Hacker News: xpil

New comment by xpil in "Scaling long-running autonomous coding"

xpil — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 10:40:01 +0000

Codex plugin (VSCode) allows consuming your "web" (ie non-api) subscription for coding/agentic tasks.

New comment by xpil in "Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed"

xpil — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:35:31 +0000

My main issue with Gemini is that business accounts can't delete individual conversations. You can only enable or disable Gemini, or set a retention period (3 months minimum), but there's no way to delete specific chats. I'm a paying customer, prices keep going up, and yet this very basic feature is still missing.

New comment by xpil in "Zed is now available on Windows"

xpil — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 10:45:59 +0000

The annoying bit is that the `zed` command already exists in Linux (ZFS Events Daemon) so you need to go through some extra motions to start Zed (the editor).

New comment by xpil in "To AI or not to AI"

xpil — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 13:12:23 +0000

My preferred approach in similar situations is to ask an LLM for an initial solution or code snippet, then take over manually - no endless prompt tweaking, just stop prompting and start coding. Finally (optionally), I let the LLM do a final pass to review my completed solution for bugs, optimizations, etc.

The key win is skipping the prompt refinement loop, which is (A) tedious and time-consuming, and (B) debilitating in the long run.

New comment by xpil in "2FA or Not 2FA"

xpil — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 12:45:34 +0000

I've noticed another issue: 2FA software fragmentation. Over the past 30 years, I've accumulated more than 600 online accounts (many of them dormant), with about 25-30% offering 2FA. As a result, I now have three separate apps for generating codes. I could consolidate them into one, but, frankly, I'm too lazy. So instead, I often find myself scrambling between different 2FA apps and devices just to locate the right account.

New comment by xpil in "Ask HN: Favorite blog in 2024?"

xpil — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:21:08 +0000

I follow over 200 blogs, but this one has remained my favorite for years: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/.

New posts are rare - just once or twice a year - but every single article is a gem.

New comment by xpil in "Breakthrough a step toward revealing hidden structure of prime numbers"

xpil — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 09:39:12 +0000

Just use 42 everywhere

New comment by xpil in "Flameshot – Open-source screenshot software"

xpil — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 14:58:01 +0000

I'm a big fan of Greenshot. My only issue with it is that it's not available on Linux, which I use occasionally.

Re Flameshot, I've tried it and it generally works well for me. My only beef is that the layout of the icons around the captured area is dynamic, changing based on the shape and size of the area, requiring me to actively search for an icon instead of finding it in a static, predictable location.

New comment by xpil in "Ask HN: Who runs the spam bots? And why?"

xpil — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 13:50:38 +0000

Never underestimate idiots in large amounts. It's a matter of "when", not "if".

New comment by xpil in "Infinite Craft"

xpil — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 11:53:38 +0000

A friend asked his wife to create a horse and an accountant. It took her 1hr of playing to get the former, and 3hrs for the latter. I'm still laughing.

New comment by xpil in "The Curious Case of MD5"

xpil — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 08:51:30 +0000

Interestingly, DBT is still using MD5 as the default algorithm for generating row identifiers.

New comment by xpil in "Claude 2.1"

xpil — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 19:09:01 +0000

Any reason why Ireland isn't on the list for phone number verification?

New comment by xpil in "Gematria"

xpil — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 12:31:41 +0000

I was bored and played around with various letter numbering schemes, like reversed order, or digits of Pi (or E), or the value of the letter multiplied by how many times it appears in the string and so on, and so forth. I got bored eventually, but it is a great fun (for certain minds, I guess, but still).

New comment by xpil in "Someone keeps trying to reset my Facebook password"

xpil — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 19:35:53 +0000

Welcome to the club. My gmail address is lastname.firstname@gmail.com and I keep receiving occasional emails for firstname.lastname@gmail.com who is actually some kind of a senior manager in one of the major TV stations. It works the other way around as well (he receives my emails - extremely rarely, but still). We simply agreed to forward them to the right person and delete afterwards so there is no issue per se, but it's still kind of funny.

Also, my daughter has firstname.lastname@gmail.com and there is another lady with the address firstnname.lastname@gmail.com (yes, a typo in her first name, duplicating one of the letters) and of course she keep receiving her emails and vice versa. Same solution - they mutually agreed to forward messages to the right person and delete them afterwards.

First world problems...

New comment by xpil in "Gematria"

xpil — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 19:26:27 +0000

I propose the following challenge: find the smallest integer number that, when written in English words, equals the sum of it's letters (following gematria rules i.e. A=1, B=2 etc).

New comment by xpil in "Total Commander"

xpil — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 15:46:48 +0000

Same here. Best piece of software, ever. Period.

New comment by xpil in "Microsoft denies data breach, theft of 30M customer accounts"

xpil — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 13:23:14 +0000

Of course there is nothing wrong with using a relational database. My concern was about storing passwords in it. There is a difference between storing passwords and storing hashes and/or salts.

New comment by xpil in "Microsoft denies data breach, theft of 30M customer accounts"

xpil — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 15:17:03 +0000

"a large database containing more than 30 million Microsoft accounts, emails, and passwords."

A database containing passwords? Why would anyone store passwords in a database is beyond my comprehension.

New comment by xpil in "A curated list of uBlock origin filters"

xpil — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 15:35:14 +0000

Like, with another person?

New comment by xpil in "Parachute use to prevent death, trauma when jumping from aircraft (2018) [pdf]"

xpil — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 10:15:36 +0000

Maybe I am missing something but an invisible parachute would reveal more of a paratrooper than a visible one.

Want to hide the paratrooper completely - use large, spherical parachutes. Elementary.