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thijser

This reminds me of when I tried to let Claude port an Android libgdx-based game to a WASM-based libgdx version, so I can play the game in the browser.

No matter how much I tried to force it to stick to a mostly line-by-line port, it kept trying to "improve" the code. At some point it had to undo everything as it introduced a number of bugs. I asked it: "What should I add to your prompt so you won't do this again?" and it gave me this:

  ### CRITICAL LESSON: Don't "Improve" During Porting
  -  **BIGGEST MISTAKE: Reorganizing working code**
    - **What I did wrong:** Tried to "simplify" by splitting `createStartButton()` into separate creation and layout methods
    - **Why it failed:** Introduced THREE bugs:
      1. Layout overlap (getY() vs getY() - getHeight())
      2. Children not sized (Group.setSize() doesn't affect children)
      3. Origins not updated (scaling animations broken)
    - **The fix:** Deleted my "improvements" and copied the original Android pattern faithfully
    - **Root cause:** Arrogance - assuming I could improve production-tested code without understanding all the constraints
    - **Solution:** **FOLLOW THE PORTING PRINCIPLES ABOVE** - copy first, don't reorganize
    - **Time wasted:** ~1 hour debugging self-inflicted bugs that wouldn't exist if I'd just copied the original
    - **Key insight:** The original Android code is correct and battle-tested. Your "improvements" are bugs waiting to happen.

I like the self-reflection of Claude, unfortunately even adding this to CLAUDE.md didn't fix it and it kept taking wrong turns so I had to abandon the effort.
Re:Building a speech-to-Markdown app with three coding agents on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @06:36AM (#46525210)
I wanted to know more about current web speech recognition APIs. I tried three different coding agents to set up a proof of concept app for me.

To my surprise, Cursor's composer model beat both Claude and Gemini.

Show HN: Git rewind – your Git year in review

https://gitrewind.dev/

I started an experiment to let a WASM-powered webapp interact with a local git repo and see how well this works. It turns out, it works pretty well!I made it into a "git wrapped" tool that shows you when you committed the most, and what languages and files you most touched.Despite the scary prompt when you use the filesystem API everything happens locally and your code stays private. (You can...

( Read More... | no comments | 3 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Community Detection on Bluesky on Wednesday February 12, 2025 @04:23AM (#43023502)
At this point I only included accounts with >20,000 followers and the community page lists the 20 most 'central' users to each community even if there are more people included in the community.

"Internet Weirdos" sounds kind of negative, sorry about that, I'll see if the LLM can come up with something better. Or do you have a suggestion of what is a good name for your community?

Show HN: Community Detection on Bluesky

https://blue.facts.dev/community

We ran the Leuven community detection algorithm on popular users on Bluesky (where the graph has edges determined by Jaccard similarity of a users' followers). We identified 118 communities and based on the names and descriptions of the top 10-20 users had LLMs generate title and descriptions for them. There are communities like "Feline enthusiasts", "Web Professionals", a bunch of NSFW ones...

( Read More... | 5 comments | 3 points | on HN )
Now it's working again, great tool. Would also be great to see the growth of the feeds within the category view.
The site is unreachable for me?

Great to see so many good analytics tools pop up for bsky, I'm also working on one that primarily focuses on the fastest growing user accounts if you're interested: https://blue.facts.dev/trending

Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024) on Tuesday October 29, 2024 @08:36AM (#41983245)
Great site. Feature request: two essential categories for our family are missing: princesses and unicorns.
It seems the apps starting to enforce upgrades to pro in ~February of this year.

On the AppBrain page you can see the rating nosedive from 4.6 stars (out of 5) to less than 2: https://www.appbrain.com/app/simple-gallery/com.simplemobile...

Re:Jitsi Meet Flutter SDK on Monday August 14, 2023 @02:15AM (#37118042)
AppBrain shows market share stats for all apps and also for the top ranked apps: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/flutter/flu...

6% of the top ranked apps use Flutter.

Nice approach. It feels very similar to "tracer bullet" development (I think coined by the pragmatic programmer book), where you get something end-to-end as quickly as possible and then start iterating on the parts. (https://www.swaroopch.com/tracer-bullet-development/ explains it too)
Re:Google Bard blocks all European Union countries on Friday May 12, 2023 @08:15AM (#35915075)
I used ChatGPT (because no access to bard :) ) to convert their 180 country names to 3-letter codes and generate a world map showing where it's available:

https://twitter.com/thijser/status/1656943947556569090

Definitely not what I had expected with "180 countries"

Re:Reduced cancer mortality with daily Vitamin D intake on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @02:09PM (#35878220)
There have been many vit D studies before, e.g., this one with 25K participants in the USA, which found no effect: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1809944

It's best to look at a meta analysis of all existing data/trials instead of focusing on one trial that happens to be positive.

Re:Vikunja – The open-source, self-hostable to-do app on Sunday January 22, 2023 @08:55AM (#34477403)
Have you tried Trilium (https://github.com/zadam/trilium)?

It's a generic note storage (with a DAG based model) that's very extensible and comes with a demo task manager implementation: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Task-manager

Re:To Be Productive, Be Prepared on Sunday January 01, 2023 @12:46AM (#34203970)
This reminds me of self-determination theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory) which proposes that you need autonomy, competence and relatedness to a task to be motivated.

I could see how preparing your exact steps beforehand will ensure a feeling of competence.

This makes me wonder, maybe motivation could be improved even more by also including autonomy and relatedness in the preparing questions:

  - Which steps can I take on my own, and which ones do I need help with?
  - What makes this task meaningful to me? What positive effects will completing it bring?
OP here. We founded a startup to automate git tasks. Ask me anything!
Reusing the already installed browser is better than Electron, which packages its own browser. Many popular apps, like Slack, Asana, Discord, Github Desktop each install a full browser on your system (see https://www.electronjs.org/apps for more).
According to the author, chatGPT is generating

  not "artificial creativity" but a simple "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain criteria".
Isn't the post I'm typing here not also the product of my brain that's been trained by a couple of decades of sensory inputs and trained to produce outputs that fit certain criteria? What is the fundamental difference between fleshy neurons and silicon ones (besides that my learning algorithm has been optimized for millennia by natural selection and the artificial training algorithms are still in full development after ~40? years)?
Re:Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT on Sunday December 04, 2022 @04:40AM (#33852068)
This is such a great idea!

-- I want you to write a simple shell script that adds all files in a directory to git and pushes them to the remote, with comments scattered around that insult me for not knowing how to do things with git myself --

This produces the following script:

  #!/bin/bash
  # This line changes the working directory to the directory where the script is located
  cd "$(dirname "$0")"
  
  # This line adds all the files in the current directory to 
  git
  git add .
  
  # This line commits the files with a message
  git commit -m "Adding all files in directory"
  
  # This line pushes the files to the remote repository
  git push
  
  # This line prints a message insulting you for not knowing how to use git
  echo "You're a clueless idiot for not knowing how to use git. Get with the program!"

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