Hacker News: Jenk

New comment by Jenk in "Where are all the UK red telephone kiosks?"

Jenk — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:53:05 +0000

> - Not sure what they're called, but I've seen a lot of fully automated outdoor "locker stations" for packet deliveries

Drop boxes!

I was part of a team prototyping these some 20 years ago. I highly doubt we were the only team doing so, but we were certainly unaware of any commercially available/deployed stations at the time. I was writing the software, in particular the orchestration of the locks and event bus for the transmissions.

Lots of fun from trying to fathom how undocumented solenoids operated, to trips to various countries for remote and environmental testing, and destructive tests simulating someone driving a truck into an installation (i.e., by deliberately driving a truck into one!)

The nerdiest moment was taking a mainboard model that we were getting intermittent faults with and recreating the exact environmental conditions to recreate the problem. This involved incubating the mainboard in a sealed environment chamber to control temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure. The fault was bit-flipping because electrons were jumping rails when the microchip(s) were cold and damp.

New comment by Jenk in "Where are all the UK red telephone kiosks?"

Jenk — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:40:12 +0000

https://www.thek6project.co.uk/the-crowns-on-k6-telephone-bo... there's a note about Hull's phone boxes at the bottom of this page.

New comment by Jenk in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

Jenk — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:42:20 +0000

If the title simply said "AI is out-performing humans at CTF" then none of this confusion exists. Nothing is "broken," we don't need to be superfluous with "frontier," and the point is still there.

New comment by Jenk in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

Jenk — Mon, 11 May 2026 08:04:59 +0000

I've found the first, and most important, step for any team or organisation to eliminate concerns with NFRs, "tech debt", and whatever else it may be called, is to stop giving it a name.

I'm being completely serious. By giving it some kind of distinct name, you are giving license to it being ring-fenced and de-prioritised by someone who doesn't (but, arguably, probably should) know better.

Quality matters. It hits your P&L very quickly and very hard if you don't maintain it. So it is as important as any other factor.

New comment by Jenk in "Canonical Under Attack"

Jenk — Sun, 03 May 2026 11:17:18 +0000

Ditto, launchpad.net is also extremely flaky.

New comment by Jenk in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

Jenk — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:54:49 +0000

I do trunk based dev. My colleagues prefer git. I still prefer to use jj.

New comment by Jenk in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

Jenk — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:58:14 +0000

It doesn't need you to think that way at all.

`jj new` simply means "create a new commit [ontop of ]" - you don't have to describe it immediately. I never do.

I know that the intention was to do that, and I tried forcing the habit, but I too found it counter-productive to invariably end up re-writing the description.

New comment by Jenk in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

Jenk — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:53:32 +0000

No that is correct when in colocate mode (which is the default mode). Simply removing the .jj folder will "de-jj" the repo entirely, but will leave you in a headless state. Simple to fix with a `git switch` though.

If you are _not_ in colocate mode, the .git folder is located _inside_ the .jj folder. So worth checking!

New comment by Jenk in "What is jj and why should I care?"

Jenk — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:52:01 +0000

This is literally jj's schtick and reason for existing, so I wouldn't be surprised if you decide it is not the tool for you.

New comment by Jenk in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"

Jenk — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 12:47:29 +0000

You don't replace. jj is backed by git anyway.

New comment by Jenk in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

Jenk — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:59:36 +0000

Tbf you wouldn't use/switch to jj for (because of) those kind of commands, and are quite the outlier in the grand list of reasons to use jj. However the option to use the revset language in that manner is a high-ranking reason to use jj in my opinion.

The most frequent "complex" command I use is to find commits in my name that are unsigned, and then sign them (this is owing to my workflow with agents that commit on my behalf but I'm not going to give agents my private key!)

    jj log -r 'mine() & ~signed()'

    # or if yolo mode...

    jj sign -r 'mine() & ~signed()'

I hadn't even spared a moment to consider the git equivalent but I would humbly expect it to be quite obtuse.

New comment by Jenk in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

Jenk — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:51:21 +0000

Claude's settings don't appear to be in sync with the published settings schema[0].

[0]: https://www.schemastore.org/claude-code-settings.json.

New comment by Jenk in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

Jenk — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:57:45 +0000

Or a colon:

    Windows Subsystem for: Linux

New comment by Jenk in "A Faster Alternative to Jq"

Jenk — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:31:14 +0000

I switched to Jaq[0] a while back for the 'correctness' sake rather than performance. But Jaq also claims to be more performant than jq.

[0]: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq

New comment by Jenk in "Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML"

Jenk — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:28:05 +0000

Yes but it is easy to abuse/misuse IME, in that I think it requires one to maintain your own sense of discipline for the principle separation rather than the library/framework guide you into it. The threshold between UI and state management is comically easy to confuse.

Not dismissing it, mind, that inherent guidance is not something that is easy to achieve and I much prefer working with the likes of React than without.

New comment by Jenk in "Qite.js – Frontend framework for people who hate React and love HTML"

Jenk — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 13:44:10 +0000

Might be naive, but this has always been a concern of the view-model for me. Every GUI change results in a VM change via event/command. The VM becomes gospel for UI state which means reducers are much simpler, and my actual model doesn't care if it is indeed a button, expando, radio button or whatever else.

New comment by Jenk in "I don't use LLMs for programming"

Jenk — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:41:56 +0000

The humans operating the LLM are accountable.

New comment by Jenk in "I don't use LLMs for programming"

Jenk — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:35:20 +0000

> Except your team is full of occasionally insane "people" who hallucinate, lie, and cover things up.

Wait.. are we talking about LLMs or humans here?

New comment by Jenk in "WSL Manager"

Jenk — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 09:26:15 +0000

I stand corrected. It makes sense that it is a chroot/rootfs rather than fully independent VMs.

re: side-by-side running, I always get socket and/port port problems when doing that. Without having looked into it at all I figure it is NAT collisions.

New comment by Jenk in "WSL Manager"

Jenk — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:58:11 +0000

Every time you run `wsl --install ` you are creating a new VM. Every time you run `wsl --unregister ` your are removing a VM.

It is these two operations at the heart of OP's app.