HN user

pbowyer

3,783 karma

To contact, strip all upper-case letters: pREDetREDer@pREDeterbowOOyer.NETco.FRuk

Posts189
Comments724
View on HN
z.ai 2mo ago

Lessons from Debugging GLM-5 at Scale

pbowyer
1pts0
z.ai 2mo ago

Scaling Pain of Coding Agent Serving: Lessons from Debugging GLM-5 at Scale

pbowyer
12pts0
github.com 5mo ago

Weave, an entity-level semantic merge driver for Git

pbowyer
2pts0
github.com 6mo ago

AliSQL, a MySQL branch with a DuckDB storage engine

pbowyer
2pts0
simonwillison.net 7mo ago

I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours

pbowyer
278pts145
github.com 7mo ago

Cardinal: Fastest file searching tool for macOS

pbowyer
2pts2
www.tigerdata.com 1y ago

Timescale Is Now TigerData

pbowyer
170pts133
twitter.com 1y ago

Svelte 5 Released

pbowyer
1pts0
old.reddit.com 1y ago

WP Tavern Articles That Recently Went Missing Following WCUS Keynote

pbowyer
3pts0
github.com 1y ago

Loss Rider

pbowyer
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Ask HN: Help me find spreadsheet software I found on HN

pbowyer
30pts23
orbstack.dev 2y ago

Fast Container Filesystems on macOS

pbowyer
6pts1
duckdb.org 2y ago

42.parquet – A Zip Bomb for the Big Data Age

pbowyer
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: How to Write Language-Agnostic Test Conditions for Any Test Framework?

pbowyer
2pts2
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Which query builders (SQL) inspire you and why?

pbowyer
1pts2
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: What have you used DuckDB for?

pbowyer
1pts0
github.com 3y ago

Port of OpenAI's Whisper model in C/C++

pbowyer
8pts1
www.coutts.com 3y ago

Bank tells customers to disable updates and not upgrade to iOS 16

pbowyer
296pts298
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Why are front end developers (esp React) in such high demand in 2022?

pbowyer
28pts39
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Rusty at math, best applied books and materials to relearn?

pbowyer
8pts2
arxiv.org 4y ago

Programming with union, intersection, and negation types

pbowyer
35pts16
waxjs.net 4y ago

Wax: The Word Processor for the Web

pbowyer
2pts0
www.youtube.com 4y ago

Bringing Page Transitions to the Web

pbowyer
2pts0
actualbudget.com 4y ago

Actual is going open-source

pbowyer
811pts318
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: How to quickly animate system sketches and 2D diagrams?

pbowyer
142pts62
web.dev 4y ago

The UI Fund

pbowyer
19pts0
percival.ink 4y ago

Percival: Web-based, reactive Datalog notebooks

pbowyer
2pts0
blog.cloudflare.com 4y ago

Project Turpentine: an easy way to get off Varnish

pbowyer
4pts0
kentcdodds.com 4y ago

How I built a modern website in 2021

pbowyer
92pts154
ionic.io 4y ago

A Better Web View

pbowyer
2pts0
CursorBench 3.1 21 days ago

I feel like this benchmark reiterates my disbelief that anyone uses the latest Anthropic models for any productive work. They seem to be the best at burning tokens and spawning unnecessary subagents even for well-defined and tightly scoped tasks.

I keep Claude around for some specific tasks:

- Linked up to Figma MCP to implement front-end stuff

- Data analysis, in the "Connect AI to a data source and ask questions" way. I've tried both Opus 4.8 high and GPT 5.5 high for this and Opus is stronger because it gets the intent in the question better

I used to keep it around for planning too, but the 4.8 plans have had more holes than swiss cheese.

CursorBench 3.1 21 days ago

I'm only using Opus at all because GPT-5.5 in the subscriptions only has a small (400k, but 258k effective) context window.

Do you find that makes a difference in your work? I've been using 5.5 high/xhigh to optimize and benchmark a C codebase, and just reading the initial code virtually fills the first context window. A session will auto-compact 5-15 times, but it seems to do okay in spite of that because the task is mainly focused on the latest window each time.

I think for programming the strength of GPT over Opus is winning here over the context window.

The one positive of this is it seems to have livened up the open source project (Vinyl Cache). Features that haven't been added for years are now being worked on, whether they step on the toes of the commercial offering or not.

Jira is the one product I feel needs to be AI native.

AI native in the sense that it papers over the pain points.

New JIRA admin? AI will set it up to do what you want (after all, Atlassian has a great training set as they can see which Cloud installs work well)

Need to set up a workflow? Bam, AI to do that.

Need to onboard a user or manage permissions? Again, have a chatbot to do it (as a time-to-time Jira standin Admin, changing permissions always needs doing in 2+ places and devolves into a "Can you see this yet?" round of questions)

What's led to the higher prices than Germany? Usually substantially lower earnings would mean lower prices, even if not substantially lower (look at the UK, higher prices than much (all?) of Europe, average earnings slightly less).

Extremely debatable. They still have never fully implemented health checks and auto healing.

Agree.

Plus there's the monitoring of the host that is always overlooked in articles. I've ended up chucking Monit on there to monitor disk usage et al, and also used it for monitoring compose too and restarting containers.

And then there's Healthchecks.io, and external uptime monitoring... the list goes on. Properly monitoring systems, even single server systems, is not simple.

Developer of 20+ years here, can't give you an accurate multiplier but I am faster.

Because spotting holes in specs has never been one of my strengths. And working without technical colleagues much of the time, it's a boon to be able to "rubber-duck" my ideas with something that is at least more intelligent than plastic.

Grabbing multipliers from thin air, the coding bit may only be 2x faster with a poorer-quality outcome, but working out what's needed is a good 5x faster.

And yes, I'm using the same adversarial AI MO as @wood_spirit, combined with Matt Pocock's excellent /grill-me and /grill-with-docs skills [1] and Plannotator [2] to review the plans.

1. https://github.com/mattpocock/skills

2. https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator

Hermes is one of these OpenClaw clones

So that's what it is. Reading its README I thought it was another harness like Pi [1], but with built-in memory so it remembers what it learns, and gets more capable the longer it runs.

Like Letta [2], Dirac [3][4] and the other "more experimental harnesses that look interesting but I haven't had time to try out".

1. https://pi.dev/

2. https://www.letta.com/

3. https://dirac.run/

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920787

What's the privacy/data security like? I can't find that on that page.

Edit: found it.

We may use your Content to operate, maintain, improve, and develop the Services, to comply with legal obligations, to enforce our policies, and to ensure security. You may opt out of allowing your Content to be used for model improvement and research purposes by contacting us at membership@moonshot.ai. We will honor your choice in accordance with applicable law.

Section 3 of https://www.kimi.com/user/agreement/modelUse?version=v2

Stripe APIs being simple and easy is a meme from the 2010s. It isn't anymore.

I'm working with Stripe subscriptions at the moment for a charity taking donations via their website. The subtle differences between subscriptions done through Stripe checkout and subscriptions set up yourself using Stripe elements are by turn infuriating and frustrating.

The documentation is geared towards people using checkout. Stripe's own AI help could find us a bit of information which going through the documentation didn't give us, and it even struggled to find the reference in the docs for it.

One product, two different ways to use it, and slightly diverging feature sets between the two. Argh!

Dealing with Google is a nightmare. I'm one of the volunteer sysadmins for https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/, a DIY and self-build forum. For 10 years it ranked very well on Google, particularly in the UK, and then on 28 December 2025 it disappeared from Google's index.

Nothing has helped, the Google forums are tumbleweed and there's no one to reach out to for what could be an algorithm change or something gone wrong. I'm a paying Workspace customer and it's made me think I need a backup plan in case I'm ever suspended. Reports like this don't encourage.

Can anyone enlighten me how having a coding harness when for most customers you say "we won't train on your code" helps you do RL? What's the data that they rely on? Is it the prompts and their responses?

I came across a coding harness using Lua as its control plane yesterday: https://github.com/hsaliak/std_slop/blob/main/docs/lua_integ...

std::slop is a persistent, SQLite-driven C++ CLI agent. It remembers your work through per-session ledgers, providing long-term recall, structured state management. std::slop features built-in Git integration. It's goal is to be an agent for which the context and its use fully transparent and configurable.

Hi @tabbott I've been meaning to pass this feedback on for 5 months, and I hope it comes across in the spirit it's meant.

I tried Zulip (cloud offering) with some techie/designery friends, so we should have been right at home but... the desktop app on macOS and the web app was visually unappealing and clunky, and we ended up going back to a paid Slack plan.

I looked for docs on how to theme Zulip (so I could contribute), or for existing theme packs that would soften the transition but found neither.

tl;dr: The functionality was good (Love the threading!) but the UI feels like the 2000s came calling. Some UI polish would go a long way.

Deno Sandbox 6 months ago

This reminds me of a SaaS that existed 15+ years ago for PCI-DSS compliance. It did exactly that: you had it tokenize and store the sensitive data, and then you proxied your requests via it, and it inserted them into the request. It was a very neat way to get around storing data yourself.

I cannot remember what the platform was called, let me know if you do.

What good use cases would you see for grid lanes today?

Fully responsive layouts, where sidebar content is interleaved with page content on small screens, but in a sidebar on larger screens.

Demo: https://codepen.io/pbowyer/pen/raLBVaV

Reordering the content on larger screens would be the icing on the cake but for now I'll take just doing it.

CSS Grid didn't solve this, as it added gaps: https://codepen.io/pbowyer/pen/azNarbZ

And using named grid-template-areas stacks the items you move to the sidebar on top of each other, so you only see one of them at a time. Eventualy I hope that https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/9098 will land and we'll be able to use this saner way to do it.

I saw people on reddit say that Opus 4.5 will hit that $20 limit after a 1-3 prompts

That's people doing real-vibe coding prompts, like "Build me a music player with...". I'm using the $20 Codex plan and with getting it to plan first and then executing (in the same way I, an experienced dev would instruct a junior) haven't even managed to exhaust my 5-hour window limits, let alone the weekly limit.

Also if you keep an eye on it and kill it if it goes in the wrong direction you save plenty of tokens vs letting it go off on one. I wasted a bunch when Codex took 25 minutes(!) to install one package because something went wrong and instead of stopping and asking it decided to "problem solve" on its own.

I think I've asked this before on HN but is there a language-independent test format? There are multiple libraries (think date/time manipulation for a good example) where the tests should be the same across all languages, but every library has developed its own test suite.

Having a standard test input/output format would let test definitions be shared between libraries.