karparov

Discussing is obviously fine.

But sometimes some innocent blog posts get criticised as if they claimed that they solved world hunger. They don't. They are often just some random thought in a rarely-read blog. Nobody intended to go convince a gang of seasoned hackers that they have undisputable wisdom.

It takes more than a few minutes, yes. But this one-time investment will prevent the next 10 migration-related bugs that he'll otherwise blog about.

Grab some representative data from production and keep feeding that into your migration tests. Keep updating those. Worth each minute if you care about quality.

Pre-populate the db.

Tbf, it's not their fault it made it to the HN front page.

Are we going to criticise every little innocent blog post just because somebody liked it, submitted it to HN and it got enough upvotes?

> This wasn’t caught by the existing test suite (even though it runs almost 200 end-to-end tests), because it always starts from an empty database, applies all migrations and only then runs the test code.

Isn't that where the test coverage has a hole?

I somehow expected the blog post to extend testing for this. A pre-populated database which is then migrated. That seems to catch a wider class of issues than parsing sql and shielding against just checking for non-null without default.

Twice a year? That's only recommended by dentists in north america because most insurances cover it because of lobby pressure. Every 1-2 years fully suffices, depending on your risk profile (smoker, genetics, ...). That's what countries where the insurrance doesn't have skin in the game recommend.

And the average european has much better tooth health than the average u.s. citizen, in my experience.

Or just not consume any water.

As a random US citizen, chances are high though that you voted Trump and are ok with all this nonsense. So, should be ok?

As a European who has lived in both countries I can only laugh at this. From our perspective, US and Canada are 99% identical, culturally.

It's also restricting the freedom of communities if you ban them from adding fluoride to their water if they like to.

This ban is anti-freedom. (Just like forcing them could be argued to be, even though that's what you argued against.)

So, this ban is arguably reducing freedoms on multiple levels.

"Receive messages on Signal via a simple API. Perfect for notifications and alerts." is not "how it works" but "how you use it".

This is "hacker news". A hacker is typically interested in how something works (under the hood).

If a hacker asks "how does this mobile phone work?" then they are not looking for "well here you press a button and then here you speak" but something about radio waves and cell towers and mobile operating systems.

> > Who is behind this

> SignalBot − built by gwillem © 2025

When I looked, this information wasn't there. Only the "buy me a coffee" link. Now it is, thanks.

"... seeking the truth ..."

Hahaha, ha ha, ha...

Maybe more accurate to say "spreading my truth".

You built this? Would you like to comment what your future plans are?

Your self-description is "entrepreneur love for automation". Is it fair to assume that if this takes off then you are planning to introduce paid plans (perhaps with some revenue sharing with the signal folks to lift rate limits for you)?

Who is behind this and how does it work?

Why is this information not present on the front page?

And why does somebody who thinks people would start using and relying on it not immediately understand that that's important information?

> Damn, local LLM just made it up.

> I just searched for the quote and my comment shows up as top result

Welcome to the future. Isn:t it lovely?

And shame on you (as in: HN crowd) to have contributed to it so massively. You should have known better.

That code-gen would be fantastic. I have commercial applications for this, so I'll keep an eye on your space.

> and we don't know how it does it

We know quite well how it does it. It's applying extrapolation to its lossily compressed representation. It's not magic and especially the HN crowd of technical profficient folks should stop treating it as such.

It's the exact opposite of math.

Math postulates a bunch of axioms and then studies what follows from them.

Natural science observes the world and tries to retroactively discover what laws could describe what we're seeing.

In math, the laws come first, the behavior follows from the laws. The laws are the ground truth.

In science, nature is the ground truth. The laws have to follow nature and are adjusted upon a mismatch.

(If there is a mismatch in math then you've made a mistake.)

It's been there in programming from essentially the first day too. People skip the theory and just get hacking.

Otherwise we'd all be writing Haskell now. Or rather we'd not be writing anything since a real compiler would still have been to hacky and not theoretically correct.

I'm writing this with both a deep admiration as well as practical repulsion of C.S. theory.

In my experience, even if people knew, they just don't care.

Most people I talk to about this, tech and non-tech folk have an attitude with a.mix of "you can't escape this anyway, so might as well embrace it" and "misuse scenarios you are describing are pretty far-fetched".

> That’s what the type system is for: a means of grouping similar bits of information into an easy-to-use whole.

While types can be used for that, they are a much broader concept.

I would say the general purpose of types is to tell apples from oranges.

Prominent definitely.

But researcher? Does he actually research anything? He just claims lots of things. He is half-way to being a fiction author, just that he would never acknowledge that.

That all may be the case. But these two arguments are working against each other.

One is to work on a super low spec machine because things were really expensive and the tech scrap in Mexico at the time just didn't have anything better. Fine, believable.

The other is that CD-ROM drives were available much earlier than the general public believes, just that they were really expensive. Fine, also believable.

But it's much harder to believe that both are true for the same person at the same time and place. Either they couldn't afford the CR-ROM drive or they could afford more RAM. Moving forward on the time axis strengthens one argument (CD-ROM drive availability since those got cheaper over time) at the expense of weakening the other.

Sure. Not common, but possible. Still 8x as much as what I responded to, and thereby even as an uncommon case an order of magnitude more. Further contributing to my point.

When somebody questions a description that by the face of it violates general sanity checks then you (and others reading along) can often contribute more to the discussion by providing the context in which it makes sense, rather than berating the commenter for being critical and not just buying into any claim posted on the internet.

CD-ROMs and only 128k of RAM? Sorry, that doesn't pass the smell test. Once CD-ROMs were available, 2-digit megabytes of RAM were standard (and affordable) for home PCs.

Excellent point. Why would a move a certain crowd likes be out of principle and when the tide turned and a move in the opposite direction happens suddenly be just opportunism? The more realistic/neutral interpretation is that it's all just opportunism in either direction.

Zuck is probably the best example.

Yes. And your point being ...?

Depends on the company. I've seen the opposite case were such a person was let go, much to everybody's relief. Some people had to clean up his mess, which was genius in the sense that it worked flawlessly, but nobody else could maintain it, so he had locked in a minimal bus factor. Which makes such a move harder to execute, but the earlier the better.

It's not just some govt. form. It's literally about using it as a reason to ban the world's largest news agency from govt. press briefings.