HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

frankfrank13

971 karma · joined February 1, 2021

submissionscomments
frankfrank13··on My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes
Underground, by Murakami, was one of the better books I've read. It mostly covers victims, but the later chapters are interviews with various members of the Aum cult. It does a pretty decent job of presenting the psyche of the type of person who joins, stays, and some that leave. Although mostly relevant for what he calls the "Japanese psyche" I still found it very insightful.
frankfrank13··on Show HN: Nikon F100 Film Camera Repair Notes
When i bought an old motorcycle, genuinely all I needed was a Clymer repair guide. I'm shocked these things don't exist for more things, eg cameras.
frankfrank13··on Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike
please add a shareable score!
frankfrank13··on Thomann takes legal action against Fender
Because strats sell. Oddly shaped guitars don't, or at least not for a long time, and would never break into the top 10 best selling guitar shapes.
frankfrank13··on Pull request limits are cutting down the noise
Yeah fair, then you could set it higher, even 100. Or default it off.
frankfrank13··on Pull request limits are cutting down the noise
I think this is a really solid move. This gives OSS contributors a lot of flexibility. You could set the limit to 0, and manually add contributors. You could set it to 1-3 to allow people to get their foot in the door. But the de facto limit today is infinite, which is spammed. Imagine if GMail did this! If I don't whitelist or reply within `n` emails, youre done. I would KILL for that.
frankfrank13··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Distribution. Cursor has enterprise contracts, SpaceX/XAi want them.
frankfrank13··on Waymo Premier
This is a huge difference between NYC and SF. There are certainly some in NYC who would prefer Waymo (direct route, no driver chitchat), but I don't think many New Yorkers would be proud of taking Waymo's. Most people feel embarrassed to admit they took an Uber somewhere!
frankfrank13··on Authentication issues related to API requests
One thing I hate about GH's status page: sure "auth" gets to live under API, so API gets the downtime report today. But all of my remote git ops are failing, because i was dumb enough to use the `gh` cli to auth. Their status pages are not well defined, but they treat them as such, leading to inflated uptime numbers.
frankfrank13··on Claude Fable 5
This makes it an instant non-starter for probably 95% of organizations. A lot of people are about to get in trouble for using it before realizing this.
frankfrank13··on Claude Fable 5
Not a lot of discussion on this, but there is no way to turn off data retention for this model. IME this is the first time Anthropic has released a model without allowing you to opt out.
frankfrank13··on What I've learned about the trombone
I guess, but the sequence of positions 6->5->4->3->2-1 maps to valves

- 1+3 (6)

- 2+3 (5)

- 1+2 (4)

- 1 (3)

- 2 (2)

- open (1)

All I mean to say, sliding a little bit at a time up the slide is easy to map to "short slide higher pitch" in a way that valves don't

frankfrank13··on What I've learned about the trombone
I loved playing trombone in school. It's such a simple mechanism, it invites a lot of curiousity, and this piece captures that well. Instruments like piano, violin, and guitar are very visual, essentially wysiwyg. Instruments like saxophones, clarinets, flutes, take a long to mentally map and reason through (this combination of keys achieves note X). Trumpets, and other 3 valve instruments map exactly to trombone positions! Eg. no-valves = 1st position, 1st valve is 3rd position, 1+2 is 4th position. But visually you don't see this, and it doesn't invite the curiousity. Trombone super unique in that you get a little wysiwyg, but you have to square that with embouchure. But learning trombone, and then mapping that knowledge to a euphonium, trumpet, tuba, etc, gives you a knowledge about that instrument (eg ok if note X is 1st valve, and note X+1 is 1+2, then i know adding 2-to-1 adds a half step, because position 3 is a half step from position 4).
frankfrank13··on Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
Hilarious, "Designed for serviceability" is one of the headline features about 3/4 down

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-lapt...

frankfrank13··on Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
Oh thank god it has a co-pilot button
frankfrank13··on What color is your function? (2015)
My first ever EM showed me this piece ~10 years ago, and I still think about it a lot. One pattern I've adopted is to keep as much code to be synchronous as possible. On larger teams, especially when the slop-cannon is really going, I can at least depend on codeowners to tag me if someone tries to convert something to async (eg. adding a DB call somewhere), because they chain of things that need to be converted to async is so long. Then I can jump in and say "this entire chain of code is sync, if you want a DB call, do it somewhere else"
frankfrank13··on Ferrari Luce
I could see this being true, except that other high end electrics (Porsche, Audi) have not sold well. So the theory would be:

> people want either $30,000 electric cars (Tesla), $100,000 electric cars (Tesla), or $500,000 electric cars (Ferrari)

I do think Ferrari is trying to expand their audience with the Luce, but not to Dubai housewives. Ferrari's are for Ferrari collectors. There exists the guy with a few already, who daily drives a Tesla. Probably hundreds of those guys! This is for them (IMO).

frankfrank13··on Trade Dollars with other startups. Book it as revenue
I interviewed at a startup, really early stage, who claimed to be on track for $100k ARR. We all know "ARR" is bullshit, but I didn't suspect the ~$10k monthly to be bullshit. It turns out this was $10k pre-discount, and this product was ~FREE for YC companies, who made up ~100% of this companies customer base. So revenue was $0, or very close to it.
frankfrank13··on Googlebook
> Intelligence is the new spec.

I'm shocked, SHOCKED how bad google is at copywriting, and it clearly not mattering.

frankfrank13··on Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust
this makes me so scared to work on OOS. If people saw every random draft PR, branch, design doc I ever made, no doubt the community would be furious
frankfrank13··on Rumor: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy from Timeline
Disneyland cast member says "world between worlds" == Disney will retcon the new trilogy. The rest is AI slop.
frankfrank13··on I am worried about Bun
TLDR;

> Claude Code appears to be enshittifying. So now I have to worry that Bun could enshittify too

frankfrank13··on Cursor Camp
brother how many times are you gonna comment that
frankfrank13··on Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs
This is one of those ideas I think makes perfect sense, but requires so much operational change for the entire stack, that it would be very difficult to scale:

- Convincing labs to run distributed, burst-y inference

- Convincing people to run their Mac all day, hoping to make a little profit

- Convincing users to trust a distributed network of un-trusted devices

I had a similar idea, pre-AI, just for compute in general. But solving even 1 of those 3 (swap AI lab for managed-compute-type-company, eg Supabase, Vercel) is nearly impossible.

frankfrank13··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
looks cool! i read `faction-identity.md`, i feel like if you come up with a little more lore, a name may come to you
frankfrank13··on Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division
I have not read this book. I've been avoiding it for a while for the dumbest possible reason, which is that I only associate this book with SWE's.
frankfrank13··on OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
An ARK ETF is a smell to me. Besides, based on their holdings, i would never invest. 18% of the fund is SpaceX
frankfrank13··on Delve – Fake Compliance as a Service
> These are starting points only: customers are responsible for reviewing, modifying, and finalizing their own materials. Draft templates are not the same as “pre-filled evidence.”

Yeah, ok. BRB to start a bank where I template everyone a billion dollars, its up to you to be honest with how much money you have.

frankfrank13··on Delve – Fake Compliance as a Service
I can understand two 20 year olds committing fraud. I can't understand a team of engineers PRE-PUBLISHING A TRUST REPORT before a single field has been filled out. This is worse than fraud, its poor craftsmanship.
frankfrank13··on AI Agent Broke into McKinsey's Internal Chatbot and Accessed Records
bot comment
Page 1 of 9Next →