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rokob

393 karma · joined September 28, 2013

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rokob; my proof: https://keybase.io/rokob/sigs/ESgkGt6PHMtdoAZiSe232fgfvoTrk5teSdmzHEevRTI ]
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rokob··on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up
Were any of those using JS/TS? I've seen Bazel perform wonders with many compiled languages, but I'm not impressed with the JS ecosystem.
rokob··on Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
The best part of the downvoting of this is the answer to all of these is yes. Companies have banned all of these in the past when they were coming up. If you don’t learn from the past, …
rokob··on Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
No they didn’t. Did you read either of the things you posted?
rokob··on Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?
Do you know of any company that banned IDEs and went back to plain text only editing?

Do you know of any company that banned compilers and went back to hand written assembly?

Do you know of any company that banned stack overflow and went back to figuring everything out?

rokob··on Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast
It makes sense at a company that sells AI as a service. Perhaps to make presentations...
rokob··on Show HN: One More Letter
None of those are French words. How many letters is the word you say is French?
rokob··on Your code is fast – if you're lucky
Have you considered what happens in the presence of multiple threads? I know aarch is weakly memory ordered but the assembly output by those two versions is quite different when multiple threads are involved. There must be a reason spreading the mutations across multiple lines causes the compiler to pessimize to the branch version.

Edit: not saying they are different just that it is harder for the compiler to see the safety of the transform when they are quite different.

rokob··on A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median
I used to do phone screens with a similarly simple question. I am still blown away that something like 60% would fail to write working code. I had more parts for the 40% that got it the first one, but it was crazy how many people couldn't do the most trivial task.
rokob··on Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
Because hypertrophy is generally pointless compared to strength. The hyperthrophy that naturally accompanies strength work is sufficient but the strength that accompanies hypertrophy work is far less beneficial.
rokob··on The (real) dead economy theory
> something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things

This has been the definition of finance for hundreds of years. I don't know why it comes across here like this is a new phenomenon.

rokob··on Shunning AI is the human choice
I mean I think hating practices and efforts to exploit people is good. I think hating the adverse consequences of our inventive structures and lack of protections for basic human rights is good. But I think hating AI is pointing at the wrong subject for scorn. If you want positive change you can’t point at something that a lot of people are getting value out of (individuals as well as corporations) and say fuck your experience. It is also wrong for a billionaire to say fuck your future and deal with it, but that should mean hating on that person not the technology.
rokob··on We are retiring our bug bounty program
Why not require putting up some money, say $20, to submit a bug eligible for a payout? If you know what you’re doing you wouldn’t mind this at all because you’ve proven it to yourself and you’ll get paid $1000. If the bug turns out to not be legit and it was a good faith effort then you can return the deposit as well. Slop doesn’t get a refund.
rokob··on A History of IDEs at Google
Dude I was there 2019-2022 and mdproxy was a huge win when I realized I could work while traveling. I remember following some incantations on someone’s personal page to get it running. Then covid happened and I was ahead of everyone for a few weeks because I already had been doing real work on my laptop. Thanks!
rokob··on Interaction Models
Yes they can. Your research papers are not the whole story. It’s like google could open source their entire monorepo and very little would change. No one else could operate it.
rokob··on Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house
Depends on the state. Illinois refusal of everything is typically a 3 month suspension. But if you are guilty that is better than submitting to evidence that gets it suspended for 6 months+. If you are innocent, it is in your interest to pass the test.
rokob··on Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house
You can. Refusing the field test allows them to arrest you. But it isn't sufficient to charge you. They also have to offer you a breathalyzer at the station and you can refuse that but demand a blood test.

But your car still gets towed even if you pass the tests at the station and don't ultimately get charged because you refused the field test.

rokob··on OpenAI’s WebRTC problem
No I think they are saying no one would say they want wrong answers. People say they want fast answers and they are implying they should also be correct.
rokob··on DeepSeek V4—almost on the frontier
> However, when their software gets to waymo level of autonomy

Luckily that won’t happen.

rokob··on Generalised plusequals
Yeah this looks like lenses at first glance
rokob··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
This is actually a false premise pushed later to justify layoffs. They started overhiring in 2018-2019. They just continued a preexisting trend through 2021.
rokob··on Claude Code to be removed from Anthropic's Pro plan?
Wait what
rokob··on We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
It’s weird because I could see raising money on the premise that GitHub is garbage, not git. But then you can’t say I co-founded GitHub as your bona fides.
rokob··on The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
Are you saying Herman Miller chairs are uncomfortable?
rokob··on Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
> architecture is what happens when all those local pieces interact, and you can’t get good global behaviour by stitching together locally correct components

This is a great article. I’ve been trying to see how layered AI use can bridge this gap but the current models do seem to be lacking in the ambiguous design phase. They are amazing at the local execution phase.

Part of me thinks this is a reflection of software engineering as a whole. Most people are bad at design. Everyone usually gets better with repetition and experience. However, as there is never a right answer just a spectrum of tradeoffs, it seems difficult for the current models to replicate that part of the human process.

rokob··on Codegen is not productivity
I’ve found them to be pretty good if you tell them to be more critical and to operate as a sophisticated rubber duck. They are actually pretty decent at asking questions that I can answer to help move things forwards. But yeah by default they really like to tell me I’m a fucking genius. Such insight. Wow.
rokob··on LLM=True
I agree with you very much, if what you are building actually benefits from that much client side interactivity. I think the counterpoint is that most products could be server rendered html templates with a tiny amount of plain js rather than complex frontend applications.
rokob··on Design and Implementation of Sprites
I’m so happy I kept reading these comments and came across this gem. Sprites are cool and all but a sandwich tournament is next level.
rokob··on Fossil versus Git
Facebook moved to mercurial because of specific problems related to the size of their monorepo. Moreover the git maintainers were unwilling to work with Facebook to improve git to solve some of these problems. Mercurial was a better fit and was open to the help. But all that said if you don’t have a truly enormous monorepo like Facebook or Google then git is arguably the better tool given the network effects. I don’t think Facebook wanted to promote Mecurial as some vastly superior solution outside because for most people it isn’t.
rokob··on Humans May Be Able to Grow New Teeth Within Just 4 Years
This is not true. I’ve seen x-rays of a child’s mouth with clearly no adult teeth visible below the gums. Later I’ve seen X-rays of the same mouth with one or two adult teeth below the gums where baby teeth are about to fall out. The adult teeth are there underneath once the baby teeth fall out but they are not there “from the start”. That isn’t even to mention the size problem.
rokob··on Golfing Is Not Rowing
I think with rowing in particular due to certain counter intuitive parts of the stroke you absolutely can get nothing out of years of self exploration.
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