Hacker News: searls

New comment by searls in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"

searls — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:46:42 +0000

Read this:

> Every time any of LinkedIn’s one billion users visits linkedin.com, hidden code searches their computer for installed software, collects the results, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers

And thought, "no way in hell this gets by Safari."

And then, under "The Attack: How it Works":

> Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser

Shocker. If you use a Chromium-based browser, you should expect to be trading away your privacy, IME.

New comment by searls in "Kagi Small Web"

searls — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:59:18 +0000

I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment and the grandparent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience.

I honestly would love to be able to give my Kagi key to the ChatGPT or Claude clients (or more realistically, configure a proxy) just to have it be their primary tool for searches—respecting my site rankings/lists

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

searls — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:43:22 +0000

LOL, no, dumbing down was when I paid two months of subscription with the model literally struggling to write basic functions. Something Anthropic eventually acknowledged but offered no refunds for. https://ilikekillnerds.com/2025/09/09/anthropic-finally-admi...

I care A LOT about the details, and I couldn't care less that they're cleaning up terminal output like this.

New comment by searls in "Railway (PaaS) global outage"

searls — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:37:24 +0000

lol, just yesterday a friend asked me if he should move his business to Railway from Heroku. Welp.

New comment by searls in "Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents"

searls — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:53:11 +0000

This feels a bit like when some Hubbers broke off to work on PlanetScale, except without the massively successful, proven-to-be-scalable open source tool to build off (Vitess).

If you're approaching this problem-space from the ground up, there are just so many fundamental problems to solve that it seems to me that no amount of money or quality of team can increase your likelihood of arriving at enough right answers to ensure success. Pulling off something like this vision in the current red-ocean market would require dozens of brilliant ideas and hundreds of correct bets.

New comment by searls in "Intel will start making GPUs"

searls — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 18:08:51 +0000

Agree, extremely poorly reported out across numerous outlets.

New comment by searls in "Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode"

searls — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 21:10:43 +0000

This is true of the CLIs that start with `xcode` but not of the CLIs that start with `swift`. As `swift-format` and `swift-test` have come into their own, they're just as reliable as any other language ecosystem. And the difference is indeed staggering. I wrote this guide last summer on extracting all your app's code into a (nonsensically necessary) Swift package dependency simply so you can test it with Swift Testing https://justin.searls.co/posts/i-made-xcodes-tests-60-times-...

New comment by searls in "Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team"

searls — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:29:43 +0000

This is madness. Some stories actually have good guys. I don't know Adam directly, but we have plenty of second degree connections. I've benefited immensely from his work, have never heard anyone say a single negative thing about him, and I genuinely believe he's done more to push the web forward with Tailwind than the larger players have done (certainly more than Facebook did with React and Google has done with Angular/AMP/etc).

Reflexively assuming that unanimous positive sentiment towards someone is itself an indication of a problem is exactly the reason people are writing posts as recently as (double checks) _yesterday_ titled "65% of Hacker News Posts Have Negative Sentiment, and They Outperform" https://philippdubach.com/standalone/hn-sentiment/

New comment by searls in "Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere"

searls — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 21:15:32 +0000

FWIW, "write markdown, publish to my static site, and cross-post to social media" is exactly what I built POSSE Party to do. All your site needs is an Atom feed to read from https://github.com/searlsco/posse_party/blob/main/docs/feed....

https://justin.searls.co/atom.xml gets flung to 8 social accounts

New comment by searls in "Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere"

searls — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 19:23:08 +0000

POSSE Party (http://posseparty.com) supports syndicating YouTube Shorts and Instagram reels, but trying to syndicate longer form video just didn't make sense IMO

New comment by searls in "Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere"

searls — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 19:19:17 +0000

I created POSSE Party because I had similar concerns. Truncation and spacing are highly customizable. You can add a posse:post sidecar element containing JSON that formats exact presentation for each platform exactly as you want it. The built-in truncation can be configured at the account level. And how you count characters, naturally, differs by platform, which the app handles pretty well.

New comment by searls in "Anthropic: You can't change your Claude account email address"

searls — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 23:36:16 +0000

OpenAI doesn't let you change your email address, either.

New comment by searls in "OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race"

searls — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 21:12:29 +0000

It would be funny if OpenAI turns for-profit, faceplants, and then finds new life (as Mozilla did) as a non-profit sharing its tools for free.

New comment by searls in "OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race"

searls — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 21:11:32 +0000

Funny, had it tell me the same thing twice yesterday and that was _with_ thinking + search enabled on the request (it apparently refused to carry out the search, which it does once in every blue moon).

I didn't make this connection that the training data is that old, but that would indeed augur poorly.

Show HN: Straight-to-video, for client-side video remuxing/transcoding

searls — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 16:51:24 +0000

Needed this to support automatically syndicating Instagram stories for my forthcoming POSSE Party app without breaking the bank on Heroku to remux & transcode videos server-side. Was really surprised how far the WebCodecs API has come, especially in the 26 series of Apple OS releases of WebKit.

Hardware-accelerated encodes => small files => fast uploads.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848330

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by searls in "Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28"

searls — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 18:00:10 +0000

At what point in history have you owned a particular piece of hardware for use with a particular piece of never-to-be-updated software and installed a major OEM operating system release a full 7 years after release without issue?

I doubt such a thing has ever happened in the history of consumer-facing computing.

New comment by searls in "React vs. Backbone in 2025"

searls — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 18:09:18 +0000

As somebody who picked up Backbone after Sammy and other earlier attempts, when React came along and took the world by storm, I more or less decided to nope out of JavaScript development and go back to Rails.

Every generation needs to learn the same lessons in their own time, but people often asked me why I’d go from speaking at national JavaScript conferences to essentially disappearing. The answer was the overwhelming popularity React and Webpack. Life is short and I don’t have time for this shit.

New comment by searls in "Whiteboarding with AI"

searls — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 11:40:37 +0000

This is a great reminder and I need to start doing this. Bullet point plans aren’t enough for lots of vertical slice work unless it fits really neatly into well known buckets (e.g. Rails MVC)

New comment by searls in "Certified Shovelware"

searls — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 17:39:56 +0000

In early September, Mike Judge's post challenging the productivity potential for coding agents by asking where the supposed AI shovelware is. It's been stuck in my craw for the past couple weeks, because I keep running into programmers of all stripes who refuse to engage with any of this newfangled AI tooling on the grounds that it's useless.

I realize people are all processing the AI boom differently, and there are many valid reasons to be really mad about all of it, but—as someone who's seen his productivity skyrocket with Cursor, then Claude Code, and now Codex CLI—it seems a little ridiculous to claim that the tools simply aren't capable.

Of course, if we never identify which projects were facilitated thanks to coding agents, we'll never have clear social proof of what they're capable of. That's why I put up this /shovelware page on my blog and started hosting a GitHub badge.

Certified Shovelware

searls — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 17:39:56 +0000

Article URL: https://justin.searls.co/shovelware/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45350340

Points: 1

# Comments: 1