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npilkon Power Tools Got Worse on Purpose. Who Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?

Yep, clearly written by AI. Seems like an SEO-type play where they just have AI do deep research and write these reports on as many categories as possible to get traction.

Pretty smart business idea as I imagine people love ragebait about why products aren't as good as they used to be.

npilkon Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

I'm trying to make it easier for non-technical folks to publish websites: https://weejur.com

82 sites published so far, with a really weird and wide range of content.

Working on a simple WYSIWYG website editor to go with the current functionality.

npilkon Am I Meant to Be Impressed?

I admittedly didn’t take the time to read all 10,000 words of him shouting into the void in detail. But the capex complaints seem trivially misguided?

Current revenue is being generated from capex investments in the past; the most recent capex hasn’t begun to pay off at all. That’s expected.

Now, I don’t know if those investments ever will pay off and there are reasons to be skeptical. But if you assume the capex doesn’t lead to any revenue, then you’re just assuming the conclusion that the investments are bad…

npilkon Am I Meant to Be Impressed?

“I’m ending this with a rant” made me laugh. What was the rest, then?

npilkon Using “underdrawings” for accurate text and numbers

Still missing 49 - humans are safe, for now!

npilkon Becoming a father shrinks your cerebrum (2022)

https://archive.is/7LHeN

("This is your brain on kids!")

npilkon Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

I'm surprised people have been getting it to reliably guess names. I have a really hard time getting it to give a specific name (perhaps for privacy reasons?) - maybe I'm not prompting effectively.

Interestingly, it is able to reliably determine my age from my writing. I suppose this is a mix of stylometry and references in the text itself that date the author (me).

npilkon Show HN: A free tool for non-technical folks to easily publish a website

Basically as you see on the website - “Connect to GitHub and publish”, “GitHub Pages is a free service to host websites”, etc.

I do think the target user for this would probably have needed to heard of GitHub to really “get it” - but maybe they just know it’s something developers use, and not any more than that.

npilkon Show HN: A free tool for non-technical folks to easily publish a website

Sweet, didn’t know about this - yes, this is very similar.

npilkon Show HN: A free tool for non-technical folks to easily publish a website

Sure, Lovable/v0 free tier is a good option, although I’m not sure how many non-tech people use them for things like personal sites or to quickly publish something they want to share. It feels like they’re going more after “builders”, and regular folks would be more using ChatGPT free tier, etc.

Mainly it’s always bothered me that Squarespace etc can charge so much for simple static sites. I just don’t think most people realize you can host websites for free if you don’t need a database.

npilkon Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1860/

npilkon Claude Design

There's an "export to Canva" button in Claude Design, so perhaps they're hoping this will be another entry point for new users, or that they'll be able to "lock in" as the default design software for Claude users.

npilkon Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

It's not "sci fi" but you should read Borges' short stories, particularly from Ficciones.

You may have already read his story The Library of Babel: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...

npilkon Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable

Remember, if you use Google to access any of this “private” information, you’re a hacker and the state of Missouri might try to arrest you!

https://missouriindependent.com/2021/10/14/missouri-governor...

npilkon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

Trying to make it easier for anyone to publish a website for free, even with no technical know-how: https://weejur.com

npilkon The End of Eleventy

The "build step" with Hugo/Astro might be slightly simpler. But as mentioned in the post, I find it surprisingly nice not to have to write strict Markdown. It turns out (at least for me) that formatting with Markdown still feels akin to creating a finished product. It's nice to just be able to type something out without thinking too much and have the LLM "get what you mean".

npilkon The End of Eleventy

Yes, I find LLMs are great for taking loosely-structured text and turning them into formatted blog posts. https://notes.npilk.com/chatgpt-is-my-ssg

npilkon Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found

Wouldn't this mean we're even more cooked? I've seen this page cited a few times as evidence that Mythos is no big deal, but if true then the same big deal is already out there with other models today.

npilkon Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones

To be fair, I think Prime Air is real, but I've only heard about it when they've had drone crashes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGdOpR-Mv-E

AFAIK it's only available in a few very specific places (seemingly for good reason).

npilkon The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here

I like to read Ed (and Gary) as a counterbalance to the AI hype that is pervasive.

But Ed reads more and more like he has been personally wronged by the AI companies and is on a righteous crusade to destroy them. He has plenty of valid criticisms, but he comes across like he has his head in the sand when he can't seem to acknowledge any potential upside at all related to AI. It's starting to feel like he's just interpreting news and events to fit his worldview, which isn't that valuable as a reader (unless I want that worldview affirmed for me).

npilkon The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here

True, good point. I still think the piece goes too far with its claims.

npilkon The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here

I would respect Ed (and Gary Marcus) more if they would concede the occasional point. But everything AI is always a hyperbolic and unqualified disaster. I suppose that's what the audience wants.

"every bit of AI demand ... that exists only exists due to subsidies"

Really? NOBODY would pay whatever the fully-loaded cost is? What about people running local models on their own GPUs? Are they being subsidized too?

npilkon Why Doesn't Anybody Realize We're Going Back to the Moon?

To everyone saying "we've done this before" or "we're not even landing" - we have sent humans to the Moon a total of 9 times. This is the 10th. Nobody has been out there in 50+ years. We've only landed on the Moon 6 times, and this mission is a stepping stone to future manned landings.

Do people really feel like "yeah, we went 9 times, that's enough, no need to ever send anyone again"?

npilkon Why Doesn't Anybody Realize We're Going Back to the Moon?

The 1960s and 70s were extremely turbulent, chaotic times in the US - the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, multiple high-profile assassinations, etc. Apollo 8 launched at the end of 1968, which was a famously challenging year with many disruptive events.

Of course we have many challenges today as well, but I don't think the political environment is unprecedented. One could easily have argued in the 60s that we should be focusing on civil rights, ending the Vietnam War, etc. instead of going to the moon. In fact, much of the messaging around space in the 60s that allowed those missions to happen was based around "war weapons" and the Space Race with the Soviets.

One could argue the Apollo program itself was responsible for creating a lot of the hope you mention.

npilkon What it's like to live in Portland, Oregon

Portland has so much to offer (especially in terms of restaurants and neighborhoods) it's hard to sum up in an article like this! I'm sure that's true of any medium to large city, but I think Portland punches above its population culturally.

npilkon Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

It seems pretty clear there is some sort of bug that only some people are experiencing (or, very cynically, perhaps an A/B test). My usage hasn't seemed to change much in the past few days, but then I see reports where people are hitting limits after one or two prompts. I doubt that could be user error or new limits.

Anthropic has said they are investigating. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7zgj0/investiga...

npilkon Learn Claude Code by doing, not reading

Strongly agree with the sentiment, but I'd say if you're familiar with the terminal you may as well just install it and truly 'learn by doing'!

I could see this being great for true beginners, but for them it might be nice to have even some more basics to start (how do I open the terminal, what is a command, etc).

npilkon Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor

Some discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555636

npilkon Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

Just for competitive reference, note that e.g. BentoPDF has a website as well, not just a GitHub repo: https://www.bentopdf.com/

npilkon "Al has joined your family"

Interesting - thanks for this info. I'll have to look into the certificates. I wonder why it eventually worked though if the issue is expired root certificates?

Realistically the laptop is pretty old even to run Catalina. I don't expect it would handle a more modern OS very well.