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rob

3,176 karma · joined April 30, 2007

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rob··on Tags to make HTML work like you expect
Yeah, I'm really asking for tons of whitespace and everything to breathe sooooo much by asking for the default font size to be a browser default (16px) and updated to match most modern display resolutions in 2025, not 2006 when it was created.

HN is the only site I have to increase the zoom level, and others below are doing the same thing as me. But it must be us with the issues. Obviously PG knew best in 2006 for decades to come.

rob··on Tags to make HTML work like you expect
Agreed. I'm on an Apple Thunderbolt Display (2560x1440) and I'm also scaled up to 150%.

I'm not asking for some major, crazy redesign. 16px is the browser default and most websites aren't using tiny, small font sizes like 12px any longer.

The only reason HN is using it is because `pg` made it that in 2006, at a time when it was normal and made sense.

rob··on Tags to make HTML work like you expect
I wish `dang` would take some time to go through the website and make some usability updates. HN still uses a font-size value that usually renders to 12px by default as well, making it look insanely small on most modern devices, etc.

At quick glance, it looks like they're still using the same CSS that was made public ~13 years ago:

https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/5a3296417d23d1ecc90...

rob··on Egg prices vs. Consumer Price Index since 1980
No it isn't. A dozen can fly by for a single person or a small family. You'll probably need at least two dozen a week. Hell, a lot of recipes ask for 2-3. So now you're looking at almost $50 a month just for eggs (2dozen/week @6.20.)

That might be easy for you when you're working at Microsoft and making $500,000 a year, but that's a significant amount of money for a lot of people in the United States. And eggs aren't some fancy item. They're eggs.

"It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost?"

rob··on Jaguar Land Rover hack cost UK economy an estimated $2.5B
Yup, the new Defender is amazing. I use mine as a daily driver and love it. You can drive 4,000 miles across country in comfort/luxury and then still have advanced off-roading capabilities in mud, sand, rocks, etc. It's the best of both worlds. All with a warranty.

What's funnier is most of the "new" Defender owners I meet love the old ones (including me, I miss driving manual.) It's the old owners that still seem to have an attitude (calling them "Pretenders", etc.)

rob··on Jaguar Land Rover hack cost UK economy an estimated $2.5B
> the new Defender got to be the worst Land Rover ever built

No it isn't. I own a 2022 D90 P300 with 18" wheels, coils, front jump seat, everything. It's been great for ~40,000 miles. I'm constantly on dirt and rocky roads here. It's never let me down.

They're used by tons of people for offroading and modified heavily as well, with companies like Sarek, Lucky8, etc.

The only people who hate on new Defenders are the ones that love the ~25 year old versions with 200,000 miles, tons of rust, a diesel engine that can barely make it to highway speeds, and spends more time in the garage every weekend than "exploring." But hey, they're cooler than us because they work on their cars and have a manual transmission.

rob··on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1
My Alexa is hit or miss at responding to queries right now at 5:30 AM EST. Was wondering why it wasn't answering when I woke up.
rob··on Claude Skills
Subagents, plugins, skills, hooks, mcp servers, output styles, memory, extended thinking... seems like a bunch of stuff you can configure in Claude Code that overlap in a lot of areas. Wish they could figure out a way to simplify things.
rob··on Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend
I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.

I own a Land Rover and their system software also ("Pivi") seems to have tons of little quirks and issues.

Sometimes the cameras won't work unless you restart Pivi. One time, the entire car wouldn't respond to locking (via the app, keyfob, in-car buttons) unless you disconnected the battery and waited ~30 mins. Many people complain that they can't even successfully upgrade between Pivi releases. It'll error out a lot of times and they have to restart the process.

(Would be interested to know the kind of tech they're using if anybody's familiar with it!)

rob··on Leatherman (vagabond)
He's pretty popular here in Connecticut. You can hike to one of his "caves" with a trail near Black Rock State Park.
rob··on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
Any verifiable cases of this "extortion" happening to a nonprofit company yet that isn't in the tech space?
rob··on AI negotiator successfully haggles down the price of a car thousands of dollars
> Notably, the service isn’t free. Customers pay $40 for a month of access without auto-renewal.

This makes it seem like this "AI negotiator" is $40/month, but it looks like it's not included at all for that plan. Seems like it's $399 or $999:

https://caredge.com/plans

https://caredge.com/plans/insights

https://caredge.com/plans/concierge

rob··on API, Claude.ai, and Console services impacted [resolved]
> APIs and Claude.ai are down. Services will be restored as soon as possible.

> This incident affects: claude.ai, console.anthropic.com, and api.anthropic.com.

rob··on Claude Is Down
"Rate exceeded." in plain text on https://claude.ai right now.
rob··on Claude now has access to a server-side container environment
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

The word "container" doesn't even appear in the original post from Anthropic, let alone "server-side container environment."

rob··on How RSS beat Microsoft
I'm sure there's still some people using a Ford Model T to drive around as well.
rob··on Next.js is infuriating
I think too many newer "developers" are relying on AI tools trained on popular frameworks like Next.js to create things, and Vercel's loving this because they're the "go-to" in the end when you need to deploy something based on this stack.

There's no real alternative for these developers because they weren't brought up to understand server/networking fundamentals, how to operate a VPS, etc. Vercel manages to make this even more confusing for them by blurring the line between server and client, "edge" functions, etc, while all behind variable pricing.

rob··on Fake accounts drove the DeepSeek AI hype and distorted markets
"Fake accounts" like OP's (evai) who somehow registered in January 2021 and its only activity is this single post today and some AI generated comment to go along with it? Definitely something suspicious but I'm not sure it's DeepSeek here.
rob··on FFmpeg 8.0
Definitely weird. No new comments from @praveenhm to HN in almost two years and then the first one made is some ChatGPT-generated one.
rob··on PYX: The next step in Python packaging
Is there a big enough commercial market for private Python package registries to support an entire company and its staff? Looks like they're hiring for $250k engineers, starting a $26k/year OSS fund, etc. Expenses seem a bit high if this is their first project unless they plan on being acquired?
rob··on Lidar-based GIS map of New Hampshire stone walls
If anybody is in Connecticut like me, here's a LiDAR map you can use for the state to find your own stone walls here:

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/4c801e35f200493ebff...

("Hillshade 2023" and "Hillshade 2023 SE illumination" are the two I use.)

rob··on Lidar-based GIS map of New Hampshire stone walls
I'm not affiliated with the site I submitted, but some just really love stone walls, especially those of us here in New England. I'm part of a "New English Stone Walls" Facebook group that has ~65,000 members.

To me (I'm in CT) there's something really cool to be in a forest surrounded by trees but see a perfectly made stone wall just there in the "middle of nowhere." I think about how much time and effort it took back in the early ~1800s to clear all that land, move all those rocks across fields without modern machinery, and put so much effort into constructing these walls. Some are over 6 feet wide and many are in incredible shape for being put together ~200 years ago.

There's also the "Stone Wall Initiative" spearheaded by Robert Thorson of the University of Connecticut that also has tons of info:

https://stonewall.uconn.edu/

(He also has a really good "Stone by Stone" book available on Amazon.)

rob··on Most Illinois farmland is not owned by farmers
> Land can’t be financed

Doesn't seem accurate. See:

https://agamerica.com/land-loans/real-estate-loans/

https://www.farmcrediteast.com/en/FINANCING/Land-Loans

rob··on I Used Arch, BTW: macOS, Day 1
Crazy, what kind of set up were you trying to do there? Been using it for probably 10 years and I can't remember the last time I had an issue and I run updates on it automatically every day. Biggest problem I remember is having to chown a directory again or something.
rob··on Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users
I don't think CLI/terminal-based approaches are going to win out in the long run compared to visual IDEs like Cursor but I think Anthropic has something good with Claude Code and I've been loving it lately (after using only Cursor for a while.) Wouldn't be surprised if they end up purchasing Cursor after squeezing them out via pricing and then merging Cursor + Claude Code so you have the best of both worlds under one name.
rob··on You Are in a Box
It's cool if you're on desktop Slack or Messenger or something between friends, but making a conscious choice to go into your phone's settings and turn capitalization off for everything you do is a bit weird and over the top.

Seems to be a trend though now to do it everywhere in public. I've seen the htmx author do that and the guy who wrote the second forked version of opencode.

rob··on Kiro: A new agentic IDE
I think IDE-based tools like Cursor, VS Code, etc, will win out in the long term, especially as the younger generation grows up.

In the short term though, I think CLI-based tools like Claude Code are taking off because hardcore developers see them as the last "vestige" they have in separating themselves from the "noobs." They know there's still a good portion of the public who don't know how to use the terminal, install packages, or even know what Linux is.

rob··on Switching to Claude Code and VSCode Inside Docker
Just have Claude make a version of your script that's shareable for others, no?
rob··on Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web
It doesn't, which is why all these solutions breakdown long-term compared to things like WP for small biz brochure stuff. 5 to 10 years from now when you're no longer talking to your client who has absolutely no technical experience, they're not gonna know that their website code is in some random GitHub repository that needs to be compiled with vite and then you need to magically wait for Netlify/etc to pull in your changes. They'll probably be fuming they have to find a developer that knows how to edit and manage that compared to something like WordPress which is used for the majority of those websites.
rob··on OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio
I don't. I have a MacBook Pro from 2019 with an Intel chip and 16 GB of memory. Pretty sure when I tried the large whisper model it took like 30 minutes to an hour to do something that took hardly any time via Groq. It's been a while though so maybe my times are off.
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