Hacker News Reader

kuahyeowon Commenting and approving pull requests

Just use blocking/non-blocking.

The issue with nitpicks: different reviewers have different definitions of what a "nit" is.

kuahyeowon The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

This is a delightful reverse turkey graph (each day before Thanksgiving, the turkey has increasing confidence).

kuahyeowon Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out

GitLab employee here. We have completed the move away from Gollum years ago (see https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2381).

It looks like that doc https://docs.gitlab.com/development/wikis/ was outdated - since fixed to no longer mention Gollum.

kuahyeowon Lie groups are crucial to some of the most fundamental theories in physics

If anyone is interested in this - checkout Richard Behiel's video on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sj_GSBaUE1o

It is fantastically long, but still fascinating !

kuahyeowon How good engineers write bad code at big companies

I think you are ascribing too much into this. If he does not believe anything then there will be nothing to write about. It looks like he does not believe in _your_ ideals - that does not make it nihilism though.

kuahyeowon Human coders are still better than LLMs

Compiler is the more apt analogy to a mechanical loom.

An LLM is more like outsourcing to a consultancy. Results may vary.

kuahyeowon The unreasonable effectiveness of an LLM agent loop with tool use

What protection do people use when enabling an LLM to run `bash` on your machine ? Do you run it in a Docker container / LXC boundary ? `chroot` ?

kuahyeowon Raising Kids to Have an Analog Childhood in a Digital World

I think you need to read the OP again. Not just the pictures at the end.

kuahyeowon Raising Kids to Have an Analog Childhood in a Digital World

OP does not ban digital screens despite the title. They even play video games !

It's more the en-shittification of the Internet, and other media.

kuahyeowon Why the weak nuclear force is short range

I will go one deeper. Are fields (quantum fields) even real, or just a model ?

kuahyeowon What it's like working for American companies as an Australian

I work from New Zealand, for a quite geographically distributed team. For our team, the solution is partly:

    1. "Write everything down" culture.
    2. Rotate the regular meetings. For example, a meeting around 1000 UTC for Europe / Asia folks on Monday. Repeat the same meeting at 2000 UTC for US / Asia folks.
    3. Write good notes for each meeting, so people who could not attend can review asynchronously.

2x meetings may not work for a truly distributed team where you have people all over the world. In which you will need to have 3x rotating meetings which becomes a bit harder to manage.

DST changes do happen every six months, or so. We mostly roll with it, and adjust the meeting times as necessary.

kuahyeowon Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source

So AGI will invent fusion, but we need fusion for AGI. Chicken-egg :)

kuahyeowon The state of merging technology

Didn't Git have a new default merge strategy, `ort` https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/RelNote... ?

kuahyeowon Adulthood Is a Mirage

Even with kids, I simply do not care about any judgement.

99% of the time, no one on the proverbial soccer field honestly cares about your family setup - they are more worried about what's for dinner.

kuahyeowon Adulthood Is a Mirage

Absolutely this, knowing what's _important_ at the end of the day. Must haves, nice to haves, not needed. We all only have limited lifespans.

kuahyeowon Software disenchantment

> Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same.

Cars cost around X * $10,000 each. Houses cost Y * $100,000 each. The author is ignoring the economics of producing real world goods.

kuahyeowon Tech workers remain some of the highest paid in New Zealand

Train new people ! That is the only long term sustainable option.

kuahyeowon Maybe you should store passwords in plaintext

Maybe there's engineers / developers working like this. Most likely it's a reflection of company culture.

But there are real-world repercussions of just plain bad working practices

* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-27/whats-happening-with-...

It's not as bad as a bridge falling down, but this is why there's professional bodies and code of ethics in certain professions.

kuahyeowon Social media is a cause, not a correlate, of mental illness in teen girls

Haha, no - way to stereotype. If you follow that it just leads to non-independent children.

kuahyeowon Twitter suspends pg's account [fixed]

Capricious enforcement sucks

See also Andor episode 8 (spoilers so I won't post exact details) ;)

kuahyeowon Ask HN: Parents: Best screen-time limiting software?

It is most likely counter-productive, if said software is imposed upon. Best case scenario, you raise a hacker who works around it.

If necessary, as others have alluded to, a global timer is best.

kuahyeowon We automatically fixed thousands of Ruby 2.7 deprecation warnings

Article author here, and also GitLab team member.

If you peek into the source code, I was actually inspired by the ruby-warning gem, and have directly credited it (https://gitlab.com/search?group_id=9970&project_id=278964&re...) :)

Also in Ruby 2.7.2, these warnings that were introduced in 2.7.0 were suppressed by default after feedback from the community.

One thing to note is that because these warnings are runtime, you really need a very comprehensive test suite to find them all. Even then logging such warnings when running in production is probably a good idea.

Agree the Ruby 2.7 => 3.0 change has been handled quite well by the core Ruby team. The kwargs warning is one part of the larger effort to get GitLab onto Ruby 3.0. You can follow along at https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5149.

kuahyeowon Is the madness ever going to end?

> It's so bad that I haven't managed to find a single industry with the same massive amount of stupidity, with the exception of perhaps the fashion industry

Perhaps a bit too much hyperbole, but lots of industries have these cycles of increasing complexity. The necessity of such complexity is in the eye of the beholder.

  - Agriculture. Herbicide -> GM plants to resist herbicides
  - Automobiles. Manual -> Auto
  - Finance. HFT anyone ?
  - Construction.
  - Medicine.
  - Accounting. GAAP
  - and finally... Quantum Physics !

kuahyeowon Tell HN: Don't root for WFH, it might destroy well-paying jobs

Also, OP, the world is bigger than just the American continent :)

kuahyeowon The Lockdowns Weren’t Worth It

> Yet not a single government has published a cost-benefit analysis to justify lockdown policies

Enjoy, here's a stackful of documents showing https://covid19.govt.nz/updates-and-resources/legislation-an... how a robust health response works.

kuahyeowon Why No HTTPS?

https://whynohttps.com/country/nz

Ouch number 5 in NZ is a Credit card payment gateway

kuahyeowon On being an Engineering Manager

Agree. At some point you have to give away your Legos

kuahyeowon Things I have learnt as the software engineering lead of a multinational

Have you read Peopleware ? There's some good gems there

kuahyeowon Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

Yes, it does. Tried it out with our Selenium based test suite. Just have to pass in the `--headless` switch to Chrome

kuahyeowon Better Git configuration

The workflow is entirely up to you and your collaborators. "commit" does not have be literally a commitment. Try branching on your branches so that you have the freedom to experiment.