Hacker News: HelloNurse

New comment by HelloNurse in "Alternative(s) to run CUDA on non-Nvidia hardware"

HelloNurse — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:58:57 +0000

Being fast and being as easy to program as CUDA are two different things.

New comment by HelloNurse in "Show HN: Beautiful Type Erasure with C++26 Reflection"

HelloNurse — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:51:52 +0000

C++ is in the transitional phase where major bad things are being taken away very satisfactorily, usually by providing a simpler and more general replacement (for example, auto instead of long and pointless type declarations or modern initialization protecting against implicit conversions and surprise constructor overloads), but most progress of elegance and grace come from new features that enable something traditionally terrible or impossible (for example the gradual generalization of templates, culminating with concepts, the gradual extension of constexpr, consteval etc, and the new reflection).

New comment by HelloNurse in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

HelloNurse — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 12:20:12 +0000

Unable to be willing. The combination of not knowing any better, political parties and media that don't care or exert a contrary pressure because they belong to billionaires, and powerful health sector businesses appears to be very effective.

New comment by HelloNurse in "What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)"

HelloNurse — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 16:03:00 +0000

They don't consider the ORM the second class citizen it actually is: an optional simplified alternative to normal queries, that can be used for the easy cases.

New comment by HelloNurse in "Half-Baked Product"

HelloNurse — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:25:09 +0000

One of the points is that, for a startup, not flailing around is very difficult and unlikely: these patterns of failure and "classic bullshit" are the universal norm. This piece "articulates a point of view or personality that you had never before considered": that you and your startup are no better than the characters in the tale, and equally doomed.

New comment by HelloNurse in "Half-Baked Product"

HelloNurse — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:04:35 +0000

It can be accurately simulated with appropriate brushes and rags, water and soap, and a sufficient number of hands.

New comment by HelloNurse in "Half-Baked Product"

HelloNurse — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:00:53 +0000

Considerable arrogance is required to think you can improve on mature products enough to conquer a large market share. Such arrogance should be supported by having, if not a demonstrably fantastic prototype, at least an obviously good idea; otherwise you are following the example of Juicero or Theranos.

In the article, the "smart" oven is only a speculation (maybe it works, and maybe someone will pay for it) and as such it is appropriate as a relatively low effort and low risk experiment on the part of an established oven maker (develop rudimentary automation and offer it as a very mildly disruptive feature at a modest price increase).

New comment by HelloNurse in "Half-Baked Product"

HelloNurse — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:37:31 +0000

Brilliant autobiography.

New comment by HelloNurse in "Solid and Clean Code never felt solid or clean to me"

HelloNurse — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:21:43 +0000

On the contrary, the new trend of telling a bot to write code automates disregard for architecture.

New comment by HelloNurse in "Fast feedback loops is the way"

HelloNurse — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:10:17 +0000

  >  I've been thinking about the futsal effect - which is how Brazilian footballers developed superior skills through a constrained small-sided game with 5 on each side, then moving onto a full football game with 11 on each side. My understanding is the constraints are designed such that the most important and difficult skills are trained in a fast, immediate feedback loop.

You might be underestimating how being one player in 10 rather than 1 in 22 and being never far from the ball makes every player more than twice as involved in the game, yielding more intense training than a normal game: feedback loops become more frequent, but not faster. For even greater intensity it is possible to play football with even smaller fields and teams, and in a cage to reduce interruptions.

This has nothing to do with iterations of the kind found in software development, which are about products and external constraints, not about training for individual skill and collective coordination.

New comment by HelloNurse in "Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions"

HelloNurse — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:27:11 +0000

A contributor in good faith is going to accept criticism and resubmit an improved change: less files modified, more explanation, more focus, references to actual tickets and discussion with actual developers.

New comment by HelloNurse in "The Return of Aspect Oriented Programming"

HelloNurse — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:04:24 +0000

Is this a joke? Instead of using a formal aspect specification that people (and bots) can get wrong, like any other programming language, trust a bot to do the right thing spontaneously and implement an aspect oriented architecture without tools?

New comment by HelloNurse in "Best way to integrate your devtool with companies"

HelloNurse — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 08:04:41 +0000

The flaw in the argument is postulating a subscription model for a product that a normal customer needs very sporadically. Even old-school selling of perpetual licenses and support fees would be inappropriate.

Instead, sell expensive one-off consultancy projects to help some company understand one specific code base, with the only long-term relationship of satisfied customers recommending you and calling you again for new projects.

New comment by HelloNurse in "My LSM tree was slower than a B-tree. Then I profiled it"

HelloNurse — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:34:14 +0000

The quoted code suggests that the wrong sizes aren't evident constants in code (there is a function to compute/retrieve them) and extra inspection during debugging is the most plausible way to detect them.

Hopefully this kind of bug is enough to teach the important of measuring, logging and testing to a naive optimist.

New comment by HelloNurse in "Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity"

HelloNurse — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:49:24 +0000

Judging from the initial portion of the anime Dragonball pivoted gradually from a loose adaptation of Journey to the West (with Goku as the protagonist among funny versions of traditional characters) to a more original and specific setting and plot (with Goku as the most important of many Saiyan and martial artists).

New comment by HelloNurse in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

HelloNurse — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:24:29 +0000

There is a lot of room to do exactly the same thing more efficiently, which doesn't count as different algorithms.

New comment by HelloNurse in "Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

HelloNurse — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:16:23 +0000

The "amazing" organizations seem amazingly evil.

New comment by HelloNurse in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

HelloNurse — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:24:51 +0000

Vocabulary please. A "codec" is software that CODes and DECodes multimedia content, while specs describe an encoded file or stream format (occasionally involving network protocols and other concerns).

In a normal standard development process experimental codecs come first, then those that have proved to work well, including having good enough performance, are described in the spec; after standardization there's very little room to "develop the algorithms" because nonconformant implementations would be useless.

Reverse engineering is limited to the abnormal case of having access to some codec but not to the standard that describes it.

New comment by HelloNurse in "A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer"

HelloNurse — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:27:01 +0000

Email domains of employee addresses aren't necessarily owned by the company. For example:

  - a startup with legacy personal email addresses from one or two universities
  - a spin-off sharing the email domain (and the whole IT infrastructure) of the parent company
  - cheapskates using six approved free email services

For security purposes, on the other hand, the important part is proving that the LinkedIn account is owned by the organization.

New comment by HelloNurse in "A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer"

HelloNurse — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:46:21 +0000

With a company-managed list of owned domains where real employees have their work email addresses (unrelated to website domains).