Hacker News: EuanReid

New comment by EuanReid in "The Oxford Comma – Why and Why Not (2024)"

EuanReid — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:04:47 +0000

There are so many times the Oxford comma prevents ambiguity. I have yet to see a counterexample. Commas separate list entries, don't change it for the last one.

New comment by EuanReid in "I asked Claude for 37,500 random names, and it can't stop saying Marcus"

EuanReid — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:27:28 +0000

I suppose it appears a bunch in training data. Marcus Aurelius and Marcus Crassus get mentioned a lot through history.

New comment by EuanReid in "Osaka: Kansai Airport proud to have never lost single piece of luggage (2024)"

EuanReid — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:06:01 +0000

Headline's a bit misleading. They've never permanently lost a bag, and well done to them for that, but they've certainly lost them for periods of time. Just eventually found them.

New comment by EuanReid in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

EuanReid — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:33:48 +0000

Upper-K is for Kelvin, so can't be mixed in as a prefix in case someone decides to commit physics crimes and talk about temperature-mass (Kkg).

New comment by EuanReid in "Ask HN: What tone to use in code review suggestions?"

EuanReid — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 16:44:23 +0000

Obviously tone is hard in text, and it's worse in multilingual teams. What's been very effective for my current team is adding explicit context as a comment prefix with standardised terms: - Nit for "it doesn't actually matter" - Suggestion for "this approach might be better, what do you think?" - Question for "help me understand this" - Requested Change for "this is actually a blocker"

We include this expectation in our working agreement, stick to it rigorously for reviews where reviewer and reviewee haven't established a strong rapport yet, and use it as appropriate beyond that. So far we've had no confusion about tone in reviews.