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jonquark

776 karma · joined September 4, 2013

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jonquark··on Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?
Isn't the metric that you've used "bugs per commit ~ per new line of code" going to miss the issue?

All code is technical debt.

If rsync releases used to have 500 lines changed and 5 bugs in and AI-powered rsync releases have 50000 lines and 500 bugs, it's the same bugs/line but much worse experience for the user?

I've not looked into the details of this case and I do use AI assistance coding at work but in my experience, the problem is that it's too easy to write lots of code and therefore hard to review the huge volumes of code and this analysis will ignore that?

edit: actually your table shows there weren't unusually large numbers of commits in this release, so perhaps my initial skepticism shows a bias I have?

jonquark··on Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait
The UK spends a lower fraction of its GDP on health than the US (the US is an outlier because of its system).

The UK's NHS is not why it's not taking part in this mess.

jonquark··on It's OK to compare floating-points for equality
Yes maths is singular, just like physics. We would say in the UK "maths is hard, physics is also hard"
jonquark··on How Israeli actions caused famine in Gaza, visualized
Only Hamas could do that but this article is pointing out that all of Gaza (not just Hamas members) are being starved.
jonquark··on I'm leaving Ruby Central
For those (like me) who didn't understand what MINASWAN means, it stands for Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/MINASWAN
jonquark··on Show HN: Oliphaunt – A native Mastodon client for macOS
It's the only social media I still use.

I don't notice "disjointed communities" I just look at the posts from people I follow without knowing which server they are on. I'm aware you can see a list of posts on your local server but I imagine people on most instances (unless the instance has a strong theme like for people from a particular location) never use it.

jonquark··on Show HN: Clawtype v2.1 – a one-hand chorded USB keyboard and mouse [video]
I'm not a hardware tinkerer - but if there was a production version of this, I would buy it. But I guess I'm a niche market.
jonquark··on Why won't some people pay for news? (2022)
This seems to be a mischaractisation of what she was saying: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/05/08/n...
jonquark··on Ask HN: Is there any software you only made for your own use but nobody else?
I made a Google calendar program for the Inkpad 6color eInk display. Because of the small number of displays I doubt there is anyone else using my code and that's ok.

It's Arduino based and it turns out the iCal format has a lot more complexity than I'd guessed so there are still bugs/incorrectly shows some events but it mostly works for me. I work on it very intermittently over a few years and find it quite cathartic.

It's cool having my code hung on my wall. https://github.com/jonquark/InkyCal

jonquark··on GPT-4o
It might be region specific (I'm in the UK) - but I don't "see" the new model anywhere e.g. if I go to: https://platform.openai.com/playground/chat?models=gpt-4o The model the page uses is set to gpt-3.5-turbo-16k.

I'm confused

jonquark··on TextSnatcher: Copy text from images, for the Linux Desktop
The Wayland leg works fine for me on gnome+wayland.
jonquark··on MQTT vs. Kafka: An IoT Advocate's Perspective
I agree there are cases where Kafka and MQTT are often used together. If you have lots of MQTT clients producing messages fanned-in to a small number of backend apps (or consuming a small number of wide fan out messages) people often combine Kafka as a fat pipe behind MQTT brokers (though there are alternatives, consuming messages from the brokers using e.g. MQTTv5 shared subs)

In more complicated situations (e.g. "outgoing" persistent messages buffered for individual clients (i.e. each client has a "message inbox"), Kafka is less obviously useful (it's an anti-pattern to try and random-seek the messages from Kafka topics as clients connect). In this kind of pattern, the main architecture pattern I see are clients partitioned across (highly available) MQTT brokers. If the messages come from MQTT clients directly to other clients (e.g. instant messaging (Facebook Messenger uses MQTT), having these broker in a cluster sharing a topic tree is very useful.

If the outgoing messages don't get buffered whilst the clients are off-line (e.g. because these are responses to client requests) then you don't need each client to be routed to a "home" broker that buffers the messages - it can connect anywhere.

It all depends on the shape of the message flow you're designing the system to support (but to say MQTT is a toy for small numbers of topics as it seemed to me that you argued up-thread seems misguided).

jonquark··on MQTT vs. Kafka: An IoT Advocate's Perspective
MQTT.org can't answer that as it's a web page for for a protocol. I've worked on platforms that do have a historian feature but it will vary from broker to broker.

(disclosure, I work on Eclipse Amlen and it does not - but people often rig it up to a subscriber that funnels (some/all) messages into databases

jonquark··on MQTT vs. Kafka: An IoT Advocate's Perspective
This comment seems backwards to me. If you're funnelling incoming messages in to hundreds of topics (or less) Kafka is a great "fat pipe" if you need millions (or tens of millions) of topics for IoT devices, MQTT is much more designed for that usecase

Disclosure: I'm biased - I've worked on the MQTT spec and I'm the lead for Eclipse Amlen

jonquark··on Microsoft to lay off 11k employees
FAANG isn't a very good acronym if Microsoft is in it. GAMMAN would would better.
jonquark··on Mozilla Rally
There is an argument that the larger the company, the less human - the more admin and beholdenness to anonymous shareholders after short term profits and therefore it correlates to the type of anti-social behaviour you reference even if it will vary from company to company.
jonquark··on Mysteries the Standard Model can’t explain
Not really in the same way.

The Standard Model is built out of quantum field theories that take as a given our experiment results that matter on quantum scales is unlike the "large scale" matter we see around us.

The problems described in the articles are unexpected results that we see in our experiments compared to the Standard Model, "weird/nonintuitive" aspects of modern particle physics would be a separate article.

jonquark··on Facebook Unceremoniously Kills Off 'Oculus' Brand
GAMMAN
jonquark··on Mosquitto: An open-source MQTT broker
There are lots of brokers and Eclipse Amlen is coming soon: https://www.eclipse.org/amlen/

(disclosure: I work on Amlen)

jonquark··on Sriracha hit revenue of $150M a year with no sales team or ad spend
It seems to be illegal in the EU+UK because it contains E222: citation: https://www.hot-headz.com/huy-fong-sriracha-chilli-sauce

I'm not saying you can't buy it on Amazon and I don't know enough about nutrition to know why E222 was banned.

jonquark··on OpenSSH switches to using gender-neutral language
Have you ever come across the game "Guess Who?"

Do they have grey hair? Yes, they do.

Sounds entirely natural to me.

jonquark··on Cicero used humor to charm audiences–and humiliate opponents
See the section about "Down with skool" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_Latin
jonquark··on Fake news can direct your behavior without you realizing it
"Essentially it was set up as a Canadian entity for people who wanted to work on SCL projects who didn’t want to move to London. That’s how AIQ got started: originally to service SCL and Cambridge Analytica projects,” said Wylie (who was research director for SCL the parent company of CA).

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/24/aggregateiq-...

jonquark··on Samsung now updates Android for longer than Google does
I'd really like some sort of "Best Before" label on electronics with a date that said how long the manufacturer was commiting to security updates.

But there are issues - what exactly constitutes a security update, how frequently and timely are the patches -what if the manufacture goes bankrupt....

jonquark··on K-9 Mail is looking for funding
I've not donated through Liberapay before but this prompted me to donate to k9-mail and in turn after poking around on Liberapay for a bit, I've set up small recurring donations to other OSS that I use (like GIMP).
jonquark··on Signal AppImage for Linux
I don't use the AppImage, but I do use the unofficial Fedora package and it seems to work well. https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/luminoso/Signal-Desk...
jonquark··on No excess deaths in Sweden compared to the last ten years
Deaths are a very lagging indicator. Cases are rising in Sweden, assuming some of the new cases tomorrow eventually sadly die, it probably won't be for a month.

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=gbr&are...

jonquark··on Parler 'free speech' app tops charts in wake of Trump defeat
That isn't what the comment you are replying to said. It said that before you claim that thing X and thing Y are related, take a look at this page that goes through the claims and debunks them.

If the answers on that page are mistaken and it is relevant to a topic on HN then it seems logical (to me) that you could discuss it here (but unfounded political allegations should be off-topic in most HN chats in my opinion).

jonquark··on Shock Result? Rust faster than Python in a single test of file parsing
The file reading isn't the slow part - removing the regular expression and file is read in fractions of a second rather than minutes (as the last python example shows).
jonquark··on Jacques Cousteau’s grandson wants to build the ISS of the sea
quack.
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