Hacker News: LennyWhiteJr

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Mystery identity of 'Green Boots' climber is finally solved after DNA test"

LennyWhiteJr — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 03:24:04 +0000

honestly just leave him. it's a more metal burial place than any other he'll get anywhere else.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Detekt – A static code analyzer for Kotlin"

LennyWhiteJr — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 15:15:56 +0000

Yeah, it's included as one of the gradle scripts which fails the build in CI if the rules don't pass.

No template, as it's specific to my team's project, but one example is that we enforce that classes within our core domain don't import types from outside the project. You could accomplish this with separate projects, but that comes with its own complexities. This rule basically says "any domain type shall not import a non-domain type".

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Detekt – A static code analyzer for Kotlin"

LennyWhiteJr — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 13:59:25 +0000

I love Detekt! It's particularly good for enforcing project conventions that can't be covered with standard linters. With access to the full AST, you can basically enforce any kind of rule you want with custom analyzers. And LLMs take out 90% of the effort for creating new analyzers.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Detekt – A static code analyzer for Kotlin"

LennyWhiteJr — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 13:58:07 +0000

Almost my entire org uses it for backend server development at Amazon. There is very strong support for Kotlin support within the Amazon dev community.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Amazon execs intentionally made site shittier to rake in more profit – Lawsuit"

LennyWhiteJr — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 02:02:03 +0000

Someone who actually knows what they're talking about.

Even with the Customer Obsession LP, it's not too hard of a stretch to arrive at a conclusion where more ads are shown. Better are worse are, in many aspects, quite subjective in these areas.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed"

LennyWhiteJr — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:27:50 +0000

There is organic matter buried in and around the site that can be used to date the point at which it was filled in.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Choose Postgres queue technology"

LennyWhiteJr — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 02:45:39 +0000

In my Amazon team, we use PostgreSQL as a queue using skip-locked to implement transactional outbox pattern for our database inserts. People commenting 'just use a queue' are totally missing the need for transactional consistency. I agree with the author, it's an amazing tool and scales quite well.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Choose Postgres queue technology"

LennyWhiteJr — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 02:43:32 +0000

Nothing about the outbox pattern guarantees ordering.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Patterns of Distributed Systems (2022)"

LennyWhiteJr — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 01:43:20 +0000

Even if are "down to several nano-seconds", a slight clock drift can be the different between corrupt data or not, and when running at scale, it's only a matter of time before you start running into race conditions.

For a small web app, fine, but if you're running enterprise level software processing billions of DB transactions per day, clocks just don't cut it.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Turn your best programmers into managers"

LennyWhiteJr — Sat, 24 Dec 2022 23:20:24 +0000

This is precisely why large tech companies generally offer parallel career progression paths for individual contributors who don't wish to go into management. A Senior or Principal engineer at Amazon carries nearly as much weight, sometimes more, in software related decision making as their SDM counterparts.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "For Want of a JOIN"

LennyWhiteJr — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 18:07:39 +0000

A couple ways. If the need is not real-time and analytical, you feed the data from multiple services into a separate BI database which can do slower and more complex joins across data from multiple data sources. Or if the need is real-time, you build a paginated API with a page limit that can always be processed within the API SLA. Then you build workflows on top of the paginated API to operate on that data.

Generally, unbounded operations have to be broken up at some point. It just depends on how big the data set is.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Enabling the Future of GitHub's REST API with API Versioning"

LennyWhiteJr — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 23:08:30 +0000

What does it mean for a field to be required in new API version but optional in the old version?

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Cracking Passwords Using John the Ripper"

LennyWhiteJr — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 15:47:18 +0000

Man, I remember running this and ophcrack as a 15 year old to recover the windows login password for my mom's computer after she forgot it. She was convinced her password had just stopped working, until I recovered it and she realized that she just forgot what it was lol.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "The Reason Java Is Still Popular"

LennyWhiteJr — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 19:23:49 +0000

There is sooooo much more that Kotlin offers over Lombok it's not even close.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "The Reason Java Is Still Popular"

LennyWhiteJr — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 19:13:15 +0000

> Checked exceptions are optional. But they're one of the BEST features in Java.

> So much code fails unexpectedly. When you want to build a professional application you need to handle every error.

Yes

> Checked exceptions help you avoid that nonsense.

Wrong

> People hate checked exceptions because of laziness. Java guards you against yourself.

Wrong

Java checked exceptions are almost universally regarded as being a mistake because they don't actually solve the problem they were meant to solve, and they make the code extremely hard to work with.

See this post from Roman Elizarov: https://elizarov.medium.com/kotlin-and-exceptions-8062f589d0...

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "The Reason Java Is Still Popular"

LennyWhiteJr — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 19:05:43 +0000

Yup, I work at Amazon and my team along with many surrounding teams are only coding in Kotlin from this point on. The JVM and its ecosystem brings insane value to the table, and Kotlin lets you take all the benefits while removing most of the downsides of Java.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over"

LennyWhiteJr — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 01:06:15 +0000

I have some hope for Hytale, an open sandbox game created by the creators of the HyPixel minecraft server. https://hytale.com/

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Commit Messages Don’t Matter"

LennyWhiteJr — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 17:54:02 +0000

Commit messages don’t matter. In fact they matter so little that I'm going to write a blog post about how much they don't matter. Commit messages are probably one of the worst places for documentation and a common source of bikeshedding. So let me kickstart some more bikeshedding since there's not enough already.

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "It's quite hard to lose a Duolingo streak"

LennyWhiteJr — Sun, 03 Jul 2022 13:12:33 +0000

+1 for Memrise

New comment by LennyWhiteJr in "Product shouldn’t be left to product managers"

LennyWhiteJr — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 17:47:58 +0000

I agree with the author, but it's also possible to take the other extreme where engineers think they don't need any input from product.