Hacker News Reader

hans0l074on Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines

The main post also reminded me of Mr.Toad, a character in a book I read as a child - The Wind in The Willows by Kenneth Grahame. One of the editions had illustrations of Toad similar to Lobels work.

hans0l074on A Selection of Los Alamos Rolodex Business Cards

Came here to see if anyone mentioned Fallout and I'm pleased to see someone else made the reference. I presume it is notes and texts like this that inspired the narrative designers of the Fallout series. So cool!

hans0l074on Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work

IIUC, this is a preview for Claude Max subscribers - I'm not sure we'll find many teachers or students there (unless institutions are offering Max-level enterprise/team subscriptions to such groups). I speculate that most of those who will bother to try this out will be software engineering people. And perhaps they will strengthen this after enough feedback and use cases?

hans0l074on Donating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation

Also IIRC, K8s was perhaps less than 2 years old before it was accepted into the CNCF.

hans0l074on .NET 10

I do not have any benchmarks other than this[1] to refer to, but I work with Quarkus[2] and Java 25 LTS (just recently released) services deployed on AWS EKS and we are very happy with the performance (for mobile game backends)

[1]: https://sharkbench.dev/web [2]: https://quarkus.io/

hans0l074on Chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky has died

A sad day for chess and chess fans around the world. I smiled when I saw this news posted here - Danya would have loved being among the nerds (I always saw him as one). I will never forget the final game, game 14 of WC2024 between Ding and Gukesh commentated by Peter Leko and Daniel. His reaction[1] at 4:18:40, when Ding blundered with Rf2 is priceless. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqA9mvyI0j4

hans0l074on Airbnb is in midlife crisis mode

I can't put a finger on it, but I have never used AirBnB, so I probably do not know what I am missing. I have kids now, and when we move around within the EU, I have always found the hotel experience predictable and reliable (and like many say here, perhaps more expensive, though I don't know by how much). Our daily life at home/base camp is filled with chores - laundry, cooking, cleaning etc. So going and staying at a hotel with good amenities and services is a welcome change. Nice breakfast every day, in-room service, laundry on-demand etc. Of course there is a price tag, though our family has found it quite affordable with a regular EU software paycheck. Also, my experience does not extend for stays beyond a week. Anything longer would demand an apartment, for sure.

hans0l074on Timo Noko – The Professional Hobo (2016)

This reminded me me of the _stillsuit_ from Dune [1]

[1]: https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Stillsuit

hans0l074on Slack was down

In the EU, and both the desktop & mobile services are down (Slack Enterprise)

hans0l074on Kagi raises $670k

How do you pronounce this? Is it a soft <g>? Whenever I see Kagi on HN I smile, because my daughter has a soft toy (a sea horse) that she has named Kagi (she pronounces it kha-gee, with a hard g). Good luck!

hans0l074on In New Paradox, Black Holes Appear to Evade Heat Death

So is it correct to say that Newtonian mechanics is "just" an approximation (based on our observations) for all practical purposes? (EDIT: Spelling)

hans0l074on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Release

Did you get a chance to checkout Horizon: Forbidden West (the sequel to Horizon: Zero Dawn)? I have been gaming for a few decades now, and this is the most impressive technical achievement I have seen in a game. For me, everything else pales in comparison after this experience (The studio develops their own game engine Decima)

hans0l074on The roots of Japan's Indian curry

Interestingly, the Nepali entrepreneurs also run a lot of restaurants here in Finland - along side Indian ones. Though I feel that there are more Nepalese ones. The cuisine is almost indistinguishable from North Indian cuisine, and I have heard from some folks who have visited Nepal, that authentic dishes from Nepal are missing from these restaurants. Though I suspect that might not entirely be true.

hans0l074on Ask HN: How do you test SQL?

On a related note (though it does touch upon testing) mitchellh open sourced Squire[1] recently (today?). Note though, that it's PostgreSQL specific.

[1] https://github.com/mitchellh/squire

hans0l074on Logseq: Privacy-First, Joyful Platform for Knowledge Management

I've started using Slack for this. I send messages to myself. And use the basic formatting to maintain lists, links and such. And various icons (green check mark etc.) to mark something as done, not relevant anymore (strike-through), and just delete things that are no longer useful to me. Of course there are limits on how far back you can go with the free account, but we use it at work as well. So far, it's been really easy - at least for to-do type of things.

hans0l074on Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

Technical manager here. We have a similar process (although for a programming-heavy role) and getting a decent flow of applicants passing through. Some deviations though from your way:

- We combine steps 4 and 6. Our assignment presentation is 90min (which sometimes goes onto 2 hours) and the hiring manager is present in that call.

- Our take home assignment usually takes 4-6 hours to complete for a competent dev, but we let them do it across a week or so. They have a work life, family etc, and we let them balance that against the interview process. It's worked really well for us.

Edit: To add, we feel that a quicker feedback loop and turnaround time helps the candidate and make them aware of that. And we don't wish to compromise on the assignment - we would like to see their output after giving them sufficient space and time to complete it.

hans0l074on Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?

I second this. The Hail Mary Project was a great read and even made it into Barack Obama's list[1]. I am working my way through The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin and so far it's a page turner.

[1]: https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1471168495312420877

hans0l074on The Modern Java Platform – 2021 Edition

But surely if you are starting off you need to install/initialize the wrapper itself, no? From your link,

Generating the Wrapper files requires an installed version of the Gradle runtime on your machine as described in Installation. Thankfully, generating the initial Wrapper files is a one-time process.

hans0l074on The Modern Java Platform – 2021 Edition

When I use developer tooling in other platforms I’m usually disappointed. I shouldn’t need some special native library installed on my system so I can install a dependency. It shouldn’t take me hours to get my local developer toolchain set up.

I found this comment odd - it does take some time to get a modern Java dev env up and running from scratch. For e.g. you have to at least download/install gradle or maven after the JDK. And then the author goes onto to talk about the Testcontainers project for which it appears you need to set up Docker. And so on. Wonder if I missed the meaning there.

hans0l074on Rethinking Sanakirja

On a side note, "sanakirja" is the Finnish word for "dictionary". My casual glance seems to indicate that it is indeed a K-V store backed by B-trees [1] 1: https://pijul.org/2017/03/16/sanakirja/

hans0l074on Fornax a Galaxy Investigated with AstroSat

I initially thought this was a reference to Mass Effect[1], where it is a magazine of dubious reputation.

1: https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Fornax

hans0l074on Cyberpunk 2077: How 2020’s biggest video game launch turned into a shambles

I have been playing on the PS4 Pro (approx. 10 hours) and so far my experience has been good. Yes, there were one or two glitches - a character walking into the elevator through closed doors, one or two disappearing cars - which can break immersion, I get it, but I have seen such things in a lot of other games at launch. I wonder as a developer myself, why aren't these obvious things not fixed by the studios? Is it so that they are just at the bottom of the "todo" pile? There is a LOT in the game just from the point of view of skills, perks, cybermods and whatnot. And the second patch (another ~18GB one) just arrived last night for the EU region. I hope this will be a great game in a few months and attract new players. I did read some articles about "lack of depth" and "wonky AI" and the way these pieces were written did make me feel uncomfortable - I'll see how I feel myself before judging the game too harshly.

hans0l074on Jetbrains founders turn billionaires without VC help

I recently stumbled upon the Jetbrains TV youtube channel specifically this one about Go [1]. I don't have Goland specifically but it's really nice that if you have a licensed Ultimate edition of the IDE, you get all that. I have been using IntelliJ for many years now (on a personal license)but pleasantly surprised how many nice/useful features are a key stroke away. Would recommend a quick watch.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0jvAea46YM

hans0l074on Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

Absolutely. I wasn't criticizing the architecture at all, just musing out loud. I had meetings this week at Big Co (read: cash cow) where external vendors were pushing microservices as manna from heaven for problems that are yet to be discovered. I am sure the technology described in the article is very clever and has strong merits.

hans0l074on Netlify for the frontend, Micro for the backend

When I read about such abstractions and "simplifications" (which usually end up with a 10 box diagram simplified to a 2-3 box diagram), I often hesitate to start building something new, always wondering "Am I doing this in the most "<tech_forum> upvoted" way of implementing such a thing? Some of this tech feels like if you switch on, and stare at your monitor long enough, a "Hello World" API will be deployed on the cloud for you, voilà!

hans0l074on Quines: self-replicating programs (2005)

I watched this video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6avJHaC3C2U - and it's one of the best programming related ones I've seen in recent times. Really well presented as well - and he talks about various Quines - I won't spoil it for anyone.

hans0l074on Learn Go: Hand-crafted Go exercises and examples

Actually, the official Go Blog has a decent "Hello World" example[0] for go modules - I've used this before, had to double check. [0] https://blog.golang.org/using-go-modules

hans0l074on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Been trying to work on a lite "Logging Service" implementation. Something along the lines of Seq[0]. Needs to be extremely simple to use on the cloud and locally. Mainly for practicing more Go which I've come to love. Have barely scratched the surface since I have regular work + a toddler at home + baby arriving in 3 weeks!

[0]https://datalust.co/seq

hans0l074on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Really cool! This reminds of Andy Weir's The Martian (I highly recommend the book - there was a movie as well - especially the chapters that touch on some programming!) and the lead characters clever efforts to use what (bio)tech he has in order to survive on Mars.

hans0l074on Amazon AppFlow

We are trying to provide a service based on CRM (Salesforce) data to our customers in China. Salesforce doesn't exist (yet...) in CN, and wondering if something like this could be useful in moving needed data to AWS China. Then I realized that Redshift is not your typical OLTP db and not suitable for regular querying from an application. Curious to hear HNs thoughts.

EDIT: Someone mentioned Heroku Connect in one of the comments. We do use this to archive certain objects (> 75 million records) and I have thought about replicating this data to AWS China (Postgres). Could be one option but some of our data is real time (e.g. customer orders), not sure what the "freshness" of the data would be.