Hacker News: shireboy

New comment by shireboy in "Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6"

shireboy — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:49:13 +0000

Maybe dumb question: One of the use cases is instrument reading of analog instruments. My brain immediately goes to "this should have some sensor sending data, and not be analog". Is having a robot dog read analog sensors really a better fit in some cases?

New comment by shireboy in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

shireboy — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:44:10 +0000

This is my life goal right now. I have a bajillion ideas, know how to code them (even faster now), and just not enough time due to day job. A few questions:

How do you market them?

Is customer support an issue?

Do you see risk since ai makes it so easy to build/copy?

New comment by shireboy in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

shireboy — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:20:54 +0000

I get that it's annoying, but also don't know what else one would do? "FooPilot is our Office AI toolset, BarWonk is our code assist tool"? There are also a lot of Claudes and GPTs. Naming things is hard.

New comment by shireboy in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

shireboy — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:15:06 +0000

Git is a distributed source control system. It's open source and you can use it to version source code on your drive and/or a remote git repository.

Github is one of the most popular git repository hosts. In addition to source repositories, it has other services like issue tracking and wikis.

A while back, Microsoft bought Github.

"Github Copilot" is a service you can buy (with limited free sku) from Github that adds AI capabilities to your Github subscription.

One of the ways you can use Github Copilot is by using the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode. This extension lets you use chat inside VSCode in such a way that it can read and write code. It lets you pick which LLM model you want to use: Claude Sonnet, Opus, OpenAI GPT, etc., from the ones they support.

Note you don't need another subscription if you only use Github Copilot. They pay Anthropic, you pay Github. You _might_ want another subscription directly with Anthropic if, say, you want to use Claude Code instead.

"VSCode Copilot" isn't a thing. Some people might call Github Copilot extension for VSCode "VSCode Copilot".

Github MCP server lets AI tools like GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode, Claude Code, or any tool that supports MCP use your Github account to do things like pull requests, read issues, etc. Just using it from Claude Code would not use Github Copilot tokens, UNLESS you used it to work against your Github Copilot service. You would not need a Github Copilot subscription to use it for example to create a pull request or read an issue. But it would use your Github Copilot tokens if, say, you used the MCP from Claude Code to assign a task to Github Copilot. It uses githubcopilot domain because they built it mostly for Github Copilot to use, though MCP is an open standard so it can be used from any MCP-supporting AI tool.

New comment by shireboy in "Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies"

shireboy — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:12:08 +0000

I’ve often thought this would be a good business for college age kids or teens. My parents and other I know are hesitant to send off to a 3rd party online. I think if someone local came and either did mobile or took and brought back they would trust that over even mailin services.

New comment by shireboy in "Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?"

shireboy — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 18:04:28 +0000

Similar. I regularly use Github copilot (with claude models sometimes) and it works amazingly. But I see some who struggle with them. I have sort of learned to talk to it, understand what it is generating, and routinely use to generate fixes, whole features, etc. much much faster than I could before.

New comment by shireboy in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

shireboy — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 23:57:31 +0000

I am a developer turned (reluctantly) into management. I still keep my hands in code and work w team on a handful of projects. We use GitHub copilot on a daily basis and it has become a great tool that has improved our speed and quality. I have 20+ years experience and see it as just another tool in the toolbox. Maybe I’m naive but I don’t feel threatened by it.

At least at my company the problem is the business hasn’t caught up. We can code faster but our stakeholders can’t decide what they want us to build faster. Or test faster or grasp new modalities llms make possible.

That’s where I want to go next: not just speeding up and increasing code quality but improving business analytics and reducing the amount of meetings I have to be in to get business problems understood and solved.

New comment by shireboy in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

shireboy — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:18:24 +0000

Similar story. I’m a bit younger, but Amiga BASIC/VB3/VB6/ASP/.NET was my path. There was a joy when “Visual Studio” meant “you can visually drag a component on and that is the app” instead of editing text files. But gradually we learned you need to be in the code. Sure you have figmas and low code tools today. But industry has gravitated back to editing curly brackets and markup in text files. And for good reasons I think.

I landed on GitHub Copilot. I now manage a team, but just last night snuck away to code some features. I find my experience and knowing how to review the output helps me adopt and know how much to prompt the agent for. Is software development changing? Absolutely. But it always has been. These tools help me get back to that first freedom I felt when I dragged a control onto a VB6 designer, but keep the benefits of code in text files. I can focus on feature, pay attention to UX detail, and pivot without taking hours.

New comment by shireboy in "iCloud Photos Downloader"

shireboy — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 21:03:35 +0000

I was just thinking about this today. Apples lack of any 3rd party integration for things like this and iMessage is really annoying sometimes. In addition to a secondary backup, I’d love to automatically sync some photos from a certain album to my parents photo frame. Or if I take a nice nature shot have it sync to a Samsung frame tv. I get the benefits of the walled garden but esp w photos and messaging it seems like opening up a little would allow for some innovation

New comment by shireboy in "Microsoft Agent Framework"

shireboy — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 20:19:26 +0000

I have used this in a “beta” feature for an enterprise app and really like it. In ~100 lines of code I have a secured OpenAI compatible endpoint that I can chat with, and write tools for in .NET. I have it doing natural language query over some data and it works quite well.

You can also expose the agents as MCP, AGUI and so it can be a tool you integrate with other AI platforms.

New comment by shireboy in "Logging sucks"

shireboy — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 20:37:57 +0000

Kinda get what he’s saying: provide more metadata with structured logging as opposed to lots of string only logs. Ok, modern logging frameworks steer you towards that anyway. But as a counterpoint: often it can be hard to safely enrich logging like that. In the example they include subscription age, user info, etc. More than once I’ve seen logging code lookup metadata or assume it existed, only to cause perf issues or outright errors as expected data didn’t exist. Similar with sampling, it can be frustrating when the thing you need gets sampled out. In the end “it depends” on scenario, but I still find myself not logging enough or else logging too much

New comment by shireboy in "History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts"

shireboy — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:05:40 +0000

Fascinating llm use case I never really thought about til now. I’d love to converse with different eras and also do gap analysis with present time - what modern advances could have come earlier, happened differently etc.

New comment by shireboy in "The Legacy of Nicaea"

shireboy — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:32:30 +0000

As we are in the holiday season it may enlighten readers to know St Nicholas, from whom we derive Santa Claus, was known for two things: secretly giving gifts to the poor and needy, and slapping heretic Arius at this council.

New comment by shireboy in "A2UI: A Protocol for Agent-Driven Interfaces"

shireboy — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:56:10 +0000

AGUI sounds similar: https://github.com/ag-ui-protocol/ag-ui

New comment by shireboy in "Claude Code on the web"

shireboy — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 20:00:17 +0000

I really want this but for Azure Devops. If you're not familiar, Microsoft owns both Github and Azure Devops, and both do similar: git repos and project management. I can use Github Copilot, Claude Code CLI, etc. against code on my disk, including Azure Devops MCP. But what I can't easily do is like Github Copilot Agent and apparently this Claude Code on Web: Assign a ticket to @SomeAi and have a PR show up in a few minutes. Can't change to github for _reasons_.

Would love any suggestions if anyone in a similar story.

New comment by shireboy in "MacBook Lid Angle Sensor"

shireboy — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 12:08:48 +0000

Make an accordion

New comment by shireboy in "Earth was born dry until a cosmic collision made it a blue planet"

shireboy — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 11:49:20 +0000

This could mean in the Drake equation ne -number of planets capable of life- is very small. A planet has to be hit with a comet big enough to deliver a large amount of water but not so big or fast to destroy it. And be in the Goldilocks zone of the star. Also the mass of the planet would play a part - gravity of more massive ones would be more likely to capture a comet. But again, too massive and I could see that hampering life.

New comment by shireboy in "IG Nobel Prize Winners 2025"

shireboy — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 13:02:50 +0000

Ig Nobel has been around a while. I wonder if there is an opportunity for them to add a feature whereby they (and donors) could _sponsor_ research in areas that would be considered candidates. Research that would otherwise be too trivial or arcane to be funded.

New comment by shireboy in "Frying Eggs and Air Quality Tests"

shireboy — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 12:32:13 +0000

Stealing from the comments: “I bet the eggs taste better”

New comment by shireboy in "Help us raise $200k to free JavaScript from Oracle"

shireboy — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:50:49 +0000

Was thinking the same. Not only would shifting industry to ECMAScript or something else get around trademark nonsense, but now that I think about it I do hear non-techy manager types get confused to this day and call it Java. Also seems like time is right as less is done in plain JavaScript- it’s Typescript, React, framework du jour, WASM. I guess the hard part is convincing an industry to use a different word.