Hacker News: BurritoAlPastor

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "The suck is why we're here"

BurritoAlPastor — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 05:01:15 +0000

I think it’s perfectly germane. When a medium is both a means for making a good living _and_ a form of artistic expression, there’s a natural tension that emerges from people who pursue both those paths at once, in addition to the people who eschew either path entirely. Obviously many people avoid cynical reasons for doing the things they do - I’m among them - but you can’t fail to recognize that there’s always a demographic that doesn’t care about the art.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "The suck is why we're here"

BurritoAlPastor — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 01:18:16 +0000

> What’s the point in generating writing … if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment?

Getting promoted, getting a better job, generating sales leads, things of that nature. A depressing number of blogs or LinkedIn posts exist only because the author is under some vague belief that it’s part of what they’re supposed to be doing to get ahead in their career.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void"

BurritoAlPastor — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 21:05:14 +0000

The language pattern the author refers to is called litotes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes), but to say that English doesn’t use them is… not quite right.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "A computer upgrade shut down BART"

BurritoAlPastor — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 02:04:35 +0000

I don’t think BART employees really have any say in where BART stations do and don’t go, or how many trains they get. Try city councils instead, although none of them take BART anyways so they won’t know the difference.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "Waymos crash less than human drivers"

BurritoAlPastor — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 21:53:28 +0000

I generally find that Waymos are cheaper than Uber/Lyft including tip.

I’ve also seen that, although Uber and Lyft peak times seem correlated to each other, they seem uncorrelated to Waymo peak activity. But this might be stabilizing as Waymo ridership increases.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "What is the origin of the lake tank image that has become a meme? (2021)"

BurritoAlPastor — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 20:52:03 +0000

Note that, at least in Thomas Malory’s telling, the arm holding Excalibur out of the lake is not the Lady Of The Lake, who is nearby on the lake. The arm holding Excalibur is neither named nor explained.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)"

BurritoAlPastor — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 04:48:03 +0000

San Francisco’s “Main Street” is in no way a major artery, however. Market Street served that function.

Here’s an 1853 map https://rumsey.geogarage.com/maps/g3463000.html in which today’s Main Street is only a block long. The map calls it Front St, although there’s another Front St nearby which kept the name – perhaps it was renamed Main to disambiguate once the streets connected?

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "P**fectionism Isn’t Your Problem"

BurritoAlPastor — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 18:10:34 +0000

Ooh, we got a doxastic voluntarist over here!

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "Hollow City: Edward Hopper’s portraits of urban alienation"

BurritoAlPastor — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 01:08:54 +0000

Clement Greenberg wrote that "Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist".

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "A step by step guide on how to become a DevOps engineer"

BurritoAlPastor — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 20:16:08 +0000

As a careerlong DevOps guy, I’ve heard many times that “if your job title has DevOps in it, your company is doing DevOps wrong” – overwhelmingly from people with “DevOps” in their job title, delivered with a mordant laugh.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "Fitbit users will have to sign into Google from 2023"

BurritoAlPastor — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 18:56:26 +0000

People are also not really expected to be individually responsible for mitigating flood or fire risk; they buy insurance. People can’t buy insurance for getting locked out of their Google account. We’re currently in a “well it’s your own fault for not owning and furnishing a second house in case the first one burns down” situation for digital property.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "The elusive future of San Francisco’s fog"

BurritoAlPastor — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 03:15:34 +0000

I do live there. I can hear the foghorns from the bridge at night. It’s nice!

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "The elusive future of San Francisco’s fog"

BurritoAlPastor — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 23:01:28 +0000

The fog doesn’t hide the beauty; the fog is the beauty.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "Grafana Mimir and VictoriaMetrics: performance tests"

BurritoAlPastor — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 18:05:32 +0000

In my experience, the business use of retaining years-old metrics is overvalued, because changes in the system tend to prevent any kind of long-term apples-to-apples comparison. You’ll have changed your metrics engine, or your collector, or your tagging strategy, or your hosting strategy, or your containerization, or your deployments, or etc. etc. Even if you can find the like metrics from last year, you can’t trust that they meant the same thing then that they do now.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers"

BurritoAlPastor — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 20:42:14 +0000

We didn’t make software engineer money when we didn’t have “engineer” in our titles. I would be perfectly happy to be a “senior systems administrator” or similar if it didn’t impact my earnings potential.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret"

BurritoAlPastor — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 02:18:03 +0000

Are you suggesting that it might be just coincidental that companies stopped putting chalk dust in milk at about the same time that doing so became illegal?

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "What We Gain from a Good Bookstore"

BurritoAlPastor — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 15:10:10 +0000

Fine, you pedant, it’s ironic that a textually sympathetic review of a memoir lionizing the virtues of secondhand brick-and-mortar bookstores, while fretting about their continuing viability as a business model, would link to the book on Amazon, a online-only store commonly considered to be the primary disruptor to that business model. Happy?

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "What We Gain from a Good Bookstore"

BurritoAlPastor — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 13:16:18 +0000

Ironic that this review of a memoir about bookstores starts off by linking to it on Amazon.

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "Five Koans of Software Architecture"

BurritoAlPastor — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 17:23:04 +0000

When did “koan” become a synonym for “aphorism”?

New comment by BurritoAlPastor in "Ask HN: Did you change jobs during the Great Reshuffling and regret it?"

BurritoAlPastor — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 21:44:13 +0000

I changed jobs at the end of 2020, my new job has better pay and better work-from-home arrangements, and I don’t regret a thing.

My hypothesis is that a significant chunk of the people who changed jobs circa 2021 are people who would have changed jobs in 2020 if there hadn’t been a pandemic, but held off for about a year while things shook out.