HN user

ripley12

1,513 karma

reillywood.com

Posts9
Comments483
View on HN

Awful headline and I doubt it's what the author would have chosen, given that her comments are much more to do with supply:

“In San Francisco, demand is reflected in increased prices,” she says. “In Charlotte, demand is reflected in increased quantities.”

“A big takeaway is that cities are in control of a big portion of their supply sensitivity,” Gorback says. “It’s cities that control zoning. It’s cities that control permitting. The real keeper of the keys are the municipalities.”

Yes, Package Identity was the bane of my existence for a while. It's wild how MS gated important APIs behind it and then made it so difficult+impractical to work with (I honestly think this is a large part of why WinRT was mostly ignored by developers).

I've moved on, but this looks like it will at least fix some of the paper cuts.

Bugs Apple loves 6 months ago

The search bugs in Mail are absolutely real. They might not affect every user but I've had major issues on both macOS and iOS mail, and eventually gave up and switched to Gmail.

I can see where Mario is coming from, but IMO MCP still has a place because it 1) solves authentication+discoverability, 2) doesn't require code execution.

MCP shines when you want to add external functionality to an agent quickly, and in situations where it's not practical to let an agent go wild with code execution and network access.

Feels like we're in the "backlash to the early hype" part of the hype cycle. MCP is one way to give agents access to tools; it's OK that it doesn't work for every possible use case.

Midori was fascinating. Joe Duffy's writing on it is the most comprehensive I've seen: https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/

I've heard someone at Microsoft describe it as a moonshot but also a retention project; IIRC it had a hundred plus engineers on it at one time, including a lot of very senior people.

Apparently a bunch of research from Midori made it into .NET so it wasn't all lost, but still...

Similar approach as MCPCat (telling agents to specify context about why a tool was called in special tool arguments): https://mcpcat.io/

I don't love it (potential privacy issues, and it makes the user's agent spend more tokens), but I don't think there's a better approach right now. Would be great if someone took the time to add an observability mechanism to the MCP spec itself.

Find SF parking cops 10 months ago

That's more or less how Tokyo works. Almost no on-street parking, people have to prove that they have a parking spot when buying a car, liberal zoning so there are lots of very small pay parking lots around the city. It works really well IMO but it would be politically very difficult in North America.

Sharpening a knife to r/sharpening standards is hard. But just honing frequently and occasionally using a cheap sharpener will get you further than 95% of home chefs.

I work in this space and I was not able to understand how this project works in a couple minutes. The README feels LLM-generated. I think you're supposed to point this at your MCP server's code and not the server itself, is that right?

Claude Code Router 12 months ago

Aider is good at one-shotting Git commits, but requires a human in the loop for a lot of iteration. Claude Code is better at iterating on problems that take multiple tries to get right (which is most problems IMO). I was really impressed by Aider until I started using CC.

Anthropic's Research is pretty good; I'd say on par with OpenAI.

Agreed about Google, accuracy is a little better on the paid version but the reports are still frustrating to read through. They're incredibly verbose, like an undergrad padding a report to get to a certain word count.

That's sort of the popular wisdom, but rails don't guarantee it will be there for the long run. DC recently announced that they're replacing their light rail with buses:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/05/27/steetcar-...

Jarrett Walker has a good piece about it: https://humantransit.org/2025/05/what-was-wrong-with-the-was...

I agree with him that in order to endure and justify a permanent operating subsidy a transit service needs to be useful and used by many people. Most American light rail doesn't meet that bar.

This is very useful, thanks. I've implemented similar authentication with tower_cookies in a home project, and it took me a long time to figure out; Axum is powerful but not always the most intuitive. It was a great learning experience, but I'd love to offload more of this to a crate next time.

(disclaimer: Datadog employee)

I haven't kept super close tabs on it but last year we were hiring for a role to do tech lead stuff and OSS community building for Vector, and yes several of the original Vector employees still work here.