Hacker News: spiffytech

New comment by spiffytech in "You said no MCP"

spiffytech — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 11:46:14 +0000

Pi vs omp is hotly debated within my friend group. It has most things you could want, ready out of the box, but also a lot of things you'd never want and it's constantly 5% broken. Some people love that trade, others don't.

New comment by spiffytech in "Plan mode is dead"

spiffytech — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 02:25:01 +0000

My experience is this is great when the model surfaces something to you. But I'm constantly caught off-guard by things the model didn't volunteer, things I would have quickly stumbled upon if I was working on code the traditional way. The model didn't think it was relevant but I sure do.

New comment by spiffytech in "Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]"

spiffytech — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 03:33:07 +0000

The market being what it is, I took a job in ColdFusion last year.

There are people here who have worked in the same CF codebase for over twenty years. They might start and finish their careers in a language everyone else forgot about decades ago.

I think Ruby has enough momentum that career Rubyists will have a home for as long as they want one.

New comment by spiffytech in "Noodle Gallery – Self-hosted photo and video manager forked from Immich"

spiffytech — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:02:12 +0000

I think it's a testament to how far computers have come that identifying the individuals in a photograph is now considered a basic feature.

New comment by spiffytech in "StemDeck, a free, open-source and local AI stem separator"

spiffytech — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 10:48:53 +0000

We'll get a sewing machine named SeamDeck.

New comment by spiffytech in "DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813"

spiffytech — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:24:18 +0000

In my little social circle DS4F generally substitutes for GLM 5.2 except it's the next best thing to free.

New comment by spiffytech in "Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak"

spiffytech — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:53:43 +0000

I know people who can cook a lot of food pretty well, but don't understand why they can't use a laser thermometer to check their meat.

Knowing really is half the battle.

New comment by spiffytech in "OnePlus halts operations in USA and Europe"

spiffytech — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 11:54:59 +0000

I've owned four OnePlus phones, but I've been buying other brands lately.

1. OnePlus became nearly as expensive as flagships but wasn't as good 2. The official software used to be almost-stock Android but they bloated it up 3. The ROM scene came to steadily lag several generations behind phone releases 4. Android/OnePlus ROMs are a worse experience than they used to be (dealing with proprietary camera drivers, SafetyNet) 5. They didn't keep pace when other brands committed to longer OS updates

They used to be a good bargain, a clean OS, and a good modding target if you wanted a ROM anyway.

The first two haven't been true for a while now, and the third became a lot less appealing on OnePlus.

I'm disappointed to see OnePlus go but the brand I loved has been gone for years.

New comment by spiffytech in "98% isn't much"

spiffytech — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:11:26 +0000

Why would farmers disagree?

New comment by spiffytech in "The perils of UUID primary keys in SQLite"

spiffytech — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:52:21 +0000

Fortunately we're seeing more JS DB libraries offering to read large numbers as the BigInt type.

New comment by spiffytech in "Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques"

spiffytech — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:19:06 +0000

I once lucked into a private tour of a Monet gallery. I asked the curator, "these paintings just don't look great, why should I be impressed?"

The curator responded that Monet, and impressionism in general, were a reaction to the then-new invention of paint sold in tubes. Previously a painter had to mix pigment powder right when they painted. So they usually couldn't paint outdoors where the wind would blow the powder, and they couldn't capture rapidly-evolving scenes.

Tube paint changed that. Impressionists started painting things in motion, or in shifting lighting like dawn. Their paintings were designed not to look good close up, but to be viewed at a distance, where the "pixelation" (so to speak) resolved into a coherent picture. They skipped on fine detail to capture something as fast as they could, because they could never do that before.

I still don't care for impressionism on an aesthetic level, but I learned something that day about art history and why some people appreciate art that I don't.

New comment by spiffytech in "Pope Leo called his bank's customer service line. They hung up on him"

spiffytech — Thu, 07 May 2026 02:10:13 +0000

My mom works at a credit union and the staff are constantly saving people from scams just because the customer came in and the staff had a chance to notice something fishy happening.

New comment by spiffytech in "Are We Idiocracy Yet?"

spiffytech — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:58:40 +0000

That'd leave even more room for drama. I'm imagining Gavin hiring thousands of cheap, unskilled laborers ("Hooli's industry-leading AI research team") to mash keys until they rediscover the prompt that generated middle-out compression with a patent-free clean room process. He never reproduces it because Gilfoyle's self-hosted LLM improved its own memory efficiency when when Dinesh got upset and started unplugging GPUs.

New comment by spiffytech in "Modern SQLite: Features You Didn't Know It Had"

spiffytech — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 01:51:34 +0000

I remember an ORM that uses fake column types like `boolean` and `datetime` because SQLite doesn't enforce anything. That way the ORM knows how to deserialize the data. Strict mode prohibits this by only accepting column types SQLite recognizes.

My preference would be for SQLite to actually support commonplace data types. But as long as it doesn't, I can see the appeal in using the schema to specify what data you're storing in your database.

New comment by spiffytech in "Claude struggles to cope with ChatGPT exodus"

spiffytech — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:19:36 +0000

Unfortunately this is why Anthropic is so aggressive about preventing Claude subscriptions from being used with other tools.

New comment by spiffytech in "How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?"

spiffytech — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:49:57 +0000

I use Ollama Cloud. $20/mo and I never come close to hitting quota (YMMV obviously).

They don't log anything, and they use US datacenters.

Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf]

spiffytech — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:01:05 +0000

Article URL: https://cs.uml.edu/~fredm/courses/91.308-spr05/files/palmdocs/uiguidelines.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47168726

Points: 203

# Comments: 107

New comment by spiffytech in "Exercise has 'similar effect' to therapy, study on depression shows"

spiffytech — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 13:55:59 +0000

And while they affect a similar percentage of people, they don't necessarily affect the same individuals. Same for therapy modalities, which often show similar efficacy in studies, but different efficacy for any given person.

So you've got to try different things and figure out what works for you.

New comment by spiffytech in "An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward"

spiffytech — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 12:34:42 +0000

Oh for sure, the operator choosing not to apologize or reflect on their behavior speaks volumes.

New comment by spiffytech in "An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward"

spiffytech — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 12:00:12 +0000

I've seen the internet mob in action many times. I'm sympathetic to the operator not outing themself, especially given how far this story spread. A hundred thousand angry strangers with pitchforks isn't the accountability we're looking for.

I found the book So You've Been Publicly Shamed enlightening on this topic.