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mavilia

31 karma · joined June 19, 2018

ryanmavilia.com professional rubber duck
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mavilia··on The Real Luxuries In Life
No direct answer, but I’ve personally noticed that having seasons makes a big difference here. After spending the past year on the East Coast with all of the different seasons, I certainly felt like time was going slower and looking back. It is pretty clear cut in my brain as to how much I did during that time.

That’s in contrast to where I normally live, which is southern California where you basically just go between Summer and Winter Lite which does seem to make the time pass quicker and lead to more routine living. I’ve often speculated with my friends around here about how there is a “Paradise Effect” of living here with both how people live their lives, as well as with how we perceive time.

mavilia··on Claude March 2026 usage promotion
I canceled my plan today and wrote my reason as: now that I have a job again I don’t have the time or needs for the pro plan. If there was a $5 a month option, I would gladly take it to make use of Opus for my rare side ideas.
mavilia··on Tomo: The Language of Tomorrow (and the next day, and the next) [video]
Direct link to the languages site for those uninterested in video format: https://tomo.bruce-hill.com/
mavilia··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://ryanmavilia.com

Recently revamped my theme and trying to write more so this post must be the universe telling me to keep it up :)

mavilia··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)
- Active recall studying app that allows a user to practice active recall[0]. The app hides user provided content at first and asking the user to try to remember all they can before reading the content. Then the user goes through the material slowly revealing each paragraph from their input. At the end they try to actively remember what they learned and can even compare to what they knew at the start.

- Mixtape sharing platform for midwest emo[1] which is a genre I've really gotten into over the past few years. The community is pretty strong on YouTube for creating "mixtapes" so I wanted a spot that was just for these videos.

- PhotoForge[2] Photographer's companion app which can help me choose photos using a Tinder-esque swiping mechanism. It also has some AI stuff for generating Instagram descriptions. Finally has a watermark tool. Still trying to think of other stuff to add. This was an AI code weekend project so it's like a house on stilts at the moment but I plan to give it some more love soon

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXdpSfDWbGY

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4M4WpmrY4

[2] - https://www.photoforge.fun/

mavilia··on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'
> At which point you now have to do it yourself, but you know the codebase less well than if you'd hand written it.

Appreciate you saying this because it is my biggest gripe in these conversations. Even if it makes me faster I now have to put time into reading the code multiple times because I have to internalize it.

Since the code I merge into production "is still my responsibility" as the HN comments go, then I need to really read and think more deeply about what AI wrote as opposed to reading a teammate's PR code. In my case that is slower than the 20% speedup I get by applying AI to problems.

I'm sure I can get even more speed if I improve prompts, when I use the AI, agentic vs non-agentic, etc. but I just don't think the ceiling is high enough yet. Plus I am someone who seems more prone to AI making me lazier than others so I just need to schedule when I use it and make that time as minimal as possible.

mavilia··on Attention Is the New Big-O: A Systems Design Approach to Prompt Engineering
This was a great refresher on things I’ve seen writings of but never thought deeply about. A lot of it already “made sense” yet in my day to day I’m still doing the bad versions of the prompts.

Do you have preference n a more continual system like Claude Code for one big prompt or just trying to do one task and starting something new?

mavilia··on My First $500 MRR – My thoughts and learnings
This was such a nice write up that highlighted what I’ve seen in so many “First $X MMR” essays that were too long. Thanks for sticking to the points with short examples.

Wishing you the best!

mavilia··on Ask HN: What's your most valuable query to an LLM?
I'm curious how clean is your handwriting? I just did a test run with Claude (pro plan) and it could not understand my iPad + iPencil notes. I expected this since they are close to chicken scratch. ChatGPT told me "I ran OCR on your notes, but the handwriting/scan quality makes the transcription pretty rough—lots of words are garbled."

Then I tried a handwritten note that was some of my average handwriting and it did okay-ish. I think it would be acceptable to use if I also store the original note image with the transcribed text and for basic searching.

I agree with you I prefer writing physically but need a system for digitizing.

mavilia··on Ask HN: Do you still bookmark websites?
Self hosting Karakeep[0] for this. I think next step is to carve out time on Sunday morning to go through things and put them in lists of read vs unread.

[0] https://karakeep.app/

mavilia··on Do Things That Don't Scale (2013)
I agree with your comment as an additional way to look at the problem but want to also mention something I heard on a podcast a few months ago.

Paraphrasing "If you get good at seeing red flags it doesn't make you good at seeing green ones. When you optimize against failure you don't optimize for success. So on and so forth."

A failed founder can tell you what broke but won't know what else could've gone wrong or rather what else they needed to go right.

mavilia··on Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?
No longer employed but from my past year's experience I became disillusioned with it. I think it maybe made me 20% faster? That's being generous but it could have been higher if I was really really diligent about when to use it. But like most dopamine rewarding technologies it became really easy to either just get lost in it or go through periods of not caring to use it at all because it kept giving back garbage.

Things change fast and the tech got way better as I moved from CoPilot to Cursor to finally Claude Code. But at the end of the day the amount that I understood the code I was producing versus how much I was writing was not worth it.

People talk a lot about "what you merge to production is still your code" and I agree with that. To that point whether its a shared experience or just how I'm wired I would need to put way more time in to trying to deeply understand the code than the time it took to write a great prompt that Claude could follow correctly.

We already had a script for boilerplate writing and honestly boilerplate is kinda fun to write sometimes if you have a nice keyboard. The annoying boilerplate is the more nitty gritty stuff like error handling in Go. So I guess I still support the AI tab, that's pretty nice.

I felt myself becoming "dumber" and my productivity increase wasn't worth it. Same reason I stay off TikTok and Instagram even though they sometimes have interesting reels that are actually informative.

mavilia··on Make Your Own Backup System – Part 1: Strategy Before Scripts
This comment made me rethink what I have that is actually valuable data. My photos alone even if culled down to just my favorites would probably be at least a few gigs. Contacts from my phone would be small. Other than that I guess I wouldn't be devastated if I lost anything else. Probably should put my recovery keys somewhere safer but honestly the accounts most important to me don't have recovery keys.

Curious what you consider valuable data?

Edit: I should say for pictues I have around 2Tb right now (downside of being a hobby photographer)

mavilia··on Ask HN: How do you stay on top of AI tech?
For AI news in general I just browse HN.

For useful tools I basically wait until something starts appearing in multiple places like HN comments, YouTube tech videos/comments, or on Reddit. This is what led to me hearing about Claude Code and trying it out before convincing other engineers at my company to try it. Now we're considering it over Cursor not so much because of Cursor pricing change but just because Claude Code is doing so much better.

That then leads me to an even more specific topic which is how I stay on top of info about the tools I'm using and for that I tend to stick to subreddits i.e. /r/ClaudeAI

Some YouTube sources would be any of the "tech-influencers" like ThePrimeagen[0], Internet of Bugs[1], or dare I say Fireship[2]

0 - https://www.youtube.com/@ThePrimeTimeagen 1 - https://www.youtube.com/@InternetOfBugs 2 - https://www.youtube.com/@Fireship

mavilia··on BYOK – Bring Your Own Keyboard
If you wanna DIY then you could achieve something similar with the open source ZeroWriter

https://github.com/zerowriter/zerowriter1

mavilia··on A receipt printer cured my procrastination
> Also, isn't handling a lot of receipt paper bad for you or something?

Yes if you are worried about microplastics. Dr. Rhonda Patrick has an episode where she talks about receipts specifically (at the 1hr 2m mark) [0].

To paraphrase: thermal paper receipts are loaded with BPA which gets absorbed through your skin. The chemicals are worse too since the plastics for receipts aren't scrutinized like they would be for a food storage item. They use BPA is used as a color developer in thermal printing.

It gets way worse if you've used hand sanitizer, lotion, or sunscreen recently since those increase skin permeability. Studies show dramatically higher absorption rates when your skin barrier is compromised. Although I can't find a link for that right now.

Definitely something to think about if you're a cashier or work somewhere handling receipts all day. I've started just declining receipts unless I actually need them for returns/expense reports.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTzw_grLzjw

mavilia··on The last RadioShack in Maryland is closing
Weird to see my home county pop up on HN. As soon as I saw RadioShack + Maryland I immediately pictured exactly where this was on rt 4. I have a distinct memory of going to this very store to buy a PS2 internet adapter and an ethernet cable back in the early 2000s. It was also my go to for anything electronics related.

It was always nice to visit back home (including this year) and see that this store was still around. It will certainly be missed :(

mavilia··on Arm and Instacart stocks have already lost most of their first-day IPO pops
I think the HN equivalent for investing would be the Bogleheads forums. Named after the late Jack Bogle who founded Vanguard.

https://www.bogleheads.org/

mavilia··on Show HN: Applying for jobs? Manage all your interviews in one place
Any plans on adding an ability to import job applications? I would love to switch to your product but unfortunately I already have a Google Sheets document with about 60+ applied companies and 50 rejected. If there were a way for me to at least import the company names that would make it easier to switch.
mavilia··on Show HN: Bookmark for places
This is a type of app that I've been waiting for. Somethng that allows me to organize my thoughts based on locations. This is perfect for creating a list of guides from places like Reddit for different destinations.

Is there already a feature to edit tags or have multiple ones? I have one which I accidentally marked as Indonesia rather than Bali. I can't seem to change it, but while on that subject I would really like to have multiple tags so I can look at all bookmarks based on city, country, continent, etc.

Either way it's an awesome service and my hats off to you!

mavilia··on PANDAS revives the debate about the immune system and mental illness (2015)
Very interesting read. I always wonder about the criticisms of new solutions that are working as magically as they seem to be in the article. The kids started taking antibiotics, and soon thereafter had obvious improvement that led to them being cured eventually. Of course you can say sample size wasn't large enough to make any conclusions, but what is their (critics of PANDAS) answer to the fact that the antibiotics worked? Is it pure coincidence? Or some other mechanism in play?

If it was another mechanism in play then at the very least I would think that autoimmune treatment should be used as a backup plan in case typical OCD, ADHD, etc. drugs aren't working as shown through the article.

Of course I am not a medical researcher so this may have an obvious answer, but I always wanted to know how critics go beyond the "n=1" argument to disprove new solutions that seem to work perfectly.

mavilia··on Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?
The Subtle Art is a great book that helps put things into perspective. At times you will open it to a chapter randomly, but it still has some application to a part of your life that you may be struggling with. I like to keep the audio book around so that I can have little reminders daily because of course the concepts are useless without application.