Hacker News: xmprt

New comment by xmprt in "Loreline – Tools for writing interactive fiction"

xmprt — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:12:39 +0000

I like how in the example gif, barista.name is set in the "Your name is Alex, right" block, implying that the barista didn't have a name/didn't know their name until after being prompted.

New comment by xmprt in "U.S. science is in chaos"

xmprt — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:45:31 +0000

I agree. But that's what functioning government is supposed to be for. You don't build centuries long institutions by focusing on day to day concerns. Sure putting food on the table is important, but also a lot of that food comes from decades of research on agriculture and how to breed genetically diverse yet resilient crops.

Today's standards are yesterday's luxuries which were the day before's scientific breakthroughs.

And the idea that science is what's breaking the bank when it's barely a rounding error in the US budget is laughable. It's hard to get exact numbers for all R&D funding vs how much we spent on the Iran war but my estimates put just the single Iran war at anywhere from 20-50% and the goals for the Iran war are even more abstract and arguably make things much worse for average Americans on a day to day basis.

New comment by xmprt in "Claude: Elevated errors across many models"

xmprt — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:41:39 +0000

It could have happened 1-2 years ago (assuming the founders were willing to sell). Not happening anymore with their current valuations.

New comment by xmprt in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

xmprt — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:29:42 +0000

If we combine the market cap of the entire S&P500 we get close to 70T. That doesn't mean any of those individual companies are any more valuable or any of the investors are any richer. It makes no sense that Tesla shareholders would be ok with paying out a performance bonus just for M&A that doesn't grow the value of Tesla and would just dilute their shares.

New comment by xmprt in "Leaving Mozilla"

xmprt — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 04:37:11 +0000

When I say small I'm referring to anything under 50 people. Maybe you could go as high as even 100 without needing a ton of bureaucracy. I think a lot of indie films have teams under 100.

New comment by xmprt in "Leaving Mozilla"

xmprt — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:41:56 +0000

It's true that large orgs need all that bureaucracy. But is it still true that productivity needs large orgs? We see a lot of massive hits coming from small teams - whether it's startups, movies, indie games, etc.

New comment by xmprt in "Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0"

xmprt — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:40:50 +0000

LTS still typically get security updates. That's what the support in long term support means.

New comment by xmprt in "Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely"

xmprt — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:41:59 +0000

But now with vibecoding it feels like the default for articles to have fancy animation, rather than the exception. I guess that by having a fancier presentation it subconsciously legitimizes the content more so you're less likely to critique it as compared to a simple blog post where you pay more attention to the words and can realize that it's very surface level.

New comment by xmprt in "Stop Killing Games"

xmprt — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:51:44 +0000

> redistribute copies

I read this more as game sharing. For example, say I buy a game and my friend also wants to play the game. In the past, I could just give them the disk and we both enjoy it. But today, with DRM and one use keys, this isn't possible. The game industry survived 20 years ago so there's no reason it can't survive without DRM and with sharable keys.

New comment by xmprt in "GTA 6 Developers Unionize"

xmprt — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:12:15 +0000

When management needs to pay more for crunch then it will prove whether the deadline is real or fake. eg. If we don't meet this deadline will it materially affect the business... or is it not really needed and it's better to save on the overtime pay.

New comment by xmprt in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

xmprt — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:23:31 +0000

One of the saddest things about modern capitalism is that people stealing from businesses is criminalized and heavily punished but businesses stealing from people (eg. wage theft, illegal contracts, medicare/PPP fraud, and outright stealing like this case) is treated as a civil violation and almost impossible to prosecute.

The only cases of white collar crime I've seen get prosecuted is securities fraud and that's rich people stealing from other rich people.

New comment by xmprt in "What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications"

xmprt — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:43:47 +0000

This is fair for permissions. But for notifications, the app shouldn't need to know. It can just send them into the void for all the app cares. If the notification doesn't work then it should never break critical app functionality and apps should be built with the assumption that users will never see/interact with notifications.

New comment by xmprt in "Last.fm is now independent"

xmprt — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:57:11 +0000

But Spotify has that as well. Tons of user curated playlists. And although user playback data is harder to parse through, it's also pretty straightforward to build some clustering algorithm where if you both like X then you might like Y as well.

New comment by xmprt in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

xmprt — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:49:34 +0000

I've actually changed that. When I type something into Google it's because I want an LLM answer - their search results have been useless for a while now. But that's only because I rarely use Google these days. I'm mostly using DDG to search (I might try Kagi at some point). Google is relegated to my phone when I want a quick answer where accuracy isn't critical without needing to scroll through a bunch of search results/open and read websites on a small screen.

New comment by xmprt in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

xmprt — Sat, 09 May 2026 06:37:00 +0000

No you don't get it. If the family just starved for 5 days then they could increase revenue for these AI companies.

New comment by xmprt in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

xmprt — Thu, 07 May 2026 02:33:26 +0000

I don't think it does. If I had to guess, the top comment was using an older version of AI or a local model which wouldn't be able to solve the JSON API task. A lot of AI skepticism comes from people who used it once a while back and decided not to keep up with the latest developments. If I only had experience with gpt-3.5 then I'd also assume what the original commenter said.

New comment by xmprt in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

xmprt — Thu, 07 May 2026 01:25:35 +0000

I'll go in the other direction and say that if you're spending a lot of your time learning to prompt better then you're wasting it because LLMs are only going to get better at understanding your intent regardless of "prompt engineering". The JSON API example to wire up a database can be one-shot pretty easily by the latest models without much context and without setting up any harness. The more time you spend perfecting your harness, the more time you would have wasted when the next model comes out to make it obsolete.

New comment by xmprt in "Can I disable all data collection from my vehicle?"

xmprt — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:46:34 +0000

What's special about EVs that gives them this loophole? Is it something to do with not having dealerships and going direct to consumer?

New comment by xmprt in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

xmprt — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:27:17 +0000

If you gave me the exact same color code 20 times I might give you green 10 times and blue the other 10 because I genuinely can't tell the difference. So it's not a binary like you're claiming.

New comment by xmprt in "NPM website was down"

xmprt — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:25:01 +0000

I mean more like a full git competitor. Gitlab exists but more competition is generally better for the consumer and it looks like Github's lead is starting to falter with all these incidents.