Hacker News: willsmith72

New comment by willsmith72 in "Cloud in a Bottle: making self-hosting accessible to everyone"

willsmith72 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:13:16 +0000

> One of my coworkers made a completely static portfolio website with a single page and used react.

People love hating on react, but I mean this is pretty common. Raw is fine, but even in a "static" thing, you'll eventually go "ok now I want to reuse some text here.." Or have some common elements with x things shared. So I'm gonna have to write some hacky imperative JS? Or messy CSS? And what starts as static very easily becomes slightly dynamic. I hate overengineering, so if React were hard to setup or deploy I'd agree (eg Kube), but the cost-benefit of React makes it worth it in most cases for me

New comment by willsmith72 in "South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones"

willsmith72 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:58:01 +0000

there's nothing holy about eating real animals (unless you're religious)

i'm no vegan, but if identical lab-grown alternatives are available at near same cost without the hormones, antibiotics, emissions, I'll take it

New comment by willsmith72 in "South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones"

willsmith72 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:54:36 +0000

> there's little to no difference in quality between the two

Lab grown can be way better quality. To me it was a no-brainer considering the ethical concerns, then add in the cost difference. The only argument I've heard for natural is "I like the imperfections". Sounds like brainwashing to me. They're chemically identical

The mining industry should die

New comment by willsmith72 in "Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?"

willsmith72 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:03:33 +0000

Internally we have MCPs for many many tools, I would expect if anyone builds a product or new feature today it has an MCP or skill

New comment by willsmith72 in "Claude: System Prompts"

willsmith72 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 16:03:02 +0000

Why are they so old though? June 9th is a long time ago for a Fable prompt. They haven't iterated on it since then? At the least we know it's outdated because it gives false info about the latest models, but you'd think they'd find other ways to improve it too

New comment by willsmith72 in "When Feature Flags Do and Don't Make Sense (2019)"

willsmith72 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:47:18 +0000

just replied above. i wish it was my imagination, it's reality

New comment by willsmith72 in "When Feature Flags Do and Don't Make Sense (2019)"

willsmith72 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 05:49:52 +0000

how? if you have 100 feature flags in your system each with 3 potential states, which states do you run in your e2es?

New comment by willsmith72 in "When Feature Flags Do and Don't Make Sense"

willsmith72 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 05:03:05 +0000

good luck rolling back when 20 teams have been waiting for your pipeline to be unblocked for 2 weeks

New comment by willsmith72 in "When Feature Flags Do and Don't Make Sense (2019)"

willsmith72 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 05:02:15 +0000

Another issue is launching behind feature flags often skips integration/e2e testing, which couldn't possibly test with every combination of every flag. So your release which is "safer" behind a flag is actually untested until it's launched.

New comment by willsmith72 in "Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale"

willsmith72 — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 04:48:59 +0000

> I probably spend like $80 a day

Wait what? I don't understand these numbers. I spend $1k/day

Your story about being told to use AI for everything I was expecting you to be well over that

New comment by willsmith72 in "DeepSeek announced to raise its API price tremendously"

willsmith72 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:47:01 +0000

brilliant marketing? how exactly? more like how to undo any goodwill you've built with your customers.

the only competitive edge for someone like me who wants an api to call is price

New comment by willsmith72 in "LLMs reward expertise"

willsmith72 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 23:12:47 +0000

the question is, what's the business cost of some amount of css bugs vs paying specialists or people to learn these details.

the generalists win overall, except of course for specific cases where specialists are great

New comment by willsmith72 in "Benchmarking Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench"

willsmith72 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:38:39 +0000

you're the manager who started with 83% dogshit. i'm escalating or moving teams.

New comment by willsmith72 in "Benchmarking Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench"

willsmith72 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 05:16:16 +0000

> The big headline is that Opus 5 got a 24% on the small subset of the benchmark that I ran - not much higher than Opus 4.6's 17% strict pass rate in the original paper.

a 41% improvement is not much higher? come on that's just doomer

New comment by willsmith72 in "Grok 4.5"

willsmith72 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:30:26 +0000

That Amazon story is a misnomer. They just saw an opportunity with the tech and hardware they had to make a new offering for customers. It's not like they could just offer their spare capacity, then eg at peak US time snatch it back for the retail site

New comment by willsmith72 in "Do you need separate systems when you already have Postgres?"

willsmith72 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:26:33 +0000

Of course spinning up a hello world of anything is easy. Now introduce monitoring, change controls, version upgrades, multiple environments and regions

It's not that it's necessarily complex. But if you don't need it, don't use it. The business could use your time elsewhere

New comment by willsmith72 in "Shadcn/UI now defaults to Base UI instead of Radix"

willsmith72 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 16:14:36 +0000

Yeah exactly this is right. In the same way that we don't get an LLM to write the HTML for each request, but we do get an LLM to write the code to make the HTML

New comment by willsmith72 in "I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI"

willsmith72 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 17:39:46 +0000

True, but this was a problem long before AI (read this article, met this guy at a conference who told me x, my boss said blah)

AI probably exacerbates it but crappy managers exist regardless

New comment by willsmith72 in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

willsmith72 — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 03:35:45 +0000

Oh you thought this was a competitive free market?

New comment by willsmith72 in "Polymarket has flooded social media with deceptive videos by paid creators"

willsmith72 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:33:55 +0000

Surely credit card has a terrible fee attached no? Just based on other services