Hacker News: CBLT

New comment by CBLT in "Elevated error rate across multiple models"

CBLT — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:49:31 +0000

New comment by CBLT in "In praise of memcached"

CBLT — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 02:21:05 +0000

I'm not really sure memcached optimizes for operational simplicity. The only time I've run it at scale, it would have low cpu utilization then unexpectedly hit lock contention and fall over without warning.

New comment by CBLT in "Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap"

CBLT — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 01:50:48 +0000

I also like having long, pointed conversations with LLMs as I review code. Then when I'm done, it's different code, and it has all of my blind spots and knowledge gaps, so I cannot effectively review it anymore.

It's like turning a code review that requests you, into a code review that requests someone else. And it tramples on the original author quite a bit too. It's hard only having the ability to add incremental value to large amounts of code, instead of large amounts of value to incremental code.

New comment by CBLT in "Asserts in Zig"

CBLT — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:35:31 +0000

> Imagine a big codebase with this somewhere in it:

    fn processThing(thing: Thing) void {
       // this function must always be invoked on
       // a thing that has already been started
       assert(thing.is_started);
   
       // ...
    }

I know you mentioned fuzzing earlier in the article but seriously, fuzzing deserves an extra mention after asking me to imagine that.

New comment by CBLT in "Malicious npm packages detected across Red Hat Cloud Services"

CBLT — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:52:02 +0000

Eh, it's worse than that. The GP comment is repeating a joke derived from an Onion headline about gun control. Where the very poignant message is about political will to make change. However, the npm ecosystem is very much willing and has already made several changes. If we're going to engage in discussion instead of meme-posting, the GP should have (imo) included real commentary _in addition to_ the meme they really wanted to post. What is the policy they want? Why do they see the NPM ecosystem as still resistant to change?

New comment by CBLT in "GitHub Actions down again today"

CBLT — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:59:50 +0000

I've been oncall for a different G service that nearly paged on every error. It used the standard error budget tooling, but on hundreds of user buckets because the engineering around locality-specific configuration was... suspect. Many of these buckets had single-digits user. If a user was on their phone and lost signal, I was paged. Very poor oncall experience.

New comment by CBLT in "A new C++ back end for ocamlc"

CBLT — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:01:49 +0000

> idiomatic, readable C++ code

I disagree with this characterization of the generated primes.cpp shown here.

New comment by CBLT in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

CBLT — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:32:09 +0000

People are quick to point out that induced demand exists - especially people that aren't fond of change.

Very broadly speaking, people mis-estimate effect sizes in economics by orders of magnitude. Induced demand is just their foothold to claim an effect exists, before they go about claiming the effect size they want to see.

New comment by CBLT in "Every layer of review makes you 10x slower"

CBLT — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 06:08:09 +0000

I use a PR notifier chrome extension, so I have a badge on the toolbar whenever a PR is waiting on me. I get to them in typically <2 minutes during work hours because I tab over to chrome whenever AI is thinking. Sometimes I even get to browse HN if not enough PRs are coming and not too many parallel work sessions.

New comment by CBLT in "Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager"

CBLT — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:14:35 +0000

I've had great experiences being managed twice by very humble engineers who've made the transition to EM. Both were sacked within the year by their boss because they didn't play the corporate politics game.

New comment by CBLT in "Assorted less(1) tips"

CBLT — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 23:19:05 +0000

I can while less is running to background that process using the shell, so the shell is clearly not completely gone.

I might be misremembering, but I think I just had to rebind in zsh to get less working.

New comment by CBLT in "Assorted less(1) tips"

CBLT — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 17:43:24 +0000

If you're following a pipe (such as `kubectl logs | less +F`), is sent to all processes in a pipeline, so it stops less from following and it stops the other process entirely. Then you can't start following again with F, or load more data in with G.

Less provides an alternative of to stop following, but that is intercepted by most shells.

New comment by CBLT in "A faster path to container images in Bazel"

CBLT — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 19:00:26 +0000

Is my adblocker blocking them? I only saw the stack of tars in a coat. Didn't break the article's flow for me.

New comment by CBLT in "Ask HN: Have you switched from AWS to GCP for more startup credits?"

CBLT — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 18:00:16 +0000

My current company started on AWS/GCP for the credits. Right now we're on Lambda for the GPU prices and GKE for some webservers that we cba to move. We dual-upload data to s3 and gcs still (which isn't too expensive, it's effectively write-only and the auto-archive features work for us). Cloud SQL database but pgBackRest to the other cloud.

We're not HA across clouds; we decided to chase RPO over RTO.

New comment by CBLT in "Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright"

CBLT — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:32:21 +0000

About once a week I see someone cut in even though the person is literally tailgating. The driver at the back has to brake+swerve to not cause a high speed collision. There's actually nothing you can do to prevent these people from getting ahead of you. Don't worry about what they'll do, it's insane anyways. Just try not to die.

New comment by CBLT in "Collaboration sucks"

CBLT — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:11:22 +0000

I'm there right now at my current job. It's always the same engineer, and they always get a pass because (for some reason) they don't have to do design reviews for anything they do, but they go concern-troll everyone else's designs.

Last week, after 3 near-misses that would have brought down our service for hours if not days from a corner this engineer cut, I chaired a meeting to decide how we were going to improve this particular component. This engineer got invited, and spent thr entire allocated meeting time spreading FUD about all the options we gathered. Management decided on inaction.

New comment by CBLT in "Jujutsu at Google [video]"

CBLT — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 21:12:49 +0000

Google's monorepo is in fact terabytes with no binaries. It does stretch the definition of source code though - a lot of that is configuration files (at worst, text protos) which are automatically generated.

New comment by CBLT in "Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)"

CBLT — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 23:25:18 +0000

Great advice! Personally, I got immense value from writing notes but never when I wrote them during the lecture. 30 minutes after the lecture has ended is a perfect time time to sit down in the library and write notes for what the lecture was about. This gives enough time to reflect about the big picture, but not so too much time that the details are lost.

New comment by CBLT in "MAML – A new configuration language"

CBLT — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 22:55:49 +0000

> TOML isn't great for hierarchical data.

My experience is different: TOML isn't obvious if there's an array that's far from the leaf data. Maybe that's what you experienced with the hierarchical data?

In my usage of it (where we use base and override config layers), arrays are the enemy. Overrides can only delete the array, not merge data in. TOML merely makes this code smell more smelly, so it's perfect for us.

New comment by CBLT in "Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle"

CBLT — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 19:04:38 +0000

The former. I clone from file:// URIs.

I just have the file path to the inside of my LXC container. If you're using Docker you can just mount it. I only need the path twice (for clone, and for adding a git remote). After that I just use git to reference the remote for everything.

I probably don't have the perfect workflow here. Especially if you're spinning up/down Docker containers constantly. I'm basically performing a Torvalds role play, where I have lieutenant AI agents asking me to pull their trees.