HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

amethyst

5,175 karma · joined July 9, 2008

https://amethyst.cat

amethyst at n7.gg

submissionscomments
amethyst··on Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub
We were benefiting from stacked pull requests in Phabricator for a decade before "AI" was a thing. Having well scoped commits that can be individually actioned by distinct sets of reviewers has always been extremely useful.
amethyst··on Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
We did these sorts of exercises in my high school social studies class, in Ohio, back in 2002ish. I fear it may have been instructive to some of my classmates rather than warning them of the inherent evils.
amethyst··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)

  Location: California
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: no
  Technologies: Python, Rust, SQL, fullstack
  Résumé/CV: https://amethyst.cat/resume
  Email: amethyst@n7.gg
Senior engineer with 13 years in FAANG and plenty of experience working on core Python developer tooling, build infrastructure, and backend services. Most recently at Astral working on Ruff. Looking to bring my broad expertise to any company with a human-focused mission that won't require me to use AI agents to get my work done.
amethyst··on FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages
3) recipient stores decrypted content in plain text and backs that up in well-known cloud storage systems
amethyst··on Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation
Is it really holding them "accountable" when the settlements are for laughably small amounts, like <1% of a single day's profit?
amethyst··on We installed a single turnstile to feel secure
If it's anything like Facebook, the side entrances (which always had guards sitting by them anyways) were all converted to alarmed fire exits. So the fire marshal would still be happy, but it was far less convenient for employees.
amethyst··on Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
It works pretty well for Apple
amethyst··on Announcing the Beta release of ty
tools like dataclasses and pydantic would like to have a word...
amethyst··on Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
Google Fiber isn't rolled out to most of the bay area. Monkeybrains is wireless with speeds significantly slower than what Comcast offers me. I've checked just about every wired ISP possible, and Comcast is the only option that services my neighborhood.

And FWIW, I own my house in the east bay — I am the landlady ;)

amethyst··on Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
*parts of the Bay Area. I'd say the majority of areas are still monopolized by Comcast, including my neighborhood of course.
amethyst··on Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
In markets where Comcast has actual real competition, they "include" the unlimited data (aka no cap) with no extra charge when you sign up for their gigabit plans.
amethyst··on Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price
And yet it's the default when formatting a device on macOS.
amethyst··on Sapling: Source control that's user-friendly and scalable (2022)
And yet, as someone working on core language infra, we apply exactly that sort of ideal when making changes. If a diff doesn't break any tests, then it's "safe" to land, and if something does indeed break afterwards, then it's the broken team's responsibility to fix forward or otherwise provide proof that it's a big enough problem to roll back. If we end up in SEV review for a change, and there were no broken tests on the diff, then there are going to be some hard questions for the team that didn't write tests.

Ie, tests aren't mandatory, but if you aren't writing tests, it's your responsibility when someone else's change breaks your project.

amethyst··on Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
That's the one I had. I got it from my friend in sixth grade, and who knows where he got it from!
amethyst··on Ball: A ball that lives in your dock
I still miss my desktop sheep every once in a while: https://github.com/Adrianotiger/desktopPet?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Edit: the best part was running it a couple dozen times to get an entire flock walking, falling, and rolling all over your desktop, and watching everything grind to halt under CPU strain!

amethyst··on Show HN: Shpool, a Lightweight Tmux Alternative
You might prefer Eternal Terminal as a TCP mosh alternative:

https://eternalterminal.dev/

amethyst··on Ford Mustang Mach-E using BlueCruise at time of crash: NTSB
My 2017 Golf R would intentionally turn off the dashboard backlights at night if the lights weren't on, providing me excellent feedback that they weren't on. Either head lights should always be on auto by default, or more cars need proper feedback to the driver when they aren't.
amethyst··on FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried Should Serve 40 to 50 Years in Prison, Prosecutors Say
Justice runs on a log scale, and the base is left for individual jurisdictions or judges to decide.
amethyst··on Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate
Or it's a simulation and someone keeps pushing changes to production.
amethyst··on gh-116167: Allow disabling the GIL
> Python makes it incredibly tough.

I disagree, Python makes it incredibly easy to work with threads in many different ways. It just doesn't make threads faster.

amethyst··on Don't fuck with paste
I wish I could selectively disable only the "paste" events, because it's extremely useful to have "click to copy this value" type of buttons in our various work tools, and I miss the ability to do that every time I try turning off clipboard events to deal with bad actors.
amethyst··on Why it's so challenging to land upright on the moon
Imagine being on STS-1, piloting a shuttle that had literally never been to space before in any form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-1

amethyst··on US achieves first moon landing in half century with private spacecraft
Grumman wasn’t operating their own Mission Control — NASA did. But NASA isn’t operating this mission, similar to how they don’t operate SpaceX missions even if they are funding them.
amethyst··on Show HN: Driftmania – an open source PICO-8 racing game
Mixed with R.C. Pro-Am, one of my favorite NES titles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.C._Pro-Am
amethyst··on It Is Somebody's Moral Imperative to Leak "Coyote vs. Acme" to the World
It almost always has to do with the details of EBITDA [1], in this case depreciations/writeoffs and amortized costs, especially if/when a bunch of funding may have been subsidized by governments along with healthy tax breaks [2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnings_before_interest,_taxe...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_production_incentives_in...

amethyst··on Ugrep – a more powerful, fast, user-friendly, compatible grep
You might appreciate setting `PAGER=cat` in your environment. ;)

Git obeys that value, and I would hope that most other UNIXy terminal apps do too.

amethyst··on History-making SpaceX booster mostly destroyed in post-flight topple
> created: 14 days ago
amethyst··on TSA introducing self-service screening technology in Las Vegas
How else would airlines get little kids wide eyed at the vast array of lights and buttons and give them a branded pin and hat to win their hearts at an early age?
amethyst··on 23andMe updates their TOS to force binding arbitration
Part of the initial terms of service that you agree to is that the terms can be changed by the company at any time as long as they give you X days of notice.
amethyst··on Apple pulls plug on Goldman credit-card partnership
Pretty sure that "insurance" only covers their money, not yours.
Page 1 of 3Next →