Hacker News: tr888

New comment by tr888 in "Agentic Engineering Patterns"

tr888 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 08:44:02 +0000

For web apps, explictly asking the agent to build in sensible checkpoints and validate at the checkpoint using Playwright has been very successful for me so far. It prevents the agent from strating off course and struggling to find its way back. That and always using plan mode first, and reviewing the plan for evidence of sensible checkpoints. /opusplan to save tokens!

New comment by tr888 in "Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse"

tr888 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:58:57 +0000

I have literally no idea how you've ended up at that conclusion from the article!

New comment by tr888 in "Why I Chose Elixir Phoenix over Rails, Laravel, and Next.js"

tr888 — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 15:05:07 +0000

Not knocking the choice but:

> I still needed background jobs, real-time updates, and two-way communication that just works. Those things are possible in Rails and Laravel, but they take a bit more effort to set up.

These all have first class support in Laravel out the box.

New comment by tr888 in "Ask HN: Why does every website ask me to accept cookies?"

tr888 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 10:11:33 +0000

Because, the law

New comment by tr888 in "Money lessons without money: The financial literacy fallacy"

tr888 — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 10:00:20 +0000

Teaching physics is pointless unless you have your own particle accelerator.

New comment by tr888 in "I built a website where you can pop confettis for no reason"

tr888 — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 10:18:43 +0000

But where is the AI?

New comment by tr888 in "Classnames – a site that provides thematically grouped lists of words"

tr888 — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 11:42:10 +0000

Wait until this person finds out about a thesaurus!

New comment by tr888 in "We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO"

tr888 — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 12:00:39 +0000

I thought about it for a minute. I came to the conclusion that OpenAI would have likely tanked (perhaps even within days) had Altman not returned to maintain the status quo, and engineers didn't want to be out of work and left with worthless stock.

New comment by tr888 in "OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman"

tr888 — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 09:57:53 +0000

Chatgpt right?

New comment by tr888 in "Habits of great software engineers"

tr888 — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 09:48:20 +0000

There's something deeply depressing about a modern software developer role consisting of 20% coding.

New comment by tr888 in "Tailwind vs. Semantic CSS"

tr888 — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 09:02:51 +0000

Is "Semantic CSS" just... CSS? There's no such thing as "Semantic CSS". There is Semantic HTML. I suppose there is CSS for Semantic HTML.

I've read the article and can't figure out if this is comparing the CSS framework Semantic UI to Tailwind?

If we're comparing CSS to a CSS framework, it seems fairly obvious to me that it's going to be bigger in size, and slower to load, and that the amount of code required to be generic (rather than totally specific) would be larger too.

New comment by tr888 in "What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023"

tr888 — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 13:25:35 +0000

What on EARTH is that mouse cursor thing all about? Why would you even bother writing this, then making it impossible to read properly?

New comment by tr888 in "Why don’t Americans eat mutton?"

tr888 — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 08:26:18 +0000

It's not "easy" to find mutton in the UK either. My definition of easy (as for the vast majority of the population) is "is it in the supermarket". I don't think I've _ever_ seen mutton in a major UK supermarket. It's somewhat of a catch-22, but the supermarkets don't stock it because there is no demand (modern palates prefer less "gamey" flavours), and there's no demand because it isn't stocked.

New comment by tr888 in "Why don’t Americans eat mutton?"

tr888 — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 08:25:11 +0000

> I'm chewing and chewing and hoping it'll dissolve and it never goes anywhere

Then it's been cooked poorly, simply as that.

New comment by tr888 in "Why don’t Americans eat mutton?"

tr888 — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 08:24:32 +0000

Er, what? Yorkshire is famous for its lamb. Especially the Dales. And seafood - Yorkshire has some of the most bountiful coastline in the UK (e.g. crab).

New comment by tr888 in "Boring technology and the five-year rule"

tr888 — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 13:50:29 +0000

This is an extremely odd way of making technology choices - especially the arbitrary 5 year limit that means having to use an older version of a framework.

> There were many quality of life improvements between Elixir 1.7 of 2018 and the Elixir 1.15 of today, but for most of our application coding these would make little to no difference.

There were also a few security fixes.

New comment by tr888 in "I moved states just before the return-to-office order at Amazon, so I quit"

tr888 — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 12:48:54 +0000

Yeh, it doesn't exist

New comment by tr888 in "‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men"

tr888 — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 12:57:18 +0000

It certainly is an experience, it's just not the only experience in life's rich tapestry!

New comment by tr888 in "‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men"

tr888 — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 12:55:38 +0000

I somewhat agree, but 2 things:

- Adoption/fostering isn't actually a guarantee for all people. It's a challenging process that may or may not be successful.

- Just some gentle advice: mentioning "just adopt" to people suffering infertility is considered a faux-pas. It's best to avoid it.

New comment by tr888 in "‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men"

tr888 — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 12:50:48 +0000

I'm not offended, thanks. I'm just saying that there is a life for everyone, and reproducing is not the most important thing for many. We're not talking objectively about the biology of the human species, really. We're talking about anthropology and what being a human means.