Hacker News: zachwlewis

New comment by zachwlewis in "Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed"

zachwlewis — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 02:28:05 +0000

I got tired of doing this and set up a /question skill that forbids the agent from doing anything that would modify my files. It makes it very clear what the intent of every prompt is.

Similarly, I have an /info skill that tells the agent to read my prompt, update any memories it thinks it should, then pass the turn.

New comment by zachwlewis in "libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months"

zachwlewis — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:15:12 +0000

balk is the American spelling of baulk, meaning to hesitate, stop short, or refuse to proceed due to reluctance, fear, or an obstacle.

"He got personal visits from both Ballmer and Gates that pressured him to stay with Microsoft but did not balk" can be rephrased as "He was pressured by Microsoft [to stay with Windows] but that pressure did not cause him to hesitate [with switching to Linux]."

New comment by zachwlewis in "Timeline Scan – AI fixes the dates on your scanned photos"

zachwlewis — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 02:38:40 +0000

From your site, under "How we find each photo's real date" section:

Sequence Neighboring photos

Photos scanned in alphabetical order often belong together, so nearby files can give useful context to each other.

New comment by zachwlewis in "Indian police trying to read minds of suspects, over neuroscientists' objections"

zachwlewis — Thu, 22 May 2025 04:13:41 +0000

https://archive.is/ZYg4v

New comment by zachwlewis in "ZeroVer: 0-Based Versioning"

zachwlewis — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 04:22:56 +0000

For humans, yes. For software, not so much.

There’s a special rule in SemVer that states when the leading major version is 0, every minor version bump is considered breaking.

https://semver.org/#spec-item-4

NPM handles 0.x.y versions of packages differently from 1+.x.y

https://github.com/npm/node-semver#caret-ranges-123-025-004

Several major packages are still on 0.x.y and (ab)use this feature when updating without "committing" to a major version.

New comment by zachwlewis in "Trump expected to take control of USPS and fire postal board"

zachwlewis — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 04:08:03 +0000

https://archive.is/kJJcs

New comment by zachwlewis in "Ask HN: Why is it so hard to download podcasts?"

zachwlewis — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 05:14:52 +0000

If downloaded from the podcast host, it'll always insert ads.

To answer your original question, I threw together a python script that takes an RSS feed and downloads all the podcasts in that feed.

https://gist.github.com/zachwlewis/7ad4182e21768dae98cabd17b...

Hope that helps!

New comment by zachwlewis in "Ask HN: Why is it so hard to download podcasts?"

zachwlewis — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 04:26:27 +0000

Many modern podcasts don't actually include any ads in their source audio, relying instead on dynamic ad insertion.

Many podcast hosts provide dynamic ad insertion functionality. Unlike baked-in ads, podcast creators mark the locations of where ads can be inserted and, when requested by a user, the host generates a new MP3 on-the-fly using the user's tracking data (geolocation, demographics, etc.) that is then downloaded to their device.

This allows old podcasts to continue to generate ad revenue by dynamically inserting ads from currently-running ad campaigns.

https://advertise.acast.com/news-and-insights/the-benefits-o...