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thesmart

10 karma · joined July 17, 2012

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thesmart··on AI Broke Code Review and It's Breaking Your Team
Getting in front of the freight train before it gains momentum is so obvious and yet no one has jumped on that... until now. Very interested!
thesmart··on Building durable workflows on Postgres
So we're back to distributed queues on PostgreSQL circa 2006...
thesmart··on Claude Opus 4.8
Rolling back to 4.6 is such a stark difference
thesmart··on Manage agent skills with GitHub CLI
Considering Github seems to have <99% uptime, I'm not super excited to use `gh` for anything. Besides, wasn't able to publish my skill anyway:

gh skill publish shellcraft

X shellcraft: name "shellcraft" does not match directory name "."

thesmart··on Intel Announces Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 GPUs
Because the B70 cards can pipeline 500 tok/s on concurrent workloads. Apple Silicon and Nvidia consumer cards only work well w/ serial workloads.
thesmart··on Intel Announces Arc Pro B70 and Arc Pro B65 GPUs
The idea that Intel's foundry could replace TSMC is hilarious. No. Maybe a gamer-focused mid-market card based on 30-series.
thesmart··on Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy
How about "no." You may be okay giving away your individual rights, including to copyright, but I am not.
thesmart··on Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy
Yeah, I'm guessing that probably because in their TOS you grant them some license work-around for running the service, which can mean anything.
thesmart··on Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy
I'm ready to abandon Github. Enschitification of the world's source infrastructure is just a matter of time.
thesmart··on Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web
WebAssembly is amazing, but I don't think making it a DOM controller is where the action is. What specific scenarios do you aspire to unlock and why would those scenarios lead to broader adoption?
thesmart··on Evaluating AGENTS.md: are they helpful for coding agents?
Both
thesmart··on GitHub is down again
Can we please demand that Github provide mirror APIs to competitors? We're just asking for an extinction-level event. "Oops, our AI deleted the world's open source."

Any public source code hosting service should be able to subscribe to public repo changes. It belongs to the authors, not to Microsoft.

thesmart··on GitHub is down again
Yes. Feels like every other week.
thesmart··on GitHub is down again
It's really pathetic for however many trillions MSFT is valued.

If we had a government worth anything, they ought to pass a law that other competitors be provided mirror APIs so that the entire world isn't shut off from source code for a day. We're just asking for a world wide disaster.

thesmart··on SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
That's LEO, not to lunar orbit and entry. Saturn V had a maximum lift capacity of 310,000 lb (140,000 kg) to low Earth orbit (LEO) and could deliver approximately 50 tons (45,000 kg) of payload to the Moon.
thesmart··on SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
So you think SpaceX isn't building on the shoulders of giants?

There are teams of incredible engineers working there because NASA paved the way.

thesmart··on SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
I had understood that reusing shuttle parts was more about keeping congressional districts (that make the parts) happy, and thus securing votes for funding.
thesmart··on SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight
You can't really compare them because SLS was a jobs program intended to spread out contracts across many states by reusing suppliers from shuttle programs. Cheap? No. Wasteful? also no. Most of that money went back into those economies.
thesmart··on System Initiative Adds AI Agents to Infrastructure Automation Platform
This solves a major problem that fills me with dread: any time the ai agent tries to change infrastructure. Can't wait to use this.
thesmart··on Sora: Creating video from text
What real life problem does this solve?
thesmart··on Cases where full scans are better than indexes
Saying there are cases where full scan is better than an index is really just describing an edge case where the default index implementation is non-optimal.

There are edge cases where default implementation of an index will not result in good performance in some use cases. For example, write heavy loads where the updated tuple values are frequently changing position in the index constantly. However, the solution is rarely "no index".

A solution is to throttle the index update by an acceptable delta through a non-default implementation.

A solution is to develop your own application-side index.

A solution is a custom PSQL function that interacts with an index in a more complicated way.

Maybe a non-default implementation is not priority right now, e.g. if scale is low. But it is always good to think ahead and to have a plan and to log the tech debt and track it responsibly so there are no surprises later. Don't build on shifty foundations.

thesmart··on Senate Bill 827 could raise height limits throughout San Fran, transform city
No one calls it "San Fran". People tell you that in the first 15 minutes of being there.
thesmart··on Massive Dyn DNS outage
It seems incredibly misguided to plug an IP address into hosts from a forum post. Is there an official source from GitHub?
thesmart··on The other kind of JavaScript fatigue
And the lack of repo ratings or author reputation. How is it that I can see 2,000 reviews about a taco stand down the street but I can't easily assess deps quality in a source base I depend on for my livelihood?
thesmart··on The other kind of JavaScript fatigue
jQuery, while mature and great, is fairly unnecessary considering all that HTML5 and ECMA maintainers have accomplished since jQuery matured.
thesmart··on The other kind of JavaScript fatigue
I think the convenience of GitHub and NPM are good features, and it's easy to blame ease-of-use as a culprit. I have often pondered about how remarkably poor these tools are at representing repo quality. I think there are some basic questions to ask before accepting any unknown source in as a module. What is the core problem and requirements the source addresses? Does it verify the solution and how? What is the reputation of the core contributors? Is it used by any serious institutions? (Aside: download count and star count are a measure of herd mentality) What are the open issues? What are the closed "won't fix" issues? How often are issues regressed? What is a safe version? How is the versioning managed and how should I pin it? How many dependencies do I assume from this library? How severable are the dependencies?

It would be useful if package management tools facilitated the process of understanding the liability imposed by a package, but the opposite is encouraged. Authors too often put up shiny marketing materials and make bold statements about the utility and vision of their software. It would be refreshing if authors were as open about the flaws, trade-offs, alternatives, etc. but few are.

Perhaps some kind of rating or feedback system that is qualitative in nature would help mitigate the salesmanship? I'd love to know who has been burned by a project and anecdotes about how packages are used by others. Ratings around issue resolutions would also be helpful, how often have we all had major bugs dismissively closed by maintainers?

TL;DR there are ways to develop a comprehensive assessment of a repo, but our tools are lacking and need much improvement in this regard.

thesmart··on Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations
Uhm, usually because living in the Bay Area is actually a 10x better life for some people. Great weather, very diverse, lots of jobs, public transit is good, arts are amazing, food is amazing, close to sea and ski, etc. etc.
thesmart··on Show HN: Nchan – a pub/sub server as an Nginx module
Does Nchan broadcast messages that may have been missed by a client that was temporarily offline? When web client's navigate from page-to-page or enter sleep mode, client's will miss messages during the offline delta. Ideally, there would be a way to "catch-up" a client or to tell if a client is permanently out-of-sync because it is beyond a message history window.
thesmart··on Some web development tips from a former Digg developer
...sorry. :(
thesmart··on Moving My Startup from Ohio - Silicon Valley
There's no reason to waste cycles trying to figure out all the company stuff. Laws in CA and the advice you will get about Delaware companies really smooth everything out.