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kurtextrem

97 karma · joined December 17, 2011

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kurtextrem··on Show HN: Skillzero – save tokens by omitting skills from agent context
yes :) you can pick the path it should run on or invoke in a path that has .claude or .agents as a subfolder, it will then auto-detect and allow you to write collections (bundles).
kurtextrem··on Show HN: A fast, private, cross-platform Markdown editor built with Tauri/Rust
Two thoughts: 1) An editor needs screenshots to spark my interest 2) What does it do better than Writer (https://github.com/joelbqz/writer-computer)?
kurtextrem··on Show HN: Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
I found this prompt works well to nudge it to use a better grep as the start, then just keep using grep (Cursors instant grep in my case):

``` - For planning, prefer using morph-mcp `codebase_search` - subagent that takes in a search string and tries to find relevant context. Best practice is to use it at the beginning of codebase explorations to fast track finding relevant files/lines. Do not use it to pin point keywords, but use it for broader semantic queries. "Find the XYZ flow", "How does XYZ work", "Where is XYZ handled?", "Where is <error message> coming from?" ```

(see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48205911; having higher quality results at the beginning of a thread seem to improve the output vs. having faster search later on).

kurtextrem··on Show HN: Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Have you tried https://github.com/mksglu/context-mode? I prefer it over rtk / headroom (at least in Cursor). The stop hooks seem to work well / prevent the agent from blowing up its context window.
kurtextrem··on Show HN: Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Related read (not from me): https://entire.io/blog/improving-agentic-search-in-coding-ag...

> The clearest result was that faster search alone only modestly helps, while better-ranked results improve first-query retrieval and help agents find the right code sooner.

Their tool "pgr" is a research preview only, so it'd be interesting to see semble vs pgr.

I'm also collecting other tools that are similar, most notably is probably Morph's WarpGrep (has a free tier too). Apart from that, there is codemogger (https://github.com/glommer/codemogger), cs (the author also commented in this HN post).

In the similar area, but not fully related, the author of fff is also pretty involved in any thread that goes into that direction (see e.g. https://x.com/neogoose_btw/status/2052161471296225710). Similar to colGREP is also mgrep (by mixedbread) and osgrep (but they seem to predate colGREP). I also found codedb on X (https://codegraff.com/blog/codedb-code-intelligence), the post reads well, but haven't tried.

kurtextrem··on Show HN: Grammit – Local-only AI grammar checker (Chrome extension)
Just stopping by to say this is great usage of the new APIs.
kurtextrem··on Show HN: Taucoder – A Better JPEG Encoder
How does it compare to jpegli?
kurtextrem··on Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
Also, the vite team in collab with a few others is building https://rolldown.rs/, to replace esbuild and rollup in vite. It's goal is to be faster than esbuild, with extended chunking options and so on.
kurtextrem··on Mako – fast, production-grade web bundler based on Rust
I'm not entirely sure if we can really tell anything about esbuild from that comparison, as vite's production build time is 1300ms (which uses rollup), but dev startup time 1100 (uses esbuild to prebundle). It seems like vite itself has overhead.

The only bench I'm aware of was presented in November 2023: https://x.com/boshen_c/status/1719596594985681275?t=x8FaB9Aw..., where esbuild was faster.

kurtextrem··on Xylitol is associated with cardiovascular risk
"xylitol-sweetened (30 g) water, an exposure comparable with a pint of numerous xylitol-sweetened ice creams, a xylitol-sweetened bakery good, or several pieces of xylitol-sweetened candy" (source: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1d9ql2u/comment/l7...)
kurtextrem··on Show HN: Track Insider CEO Stock Purchases for your trading game
Anything for Nancy pelosi?
kurtextrem··on Show HN: I built an image optimization tool based on Google's new Jpegli encoder
Really cool stuff!
kurtextrem··on GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 being tested on LMSYS?
It tells me that its knowledge cutoff is Nov 2023. So pretty recent.
kurtextrem··on Show HN: I build browser extension that skips any type of ad(Not an ad blocker)
just curious, what's the difference to the other extensions doing this?
kurtextrem··on Some Fritz!Box modems might have been hijacked
what happens in chrome, where afaik google's dns is the default?
kurtextrem··on JPEG XL and the Pareto Front
do you know why Jon didn't compare near-lossless in the "visually lossless" part?
kurtextrem··on JPEG XL and the Pareto Front
the jpegli progress is so awesome to see
kurtextrem··on Sieve is simpler than LRU
Made also a JS implementation based on the golang one here: https://github.com/kurtextrem/js-sieve. It's a bit different than your reference implementation.
kurtextrem··on Show HN: Open-Source Loom Alternative
When I download the Windows .exe using Chrome, it says "Malicious download blocked", just fyi
kurtextrem··on Show HN: Docu – Never sign a sketchy contract again. GPT-4 contract review
I like the idea, it's nice. Thank you
kurtextrem··on YouTube is now blocking ad blockers so I make ads run faster
Am I missing something or was exactly something like this on "Show HN" the last days? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327017
kurtextrem··on Victor Mono Typeface
been using for longer now and I still love it the most. Might try Ghost from Vercel, or GHs latest font to compare, but every other mono font didn't come close to the italics and general style
kurtextrem··on Show HN: React server state management package let developer control over data
I like your approach and it feels like you thought of everything that is needed for solving the problem your company has. The usage of immer also shows you put careful thoughts into it.

However, I wonder: is your company the only one out there with this specific problem? Has no one else tried to solve this in the react landscape based on the libs you've put in the readme?

kurtextrem··on Htmx Is the Future
Back in the days, when JSON became popular as response type for rendering in the client, I saw arguments such as "the JSON payload is smaller than sending full HTML, so you pay the download only once instead of N times". Only once, because what has to be done with the JSON has been downloaded in the JS bundle. With full HTML, full HTML comes back in every response.

However, I'm not sure if this is actually a problem or rather depends on how much interaction the user does (so where is the "turning point" of the overhead of having all in the bundle vs full HTML responses). What does everyone think?

kurtextrem··on ThumbHash: A better compact image placeholder hash
Small heads-up, you might want to look at the PRs (I've opened the single open PR) :D

Take a look here: https://github.com/ascorbic/unpic-placeholder. Recently created by a Principal Engineer of Netlify, which kind of server-side-renders BlurHash images, so that they don't tax the mainthread. Maybe the same can be done for ThumbHash (I've opened an issue in that repo to discuss it)

kurtextrem··on 'They fire, we hire' – Germany seizes on Silicon Valley's woes
Literally no one who is used to the Silicon valley comp will move to a new country for around half the pay in order to celebrate the Oktoberfest. Wtf.
kurtextrem··on Faster MySQL with HTTP/3
Crazy results, really interesting experiment!
kurtextrem··on “Twitter core services latency reduced by ~400ms.Should feel noticeably faster.”
Idk but, at least from Germany Twitter now loads slower. The comments below Elon's tweet load slow, my home timeline loads slow, even the notifications load slow. Before the "reduced by 400ms" change everything was faster for me (I never understood who perceives the Android app or Twitter in general as slow - NOW I do).

I'm guessing a dev made US calls faster, so that he/she can tell Elon it's faster without mentioning for the US only.

kurtextrem··on We're improving search results when you use quotes
If an official blog post, meant for regular users, lists using the search of Chrome Dev Tools to find hidden content instead of the actual Ctrl+F search: "in Chrome, you can search from within Developer Tools to match against all rendered text, which would include the text in drop-down menus and other areas of the site." it is maybe time to change the Ctrl+F search instead of recommending regular users to use developer tools.
kurtextrem··on Cloudflare outage on June 21, 2022
Yet another BGP caused outage. At some point we should collect all of them:

- Cloudflare 2022 (this one)

- Facebook 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28752131 - this one probably had the single biggest impact, since engineers got locked out of their systems, which made the fixing part look like a sci-fi movie

- (Indirectly caused by BGP: Cloudflare 2020: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-outage-on-july-17-202...)

- Google Cloud 2020: https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/16/google_europe_outage/

- IBM Cloud 2020: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/ibm-cloud-g...

- Cloudflare 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20262214

- Amazon 2018: https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/news/252439945/BGP...

- AWS: https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/route-leak-causes-amazon-a... (2015)

- Youtube: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2648947/youtube-outage-und... (2008)

And then there are incidents caused by hijacking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGP_hijacking#:~:text=end%20us...

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