Hacker News Reader

e12eon Breaking the spell of vibe coding

I think this continued anthropomorphism "Have you tried asking about..." is a real problem.

I get it. It quacks like a duck, so seems like if you feed it peas it should get bigger ". But it's not a duck.

There's a distinction between "I need to tell my LLM friend what I want" and "I need to adjust the context for my statistical LLM tool and provide guardrails in the form of linting etc".

It's not that adding prose description doesn't shift the context - but it assume a wrong model about what is going on, that I think is ultimately limiting.

The LLM doesn't really have that kind of agency.

e12eon OpenAI should build Slack

Google gave us Wave - surely that's enough? /s

e12eon Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Apparently windows 11 still ships with classic notepad?

https://github.com/christian-korneck/classic-windows-notepad

e12eon Trying Out Thunderbird Appointment While I Patiently Wait for an Invite

Very excited to see some new developments around foss calendar solutions.

e12eon Data centers in space makes no sense

No, no, no - Villa Starlight was the prison the Tessier-Ashpool AI needed help to escape from!

e12eon France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

Heh, now that our team has standardized on Teams rather than Zulip (so that we suffer/connect with the rest of the org whom are stuck in MS land) - and I've been given the chance to use Teams for a while - it really is worse than I initially thought.

Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:

https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack

But all I found was:

https://github.com/btp/teams-cli

https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams

Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?

e12eon Deno Sandbox

Looks promising. Any plans for a version that runs locally/self-host able?

Looks like the main innovation here is linking outbound traffic to a host with dynamic variables - could that be added to deno itself?

e12eon Rust’s Standard Library on the GPU

There's indeed an actual toggle at the top to switch on pedantic mode, FYI.

But still a bit odd that the article doesn't show assembly/cuda/opencl output of the compiler - nor show an example of anything parallel - like maybe a vector search, Mandelbrot calculation or something like that?

Something like this 2019 article on cuda for Julia:

https://nextjournal.com/sdanisch/julia-gpu-programming

e12eon A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

> ... few tears ago

Brilliant. Even if it was a typo.

e12eon ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

Hm... I have a Google drive app [Ed: available for install] - but no Gmail/calendar. Maybe because I'm in Europe?

(Not that I'm super excited about giving chat GPT my emails - on the other hand Gemini is already there (Gmail) I guess...).

e12eon ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

Strange. When logged in to a free account on Android:

https://chatgpt.com/share/697902ad-3070-800d-b523-0fe312c772...

e12eon ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

Hmm.. what's this?

> gmail (read-only) # gmail.search_email_ids → any # > Description: Search Gmail message IDs by query/tags (read-only).

Chat GPT App on android disavows having this... In what context does chat GPT get (read) access to Gmail? Desktop app?

e12eon Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

> ... it doesn't have access to any of my personal or business accounts or computers, at least not anything more than read-only access on a couple of non-critical things

How have you set up read-only access? Network shares mounted as a guest/read-only user? Custom IMAP login with read-only access?

e12eon Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

I also would like local LLMs - but that's hardly the biggest issue with these projects?

You point it at your email, and you've opened a vector for prompt injection and data exfiltration - all as an integral part of the features you want (read my emails, send some emails).

Your local LLM won't protect you there.

You could probably write some limited tools (whitelist where mail could be sent) - but it goes against the grain of "magically wonderful ai secretary".

Security is not a convenience.

e12eon Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant

> ... what films they are watching.

I assume this relates to looking at their desktop activity? Or various streaming services (bot can login from desktop, and can see what was recently viewed... Even if viewed on smart tv etc?

> At the moment it is exceptionally easy to exfiltrate anything, but you still can control via proper prompts - what you want to share and what you dont want to.

You can? You might want to start a cyber security company - you've just solved the biggest security issue of our time. That, or you're overly optimistic?

e12eon Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

I was more commenting on the language design here; the idea of indexing into a UTF-8 string and returning an ASCII character. What does the index count? Bytes? There doesn't seem to be a way to get UTF-8 characters from strings?

Ed: There seems to be an UTF-8 library:

https://github.com/jordanhubbard/nanolang/tree/main/modules/...

e12eon Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

In this case, sure. But what if we shifted to rendering with emojis or whatnot. What would the first ASCII character of the string be?

e12eon Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

True enough. On that note, I had a look at the language reference - there's arrays - but also this:

    (char_at s index)        # Get ASCII value at index (0-based)
    (string_from_char code)  # Create string from ASCII value

So, you can pluck a character... From an UTF-8 string? What if the rendering used multibyte characters?

e12eon Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

True, with early return - there's no need to actually nest with else.

Logically this still would be a case/switch though...

e12eon Nanolang: A tiny experimental language designed to be targeted by coding LLMs

Oh, wow. I thought the control flow from the readme was a little annoying with the prefix -notation for bigger/smaller than;

    # Control flow
    if (> x 0) {
      (println "positive")
    } else {
      (println "negative or zero")
    }

But that's nothing compared to the scream for a case/switch-statement in the Mandelbrot example...

    # Gradient: " .:-=+*#%@"
        let gradient: string = " .:-=+*#%@"
        let gradient_len: int = 10
        let idx: int = (/ (* iter gradient_len) max_iter)
        if (>= idx gradient_len) {
            return "@"
        } else {
            if (== idx 0) {
                return " "
            } else {
                if (== idx 1) {
                    return "."
                } else {
                    if (== idx 2) {
                        return ":"
                    } else {
                        if (== idx 3) {
                            return "-"
                        } else {
                            if (== idx 4) {
                                return "="
                            } else {
                                if (== idx 5) {
                                    return "+"
                                } else {
                                    if (== idx 6) {
                                        return "*"
                                    } else {
                                        if (== idx 7) {
                                            return "#"
                                        } else {
                                            if (== idx 8) {
                                                return "%"
                                            } else {
                                                return "@"
                                            }
                                        }

e12eon Gas Town Decoded

Well, according to Yegge, the next step is an SDK/framework for building your own ai orchestrator - so I expect we'll see support for more than Claude soon.

e12eon Claude Cowork runs Linux VM via Apple virtualization framework

> The sandboxed bash tool uses OS-level primitives to enforce both filesystem and network isolation.

As I can't trust Claude Code to use a correct shell, I don't know why I would trust this feature.

e12eon Ask HN: How do you safely give LLMs SSH/DB access?

For ssh/shell - set up a regular user, and add capabilities via group membership and/or doas (or sudo).

You want to limit access to files (eg: regular user can't read /etc/shadow or write to /bin/doas or /bin/sh) - and maybe limit some commands (/bin/su).

e12eon There are many coding agents, but this one is mine

Ah, I see; the "pi-mono" ai framework has been submitted once:

"Pi Monorepo: AI agent toolkit"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46590828

e12eon There are many coding agents, but this one is mine

Not actually mine, but theirs (hence no "show hn").

But after learning that Claude code and OpenCode both are closed projects with poor quality control and development process - I thought this looked interesting - and seems to not have been discussed here previously.

Came across it in the article:

"Porting MiniJinja to Go with an Agent":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614802

e12eon Show HN: Mantic.sh – A structural code search engine for AI agents

So this basically competes with fzf?

https://junegunn.github.io/fzf/

e12eon I switched from VSCode to Zed

https://archive.is/aaJh4

e12eon Show HN: Vibe Coding a static site on a $25 Walmart Phone

I thought the content was interesting, but didn't really match the headline - I didn't learn how I could vibe code a website on a phone - I learned how I could "traditionally" deploy an existing site on a phone (ie: no help on using LLM, no information on how to create a static website).

e12eon Web development is fun again

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=phpmyadmin

Sort by oldest to newest

e12eon The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

Surely you can turn your phone off when you get to the cafe, and leave it off for half an hour?