verbose MusicXML.

New comment by sbrother in "OpenAI’s WebRTC problem"

sbrother — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:07:57 +0000

> …but as a user, I would much rather wait an extra 200ms for my slow/expensive prompt to be accurate

I disagree with this SO strongly. I find the conversational voice mode to be a game changer because you can actually have an almost normal conversation with it. I'd be thrilled if they could shave off another 50-100ms of latency, and I might stop using it if they added 200ms. If I want deep research I'll use text and carefully compose my prompt; when I'm out and about I want to have a conversation with the Star Trek computer.

Interestingly I'm involved with a related effort at a different tech company and when I voiced this opinion it was clear that there was plenty of disagreement. This still surprises me since it seems so obvious to me that conversational fluidity is the number one most important feature.

New comment by sbrother in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

sbrother — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:52:40 +0000

Same. Well the biggest thing I don't want to do that they could help with is work. But in the cases where it can do that for me, there's no world where that benefit goes to me rather than my employer.

New comment by sbrother in "Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold"

sbrother — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:33:55 +0000

That actually sounds... really nice. Like they've borrowed some of the things from traditional theatre that make the experience not awful.

My reference point for movie theatres is the late 90s/early 2000s so maybe I'll have to give them another try.

New comment by sbrother in "Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold"

sbrother — Tue, 05 May 2026 05:18:03 +0000

wait... I don't think I've ever experienced assigned seats in a movie theatre. Is that a thing?

New comment by sbrother in "The woes of sanitizing SVGs"

sbrother — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:08:36 +0000

Maybe I'm missing something as I am not a frontend developer, but when you embed SVGs in an img tag as part of a Phoenix LiveView or even just a static component, you no longer get the ability to dynamically change paths/fills/colors with events coming from the server. Even if it's as simple as having a shape that you want to fill with a brand/highlight color, which at least for me is a common use case.

New comment by sbrother in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

sbrother — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 03:26:44 +0000

This is my experience too. I actually briefly took the cool exciting climate change related science job and then realized that I couldn’t actually support my family’s lifestyle on $160k so I left and went back to surveillance capitalism. I do feel guilt about that decision, but I like to imagine I’ll be able to go back to working on interesting and ethical things after my kids are out of the house.

New comment by sbrother in "Vercel April 2026 security incident"

sbrother — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:18:10 +0000

Following since I just reproduced the crash on my own system (Chrome on Ubuntu)

New comment by sbrother in "Sky – an Elm-inspired language that compiles to Go"

sbrother — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:54:55 +0000

> people like everything about Go except the language itself.

Thanks for putting so succinctly exactly how I feel about Go!

New comment by sbrother in "Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't"

sbrother — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 03:01:23 +0000

Ooo, does everywhere in Sugarhouse have access to this now? We've been up in Park City relying on wireless point-to-point but are about to move back down to the valley and that is very exciting.

New comment by sbrother in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

sbrother — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:50:03 +0000

My version of fizzbuzz (I'm in backend/ML/NLP) is counting how many times each word appears in a string. Literally `return Counter(text.lower().split())` but it's totally fine if you want to do it in a for loop or whatever, as long as you can fluently write an incredibly simple function.

Half of the people I screen fail it. It's crazy.

New comment by sbrother in "MacBook Neo"

sbrother — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:37:36 +0000

Does that include VAT? Also the USD has been getting weaker quickly so I wouldn’t be surprised if the differential there is even larger than when they settled on pricing.

New comment by sbrother in "Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR"

sbrother — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:00:17 +0000

> you can get very nice displays for less than half the price that are 98% the same on specs.

Can you recommend any displays with PPI and brightness equivalent to the studio display, with 120Hz+ refresh rates? I was waiting for this announcement to buy a studio display because I thought they might bring 120Hz to the base model, but $3300 is a lot to spend on a single display. I have an original studio display and a high refresh rate 4K OLED monitor, and they are both compromises unfortunately.

New comment by sbrother in "Instant AI Response"

sbrother — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:07:45 +0000

Do we understand how to scale up the hardware to the point it can run a frontier model? Because this is insane. It will be a game changer for agent systems making 10-100+ calls.

New comment by sbrother in "Facebook is cooked"

sbrother — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:42:19 +0000

Similar experience for me and at this point it's just a collection of private chats. Different groups use different platforms (mine are on iMessage, Whatsapp, Signal, Slack, and.. actually Messenger although apparently Facebook is taking that away soon). It kind of feels like real-name social media is a failed experiment at this point.

New comment by sbrother in "Voxtral Transcribe 2"

sbrother — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:16:03 +0000

Amazing. Thank you.