Hacker News Reader

There’s a lot of folks doing their own thing over at https://indieweb.org/ if you want to dig in further.

nertzyon Maybe we shouldn't be reviewing all this code

As someone who pair programmed 8 hours a day for 10+ years, it’s important to note that there is an ebb and flow. Sometimes we were collaborating fully. Sometimes one of us got up to make coffee and looked at Instagram on their phone for 20 minutes while the other tried to get tests to pass. Then we reunited and caught each other up. It’s easy to dwell on the intense part of pairing, but it’s just as important to purposefully acknowledge your humanity and expect to take real actual breaks and go sit in a comfy chair and zone out for a short while or go to a doctor appointment or chat up another person at the water cooler for a bit.

8 hours a day pairing means that pairing is the default, but it’s not the only thing that ever happens.

also: 8 hours/day pairing meant 16 hours/day not working at all in my case. Really really really not working. Not checking Slack. Not trying out some crazy idea. Not working at all.

nertzyon Mark Zuckerberg directed Meta to create a prediction markets app

I just directed my cats to make a cryptocurrency.

nertzyon How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?

TLDR implies you didn’t read - therefore you don’t know if it’s slop.

But seriously it does read well like normal thoughtful human writing, so I am on the side of it not being “AI slop” while also noting that you didn’t claim it was.

nertzyon Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed

The editor treats edits from Claude Code as a first class citizen. You can easily review, approve, rollback, etc. Claude's changes in a curated experience that is much faster than digging around in diffs or needing to approve each edit as it is proposed.

https://zed.dev/agentic

nertzyon What went wrong for Yahoo

I am still a Yahoo! pinger as well.

  ~  ping yahoo.com
  PING yahoo.com (74.6.231.20): 56 data bytes
  64 bytes from 74.6.231.20: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=42.366 ms
  ^C
  --- yahoo.com ping statistics ---
  1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
  round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 42.366/42.366/42.366/0.000 ms

nertzyon Analyzing New Unique Identifier Formats (UUIDv6, UUIDv7, and UUIDv8)

Isn’t it because you can generate the same content two different times and hash it and come to the same ETag value?

Using UUID here wouldn’t help here because you don’t want different identifiers for the same content. Time-based UUID versions would negate the point of ETag, and otherwise if you use UUIDv8 and simply put a hash value in there, all you’re doing is reducing the bit depth of the hash and changing its formatting, for limited benefit.

nertzyon My spiciest take on tech hiring

This is the only correct answer. I interviewed dozens of people this way over more than a decade. Hiring was never difficult to get right.

Bonus: we self-selected for people who don’t like to pair. We paired 100% of the time.

nertzyon Bug Thread

And another to experts-exchange.com of course.

nertzyon Bug Thread

My favorite was when I was in college. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to get my WiFi card for my school-issued laptop working in Linux. Someone else posted a fix (with a full explanation of what to do!) and I followed it and it worked!

Then I look at the username and it’s my classmate from down the hall in the same dorm.

And I’m pretty sure I actually did end up in a beach house with them at some point.

nertzyon Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

It’s pretty funny that anyone would complain about a Linux distribution being named after a developer’s given name.

I mean, it’s Linux.

nertzyon Proctorio used DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets

Maybe find a law office willing to take on the case for the chance at a cut of the penalty?

nertzyon Tell HN: Google drops blogspot.in, breaking hundreds of thousands of permalinks

I read it as that blogspot.in was registered via Mark Monitor and that MM made a big mistake here.

nertzyon Most book clubs are doing it wrong (2017)

I used to work on a software development team with James Somers and I can attest that he is both a great writer and able to handle criticism, valid or otherwise. I think he would appreciate the debates he is generating.

nertzyon Use links not keys to represent relationships in APIs

Yes, this is why developers should use URI-building libraries instead of direct string manipulation to modify URIs.

If I visit an HTML page with a link to “.evil.com/people/123” and click on it, the user agent won’t append “.evil.com” to the hostname. You’d instead get something like “https://api.hotstartup.com/.evil.com/people/123” which would be safe (if not broken).

nertzyon How I Almost Destroyed a £50M War Plane and the Normalisation of Deviance (2016)

> "The lingering uncertainty in the social control of risky technology is how to control the institutional forces that generate competition and scarcity and the powerful leaders who, in response, establish goals and allocate resources, using and abusing high-risk technical systems".

Seems to me that the relationship between Boeing and its various 737 MAX customers could be seen in a very similar light. Abusing high-risk technical systems as a tool to extract resources to cover for artificial scarcity in budgets or market expectations.

nertzyon Private Key Extraction from Qualcomm Hardware-Backed Keystores

Here’s what could have happened:

March 20: Confirmation of receipt of issue, boilerplate response detailing expected next steps

And as far as we know, this might have actually happened! Maybe it wasn’t deemed interesting enough to include on that timeline.

nertzyon KABOOM in 180 lines of bare C++

I was hoping that this was a clone of the Atari game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaboom!_(video_game)

nertzyon Show HN: Generate Google Slides from Markdown

I use MacDown[1], a macOS open source visual Markdown editor. You can select from several styles, toggle features such as GitHub-flavored on and off, and then save as PDF. I'm not sure about its scriptability from the command line.

[1] http://macdown.uranusjr.com

nertzyon Tetris Reimagined For A TouchScreen (drag pieces with your fingers)

Reminds me a bit of Topple by ngmoco

http://topple.ngmoco.com http://topple2.ngmoco.com

Although yours has more of a puzzle feel to it.

nertzyon Excuse Me, But Where Did Google's Organic Search Results Go?

Aren't the map results organic?

Just because they're displayed in a different form doesn't make them any less organic.

nertzyon A Visit to Olin College: A Design-Oriented Future of American Engineering

Great to see Olin getting some attention.

I was one of the 30 student Partners they talk about and I can't even begin to enumerate how many wonderful experiences I've had. After graduating, transitioning to work for a small software startup was quite natural.

Also, it is interesting to note that several Y Combinator teams have been made up of Olin students. (Flagr and Thinkature come to mind)

nertzyon Astalavista.com hacked, including details

Neuter nouns of the second declension don't generally have plurals that end in -i, but rather in -a, so "vira" would be equally possible.

It's also important to note that scholars don't actually know the proper plural of virus because they haven't really found one in extant literature.

Wikipedia has a longer discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus#Virus

nertzyon End the University as We Know It

Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass. (alma mater of a handful of YC team members) has taken several of these ideas to heart.

http://www.olin.edu

No tenure, collaboration with nearby institutions to share courses, encouragement for all community members to contribute to developing and changing all aspects of the college at any time, and no separated academic departments. The list goes on and on.

It's a great place for entrepreneurially-minded students to find an atmosphere that allows them to build up their skills without having to settle for university-level bureaucracy.

nertzyon Propose HN: Boycott submissions with inaccurate titles to eradicate linkbait

If it isn't, don't read the article ... then state what the article is actually about.

At the very least I hope that you would read the article before deciding what it's actually about.

nertzyon The Little Book of Semaphores

I had the pleasure of taking a course on synchronization with Prof. Allen Downey at Olin College. He made the topic very understandable, and even added student problem examples to this text! I wrote the "Faneuil Hall problem".

Prof. Downey has a great knack for making complex CS topics seem very simple.

nertzyon Burning out on Capistrano (Jamis Buck)

"I recently had an e-mail from a Windows developer in the Ruby community who pointed out how opaque many Ruby projects are regarding Windows."

I guess my response to that would be that Microsoft is quite opaque regarding Ruby. By being such a closed system, Windows doesn't do anything to help developers improve Ruby library compatibility.

Compare this to Apple. Apple builds Ruby into its operating system, contributes patches upstream, and is even supporting the development of MacRuby, which more tightly integrates Ruby into the Mac OS X operating system.

So the opaqueness goes both ways in my opinion.

Due to this, I am very impressed that Ruby even has the level of support in Windows that it currently enjoys. I would say that Windows hackers should keep up the good work and submit substantive patches as often as possible.

nertzyon The Greatest Bug of All

I understand your sentiment but frankly I disagree.

Your first paragraph presents a straw man. Sure, in extreme cases, reproducing a bug is not mandatory. Again, the author does not claim that reproducing a bug is mandatory, but rather that it is a useful practice.

It is not a virtue to try to base your work on the least amount of information.

You say that "when the hard problems come you will be ready". But really when the hard problems come you will look at them assuming that the logged information is enough to solve them. No programmer can know ahead of time what information to log, so by purposefully blindfolding yourself from experiencing the bug directly, you might miss the bigger picture.

Indeed, I can't think of a reasonable logging mechanism that the author could have thought of ahead of time that would have helped with this particular bug. Emphasis on "reasonable".

nertzyon Chemistry textbooks will have to be rewritten

The headline seems a bit sensational to me.

They have found a way to cause an unusual interaction, but that doesn't make the whole of chemical knowledge up to this point any less useful or correct.