Hacker News Reader

chetanahujaon We mourn our craft

Oh good lord. Spare us the beatings of the chest and rending of the garments. "crafting code by hand" like some leftover hipsters from 2010s crafting their own fabric using a handloom. It's fucking code. Were there similar gnashing of the teeth and wails of despair when compilers were first introduced?

chetanahujaon Surprising hostility towards LLM based coding in R/programming

Yup. Even if you treat the LLMs as just a question answering, brainstorming, code parsing, doc creating bot, it's already a major quality of life improvement for engineers over whatever we were doing before it existed.

chetanahujaon Surprising hostility towards LLM based coding in R/programming

My experience on r/programming came as a surprise to me. I know that not everyone in the community is sold on LLM based coding, and I was fully prepared for some pushback. But I was not prepared for the outright hostility and vitriol just for recounting my actual experience with LLM coding as a practitioner. I wrote up the post since it needed to be longer than a reddit comment and I was not feeling the need to engage with that level of negativity in the comments anyway.

chetanahujaon Consumer startups that said no to investor money

> If there's one thing all start-ups should conspire to abolish, it's liquidity preferences.

Liquidation preferences are not the norm in the normal seed/A/B rounds etc. right now. At least not in the silicon valley VC ecosystem.

chetanahujaon Apple Is Planning a New Low-Cost MacBook, Pro-Focused Mac Mini

Still running a 2008 vintage aluminum tower at home. True story.

chetanahujaon How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

For users who have reasonably functioning products, yes. For Siri users, looks like not so much.

chetanahujaon How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

> "Is there any proof that actual people use and value Google and Amazon assistant more than Siri?"

This is a common confusion among iPhone users. I suspect the reason is that if all you're used to is Siri (and it's myriad disappointments), it's hard to conceive of the the quantum leaps that is Google Assistant in product polish and usefulness.

First and foremost is the near flawless voice recognition. I, with my India accent even, can just say things to my Android device (and now, my new google home) it just ... gets it. It's spooky.

Then, after it recognizes the question/request correctly, it is very likely to take the correct action with a high enough probability that it's now almost a surprise to hear "Sorry I don't now how to do that yet" when it does happen.

Outside of the active queries, there are things it does automatically that are at the level of what a particularly attentive human assistant might do for you.

It'll check your calendar and remind you that you should start driving for your 4pm appointment because the traffic is unusually heavy on 101 today.

Or that your flight tomorrow morning has been cancelled. It knows about your flight because of the confirmation email in your gmail account.

Remember, you have to take no action for this sort of reminders. Just have to opt in when assistant is setting itself up on your new phone.

There are myriad other such examples. It has saved my bacon numerous times. We're truly living in the future.

chetanahujaon Discovering Issues in HTTP/2 with Chaos Testing

Packet loss is happening at a lower layer (ethernet, wifi, mobile etc.). It's a property of the physical medium, not whether HTTP1.1 or HTTP2 is running at the higher layer.

The point of this blogpost is that design of HTTP/2 (specifically, multiplexing multiple http transfers over a single TCP connection) behaves badly under packetloss conditions.

chetanahujaon A conversation about how public transport really works

> No, it's not bullshit. It is not profitable to have a train route of more than about 5 hours

Most of the discussion in this tread is mostly about mass transit in metro areas.

chetanahujaon Show HN: Gophercises – Coding Exercises for Budding Gophers

I'm getting "Sorry, Because of it's privacy settings, this video cannot be played here" for every video.

chetanahujaon Ask HN: Would you recommend someone to learn Emacs now?

Yes. Emacs has the wonderful property of one time investment in time and learning curve that pays off over years to do all sorts of code and non-code editing.

chetanahujaon Google’s Airpods competitor do real-time language translation

"allow"? As in, you think Apple has been holding back permission of some kind?

chetanahujaon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2017)

PacketZoom | Developer Evangelist | San Mateo, CA | REMOTE | NO RECRUITERS/AGENCIES PLEASE.

PacketZoom

----------

PacketZoom is revolutionizing network connectivity for mobile apps. Our Mobile AMPO (Application Performance Monitoring & Optimization) platform offers an end-to-end solution to analyze, detect and resolve mobile app networking issues in real-time without changing the app code.

Mobile IQ provides insight into mobile app performance issues, while Mobile Expresslane fixes them -- it speeds up mobile apps by up to 3x, rescue up to 90% of connection errors and reduces CDN costs. We're venture funded (from top VC firms) and millions of users are using our tech every day.

Position

--------

As dev evangelist, your job is to inspire, empower and equip mobile developers to build better apps and boost user engagement utilizing PacketZoom’s in-app SDK.

Duties and skillsets:

--------------------

Build and expand relationships in the developer communities. Create engaging written content and present demos/webinars etc. (Video production skills/experience a huge plus.) Enough technical savvy to create sample mobile apps and demos using PacketZoom SDK and engage a highly technical audiences in online and offline forums. Existing presence and credibility in online/offline developer communities a huge plus.

If interested, my contact info is in my profile. CANDIDATES ONLY. NO RECRUITERS/AGENCIES PLEASE.

chetanahujaon China Blocks WhatsApp

Chinese debt is a ticking time bomb. http://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-debt-risk-to-financia...

When (not if) it goes off, it'll not only be a huge shock to the world economy, it'll most likely also result in huge unrest inside China. The only political tool the communist party has known is to suppress dissent. I expect things to get worse in the next few years... not better.

chetanahujaon Introducing Network Service Tiers

You want to see some weirdly long ping times... try pinging Israel to Turky. Compare that to say, Israel to Netherlands.

chetanahujaon Twilio stock plummets as major client Uber distances itself

The answer to that of course is that the underlying network protocols need to be aware of this dilemma. It's wasteful for every developer to try and solve this problem on their own.

The main culprit here is of course TCP's session based view of the world which was invented for a completely different era. An era when "cable got cut" was a catastrophic event that was almost never going to happen. It's a pity that the native app world is still mostly stuck with TCP/HTTP based networking stack where a UDP/mobile-specific-protocol is what's needed.

chetanahujaon Twilio stock plummets as major client Uber distances itself

> Ideally the phone would handle this in a smarter way, e.g., by monitoring the strength of both the wifi and data signals and switching to whichever is likely to have the least packet loss

The tradeoff here of course is battery life. The phone OS doesn't want to switch on a second radio until absolutely necessary for obvious reasons.

chetanahujaon An Eye Tracking Study on CamelCase and under_score Identifier Styles [pdf]

I knew it! I've hated the camelCase style with a passion from the day I first saw it. I'd be very curious to know if there's any developer who didn't grow up on windows actually likes camel case style.

chetanahujaon India Is Winning Its War on Human Waste

> He has a very interesting (and controversial) history

Sure does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_riots

chetanahujaon Uber employees 'spied on ex-partners, politicians and Beyoncé' (2016)

"I'm starting to get very skeptical to be honest. I tried to read that article looking for some hard evidence, one link went to BuzzFeed, where that linked to Forbes. I'm finding it hard to get more information."

(Edit: the fact that you did know about documentcloud link and relegate it's mention to the third paragraph of your comment is not very convincing about your quest for truth)

WTF are you talking about? The first external link in the body of the article is to the sworn testimony of the whistle-blower in question https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3227535-Spangenberg-...

chetanahujaon Why I will not exercise my GitLab stock options

One of the biggest weaknesses of gitlab, that becomes glaring as you add more and more projects, is that a code repository and a project are considered one and the same thing. It's quite common to want two or more separate repositories for an actual development project (e.g. frontend/backend or client/server etc.).

Of course gitlab's problems arise from the fact that their whole reason for existence is being an open-source copy of github. (And github is designed first and foremost as a public facing opensource management tool... which forces a lot of their product design choices).

Does phabricator work on a different paradigm that's more conducive as an internal tool to manage dev projects for a single organization?

chetanahujaon Stanford Professor Loses Political Battle To Simplify Tax Filing Process

Yup. US system of passing laws through congress is now broken to such an extent that the only things that can pass unmolested are esoteric bills that (usually) shift money from the taxpayer to big corporate lobbying group in such a way that the common person can't (or isn't bothered enough) to understand. That's one of the reasons most of a President's power is expressed through executive orders directives to federal agencies selectively enforce or ignore laws passed by congress. That is also why passage of Obamacare will forever be remembered as a huge legislative accomplishment the likes of which will probably not be replicated again in our lifetimes.

chetanahujaon VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor rendering

"3% idle sounds egregious but higher battery usage isn't a problem for most"

Oh God this is why we can't have nice things. How the heck is someone actually justifying this stupid shit here?

chetanahujaon Gitlab 9.0

"Since Gitlab projects are repo-centric"

This seems to be the huge blind spot on gitlab product design. Everything is tied to git repo's while in the real world installs, users want global views of things which go across git-repos. I suspect this comes from starting off as a github clone, which has it's own constraints as a product (and it's public face).

chetanahujaon Gitlab 9.0

The new enhancements seem very promising. We've been using gitlab for our internal use for a while now.

Having said that, every time a new gitlab release comes around, I always looks for updates in one area expectantly but mostly left unsatisfied. And that is, separation of the concept of Project from "one git repo"

E.g., I want to manage a project that ties in issues from various different git repositories. It's pretty common. Almost no actual "project" in a real life business is limited to just one git repo.

I want a system-wide wiki that collects knowledge about the entire operations. The idea that each wiki is tied to a particular git-repo is.. just... wrong.

Heck, even the new search feature across projects somehow doesn't include wiki's. How did that decision get made?

And so on and so forth.

chetanahujaon Spotify Is Using the Toilet to Teach How to Use Internal Code

The first time I saw this was in Google toilets something like 7-8 years ago (before I joined Google later). The series of tutorials there were cutely named things like "learning on the loo" or "pondering on the potty" or some such.

chetanahujaon Uber Driver Tip-Hustling Schemes

Right on. I use Lyft and frequently leave tips when I feel the driver and my ride experience has been great. I also think the tipping experience is much more friendly to both the driver and the passenger (compared to say, a usual taxi ride) and I've rarely, if ever, had an unpleasant experience with Lyft.

I used to rarely use Uber (more outside bay area) though I did have Uber installed on my phone. But I uninstalled Uber a few weeks ago as I was feeling more and more uncomfortable with Uber's corporate behavior and their CEO's personal and political reputation. This was even before the latest spate of allegations of sexual harassment and other bad publicity. I don't think I'll ever install Uber app again... the tipping policy being just one of the many reasons for that decision.

chetanahujaon YC will hold interviews in Vancouver for founders who can’t get US visas

> Tech bosses decided they liked San Francisco, and the rich enclaves like Marin County.

What sort of delusional rant is this? Marin county is now the hotbed of tech startups?

chetanahujaon Google Cloud SQL for Postgres

Could you elaborate why that combination is killer? Is the new billing setup more efficient cost wise? What is the new billing setup?

chetanahujaon Why we are not leaving the cloud

> but on having content that their subscribers want

This is where we disagree. I don't even know what content Amazon or HBO or Hulu has at this point. Netflix has already made me a lifelong customer with their product and user-experience in the past 10 years or so that it'll take an earth-shaking difference in content for me to switch (or add) a second monthly bill for content. Netflix is part of social fabric (at least in the US). All of this was won by relentless focus on an excellent product and user experience... and perhaps only a middling content catalog.