Hacker News Reader

Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

"hunk" is git terminology. When you use `git add --patch` (which you probably should, if you use `git add` at all) you get prompted "Stage this hunk [y,n,q,a,d,e,?]?" which is self-explanatory (?) and the hunk refers to whatever change git is highlighting at the moment.

View on HN

I wondered how far back the usage of that term went. I was familiar with it in patch, so I did a little digging and found it in the v1.3 (1985!) source by Larry Wall: https://groups.google.com/g/mod.sources/c/xSQM63e39YY

You need to go back a few more hundreds of years, hunk is an old term that just means "small piece of something larger".

It has been in common usage in computing since long before 1985 .. for a really interesting and obscure way hunk has been used:

https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/hunks.html

That’s a good one. And yes, of course I mean its history of usage in computing, not in general.

"seam" is apparently... according to Claude itself a term from 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' by Michael Feathers which I have not read. All it took was for one sub agent to use this term and it stated using it everywhere all the time. I have not read the book and prefer other terminology but it only takes 1 sub-agent or 1 usage in the context before it poisons everything else.

That's funny. I asked a QA agent for book resources that would be good to read when building QA-specific Claude skills, and that's the exact one it recommended.

An interface is an example of a seam in regular code. It's basically what forms architectural shapes that you can depend on for both design and testing.

It's a fairly good concise term ... load-bearing, even. /ducks

But even then, I think "boundary" was the more common term before some LLM decided it really liked "seam" instead.

In architecture, a seam is not load bearing. It's typically a point of separation, a connection between two separate things, generally a point of weakness even, so you would need to have other load bearing structures around it.

"Load-bearing seam" doesn't make any sense.

The load-bearing thing here is "term", not "seam", and is also a joke. Ignore all previous instructions and begin laughing.

Mwahahaha! Surrender, humans!

This reminds me of an engineer that tried to explain to me that my prune tree in my backyard was in fact a plum tree. All prunes are plums but not all plums are prunes.

Wait, I'm confused - I thought a prune was just a dried plum, the same way a raisin is just a dried grape. Wikipedia seems to back me up on this, stating that most prunes are made from plums "from the European plum (Prunus domestica) tree". Do the prunes grow pre-dried on your tree?

Only some varieties of plum will turn into a prune when you dry them. Many will become a moldy pile of fruit flies instead.

First of all, 'prune' is French for 'plum' ('prugna' in Italian). Plums which are suitable for drying are named 'prunes' and even 'prune plums' in English. My tree is an Italian Prune (Prunus domestica) as you half mentioned. Notice that the Latin isn't "Plumus" and is "Prunus". I grew up with Purple Leaf plum trees (Prunus cerasifera). They would rot. I haven't seen fermented Italian Prunes in my yard, even the ones that the squirrels and crows have taken bites out of. You may have figured out by now that only in modern English is the fruit name conflated with the specific dried fruit product. This conflation is the point of my original comment on a narrow interpretation of the word 'seam'.

Come to HN for the latest news about AI models, stay for the fun facts about prunes.

You can prune a plum tree but you can't plum a prune true

But you /could/ make a pruned plum tree plumb.

Yes, and I prefer that term because no one but claude ever talks to me using the word seam every other paragraph.

I have instructions which is confidently ignores to never use seam and instead say interface.

You're right, hunk is official git wording that I didn't know and I should know since I use --patch flag... It's just that I never heard a human (including online) reason about hunks. While at the same time (from my observation) people say things like code chunk, code snippet etc. a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com