Hacker News: z3ugma

New comment by z3ugma in "Show HN: Libretto – Making AI browser automations deterministic"

z3ugma — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:35:11 +0000

Love it! Do you have a BAA with Claude though? Otherwise, your demo is likely exposing PHI to 3rd parties and exposing you to risk related to HIPAA

New comment by z3ugma in "Do you even need a database?"

z3ugma — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:29:51 +0000

not re-implement SQLite, I mean "use SQLite as your persistence layer in your program"

e.g. worry about what makes your app unique. Data storage is not what makes your app unique. Outsource thinking about that to SQLite

New comment by z3ugma in "Do you even need a database?"

z3ugma — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:58:56 +0000

but it's so trivial to implement SQLite, in almost any app or language...there are sufficient ORMs to do the joins if you don't like working with SQL directly...the B-trees are built in and you don't need to reason about binary search, and your app doesn't have 300% test coverage with fuzzing like SQLite does

you should be squashing bugs related to your business logic, not core data storage. Local data storage on your one horizontally-scaling box is a solved problem using SQLite. Not to mention atomic backups?

New comment by z3ugma in "Do you even need a database?"

z3ugma — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:42:16 +0000

At some point, don't you just end up making a low-quality, poorly-tested reinvention of SQLite by doing this and adding features?

New comment by z3ugma in "Google Fitbit is working on a screenless fitness band, to compete with Whoop"

z3ugma — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:54:48 +0000

Didn't they already have one of these? Like the original FitBit was a screenless fitness band...

New comment by z3ugma in "Show HN: Substrate UI, my "teaching myself front end development" design system"

z3ugma — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:41:07 +0000

You did all of this in one week?! Pretty cool. Even with LLM-assisted making, it shows that you have a lot of taste and architecture know-how. What would you attribute to being able to think through useful abstracts like the design tokens?

New comment by z3ugma in "Build123d: A Python CAD programming library"

z3ugma — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:47:06 +0000

I have been using this library for a few months alongside Gemini 3.1 Fast

It's really useful to get an iteration loop going with an LLM.

The OCCP viewer extension for VS Code helps make sure you can see and manipulate the resulting model

New comment by z3ugma in "Trace: AI Native PCB Design"

z3ugma — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 04:01:07 +0000

See also the recently-posted open source project https://github.com/ForestHubAI/boardsmith

"Text prompt → KiCad schematic, BOM, and firmware. No templates — real wired circuits with computed values."

New comment by z3ugma in "I turned Markdown into a protocol for generative UI"

z3ugma — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:07:52 +0000

Do you know the meme about carcinization ...how in nature, everything tends toward becoming a crab?

I think we are reinventing HTML from first principles. It's semantic structuring with a meaningful render

New comment by z3ugma in "The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild"

z3ugma — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:37:52 +0000

"Well There's Your Problem" on the collapse of the St Francis Dam, mentioned in Grady's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxLgM1vnuUA

Also I love when they refer to it as the "_First_ California Water Wars" in a grim realization of the future of water scarcity in the West

New comment by z3ugma in "I turned Markdown into a protocol for generative UI"

z3ugma — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:42:32 +0000

I will say I came upon this same design pattern to make all my chats into semantic Markdown that is backward compatible with markdown. I did:

````assistant

gemini/3.1-pro - 20260319T050611Z

Response from the assistant

````

with a similar block for tool calling This can be parsed semantically as part of the conversation but also is rendered as regular Markdown code block when needed

Helps me keep AI chats on the filesystem, as a valid document, but also add some more semantic meaning atop of Markdown

New comment by z3ugma in "Returning to Rails in 2026"

z3ugma — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:48:34 +0000

Nah read my own comment history. I tend to phrase things this way a lot too because it positions it as opinion/curiosity rather than arrogant / confident statement?

New comment by z3ugma in "No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user"

z3ugma — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 04:08:13 +0000

This is such a well-written essay. Every line revealed the answer to the immediate question I had just thought of

New comment by z3ugma in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

z3ugma — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:30:13 +0000

Building a PCB milling software tool that combines converting Gerbers to toolpaths in G-Code and then actually commanding and operating a restored PCB mill from 1998.

Bringing back the hobbyist self-made PCB workflow since it can be a headache to get designs back from PCBWay / JLC between customers, tariffs, shipping..get more quick to close the prototyping loop.

Here's a YouTube playlist of how to make PCBs at home for anyone who wants a deep dive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm_JrACrmVs&list=PLWDQgxl-jH...

New comment by z3ugma in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

z3ugma — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:26:52 +0000

Do you want some more science YouTube recommendations to top that off?

New comment by z3ugma in "Google Workspace CLI"

z3ugma — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:46:41 +0000

Right click > "Paste from Markdown" instead of just straight up pasting in

New comment by z3ugma in "GitHub having issues [resolved]"

z3ugma — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:43:36 +0000

"78 incidents in last 90 days" per https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

that's....gobsmacking...I knew it was memeably bad but I had no idea it was going so badly

New comment by z3ugma in "Ask HN: Why don't software developers make medical devices?"

z3ugma — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 01:29:49 +0000

There's a nice middle ground here, Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) which also goes through 510(k) in the US and has its own regulatory pathways distinct from hardware medical devices

New comment by z3ugma in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

z3ugma — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:56:40 +0000

I have a calendar reminder on August 4, 2026 to send a message to my high school English teacher from 20 years ago, for having this date stuck in my head that whole time.

New comment by z3ugma in "A 'Holy Grail' Sleep Apnea Pill Could Be on the Market Next Year"

z3ugma — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:00:02 +0000

This has been one of the things their latest clinical trials are pursuing, which is to see if the side effect of insomnia ends up outweighing the benefits of preventing the apnea