<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: wccrawford</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wccrawford</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:14:22 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=wccrawford" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well, in this case, I imagine they mean by shredding books after scanning them.  Since that's what's happening.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:01:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832616</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832616</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832616</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Six-year-old breaks women's world Rubik's Cube record [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In an ideal world, yes.  But I think we're finding that it's practically impossible to eliminate toxicity completely, and people are irrationally bothered by "the outgroup".<p>"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" talks about how people more fiercely reject a group very similar to their own, yet slightly different, more than they reject groups that are actually very different.<p>It leads to stupid gatekeeping like "treat the male chess players better than the female ones" and small nudges will never overcome it.<p>If women feel put off by chess unless they have their own tournaments, then they can have their own tournaments.  It literally hurts nobody.<p>If you want to have a chess game against women, I'm sure you can do so.  They aren't stopping you from playing them.<p>They're just stopping you from playing in the tournament they created because others were toxic to them in the existing ones.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:47:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828375</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828375</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828375</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "AI has no intent and no motivation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I feel like that's like saying amoeba have no intent and no motivation.  Or plants.<p>And those cause quite a bit of damage.<p>AI has all the intent that we gave it, and we continue giving it.  That's always been the fear.  Not that it will randomly wipe out humanity.<p>The fear is that it will <i>decide</i> to do that, with a purpose.  Whether we tell it to protect us and it goes too far, or it decides that it can't achieve the purpose we gave it because we'll interfere and it removes that interference...<p>The fear is that we will set it on that path and can't stop it.<p>I'm sure there have been some scifi books that have it just be random, but they're far, far less worrisome.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:41:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828335</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828335</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49828335</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not open source.  It's more "source available", since it's published, but you legally can't do anything with it.  Other than maybe build it yourself, for yourself, I guess.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:27:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815799</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815799</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815799</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think "unhinged" is a ridiculous word for it.  They aren't <i>crazy</i>.<p>"Outrageous" is better.  This will work on a lot of people, and they really will email their managers, because they're sheep.  But it won't actually change the managers' minds for the positive.  If I got wind of a plot like this against my decision, it would absolutely convince me to stay the course.<p>If the employees want to complain, I'll listen.  If they're encouraged to complain, forget it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:12:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49814298</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49814298</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49814298</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8GB"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're being downvoted, but I think you've hit the nail on the head.<p>So many people, especially managers, have decided they can just give the rules to the AI in English and let it make "decisions", and they think it'll do it correct every time.<p>"Engineering" a few years ago meant that code was written, was (mostly) deterministic, and could be debugged.  Computer processing didn't mean relying on Human-like processes, it meant relying on hard-coded logic.<p>This is absolutely one of those "gets worse before it gets better" things, and will probably never go away fully now.<p>Programmers know not to tell ChatGPT to do a bunch of data processing.  If they use it at all, they tell it to write code that will then do the processing.  It's more efficient on tokens, and if it fails, you can <i>fix</i> the process, instead of wondering why it went wrong, like too much context, or the LLM model version changed and doesn't work the same now, or just randomness.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:50:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803279</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803279</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803279</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "A font that reads what you wrote"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a really neat idea.  I'm not sure it's actually useful, but it's definitely neat.<p>And it made me think of the new kid in town:  Jev.  I wonder if Jev can do this well and quickly?  Not that I'm willing to pay the tokens even to find out, but it's another neat thought.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 22 Sep 2026 09:43:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49798650</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49798650</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49798650</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "English: A vs. An"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even as a native, I didn't know the difference until I looked it up right now, and I'm almost 50.<p>Short form, for those who wonder:<p>"That" is used for things that are important, and "which" is used for things that aren't.  In the first sentence, they want the blue floppy disk in particular.  In the second, they want the floppy disk, and it happens to be blue.  The "which" is added to aid the listener, not to because the color blue is important.<p>If that's interesting, it's worth Googling for a more precise answer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:30:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774740</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774740</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49774740</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Ask HN: How to recover Google auth after phone stolen?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Everything you listed, plus a recovery email option, plus backup codes, plus SMS.<p>That's already a <i>lot</i> and anything easier would allow people to just take over accounts that they don't have a right to.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:44:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743341</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743341</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743341</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Devastated father says his 9-year-old son spent $118,000 on YouTube ads"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, I'm saying the father just let the son use his own account.  He didn't bother making a child's account for his son.  That's at the root of this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:14:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49726532</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49726532</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49726532</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Devastated father says his 9-year-old son spent $118,000 on YouTube ads"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The article doesn't call it out very loudly, but...<p>"to a company credit card the father had saved to his own Google account, which his son also used"<p>It sounds like the son didn't have an account.  It was just the father's account, with billing info attached with no limits.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:08:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49725665</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49725665</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49725665</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The new one appears to use real art from real humans, instead of AI art that was fixed.<p>And just because 2 things do the same job doesn't make one a "copy" of the other.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:23:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49712153</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49712153</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49712153</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Claude is a Contrarian"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It probably is "and", and I agree it sounds better than "but".  That was probably just me misremembering because it was about the feeling and not the exact words.<p>But if it were a person, I'd still definitely think they were trying to show they were smarter than me.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Sep 2026 23:01:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49705439</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49705439</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49705439</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Claude is a Contrarian"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have absolutely seen this, and love to read out it's quotes to my wife.  Things like "You're right, but for a stronger reason than you said:" and crap like that.<p>Even if it's <i>correct</i> about that, if it were a human, I'd assume they were 1-upping me on purpose to make themselves look better.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:12:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700415</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700415</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700415</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The hug of death.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:52:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49666523</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49666523</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49666523</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>While I mostly agree with you, this is the kind of thing that might not have been done if the AI couldn't do the heavy lifting.<p>They had previously chosen React Native because it was easier for programmers to keep it updated, since it was really just 1 codebase.  With AI, those same programmers can do the more difficult version, keeping the native apps updated separately.<p>So did it kill a job, or did it make it possible for the existing programmers to do it better?<p>It's the kind of thing that is really hard to determine in general, but here, it really does sound like they only made the change because it became possible with existing resources.  They would <i>not</i> have done it otherwise.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:50:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645801</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645801</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645801</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No.  Sony has recently removed 551 movies that people "bought".  Sony's distribution license ran out with a studio and they didn't renew it.<p>They seem to have gotten away with it so far, so there's <i>no</i> legal protection for "buying" digital at the moment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 11:21:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641821</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641821</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641821</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That was my experience with Claude when my vibe-coded project was small.<p>But now that I've been working on it a month and there's a <i>lot</i> of documentation, it's pretty clearly ignoring parts of the documentation and parts of the code.  It will come up with some ridiculous statement about how something works, and I'll challenge it, and it'll admit I'm right.<p>It definitely reads more documentation than any programmer I've ever worked with (myself included) but because it doesn't have a memory <i>other</i> than the documentation, it still makes mistakes like that.<p>I haven't turned on "memory" or tried it with Codex, so I don't know how that'll change soon, though.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:35:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628306</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628306</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49628306</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Carmakers Have a New Idea to Boost EV Range: Add a Gas Engine"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's new in that it's not really a hybrid.  It isn't meant to take over when you run out of battery.  It's meant as an emergency recharge for the battery to get you to the next charging station.<p>Hybrids can just run on gas and not have to worry about the distance to the next charging station.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:36:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624245</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624245</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624245</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by wccrawford in "Jellyfin 12.0"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Probably 20TB here, 10.11.11, upgrade was smooth and quick.  Maybe a few minutes of migration time?<p>I was actually just getting frustrated with Jellyfin performance and had <i>just</i> told my wife last night that I was switching back to Plex.  I didn't realize it was a .11 thing.  I just realized that it had gotten worse lately.<p>12 is working good in the browser so far, but I haven't really put it through the paces fully on Android.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:57:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49610436</link><dc:creator>wccrawford</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49610436</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49610436</guid></item></channel></rss>