Hacker News: TheSoftwareGuy

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

TheSoftwareGuy — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:28:36 +0000

Sounds like he pays for AI himself. He said he bills by the feature/bug. So he keeps all the productivity gains from using AI

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy"

TheSoftwareGuy — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:32:57 +0000

Is mail fraud really taken seriously? after I bought my house I got dozens of letters every few days that appeared (or tried to appear) from my lender warning of "FINAL NOTICE call this number about your mortgage!!!!!". The phenomenon is apparently so common and well known that my realtor, the seller's realtor, and my lender ALL warned me about these letters.

I feel like it should be easy for the postal inspectors or to go after these, if they cared. Just gather up some of these letters from someone who just bought a house (seems to be public record when someone buys a house, that's how the scammers know when to target someone). Then just call the number in the letter, trace the call and arrest whoever is there.

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers"

TheSoftwareGuy — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:28:09 +0000

The trailing return type pattern was added to the standard, IIRC, to make it easier for templated functions to have return types that depend on the types of the arguments, such as in this example:

    template 
    auto multiply(A a, B b) -> decltype(a * b) {
        return a * b;
    }

Its easier for the compiler to parse everything if `decltype(a * b) occurs _after_ the definition of `a` and `b`. Once this pattern was added and people started using it for that purpose, people also started using the pattern for all functions for consistency.

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory"

TheSoftwareGuy — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:42:49 +0000

I'm interested, as I've never been in an org with QA specialists. What does that look like?

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Passing the Torch: James Gross on the Next Chapter of Micromobility Industries"

TheSoftwareGuy — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:42:26 +0000

Honestly I think micro mobility is an undervalued topic. It has the potential to really change the viability of transit in a ton of major cities, where transit infrastructure has poor coverage. And honestly anything at all that helps people not use cars has huge social benefits in my eyes.

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Python is not a great language for data science"

TheSoftwareGuy — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 18:43:01 +0000

IIRC those are basically hash tables, which are first-class citizens in many languages already

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "The end of the rip-off economy: consumers use LLMs against information asymmetry"

TheSoftwareGuy — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:23:56 +0000

Yeah, this is one of my favorite things about LLMs right now: they haven't gone through any enshittification. Its like how google search used to be so much better

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "HP SitePrint"

TheSoftwareGuy — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 19:01:18 +0000

That's awful. I hope you were able to recover damages from the builders

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Amazon-backed, nuclear facility for Washington state"

TheSoftwareGuy — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 18:08:32 +0000

Huh. I'm pleasantly surprised about this. Maybe there will be a long-lasting positive outcome from all this AI stuff after all

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Let's write a macro in Rust"

TheSoftwareGuy — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 17:16:54 +0000

For those interested, this blog post also has a part 2 and 3:

https://hackeryarn.com/post/rust-macros-2/

https://hackeryarn.com/post/rust-macros-3/

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints"

TheSoftwareGuy — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:04:04 +0000

Not necessarily. If $x is enough to get you 10x more Software engineering effort, people may be willing to increase their spending on software engineering, rather than decrease it

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ"

TheSoftwareGuy — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:02:09 +0000

>Hard-code some logic to identify cranes and always assume there's a cable dangling from the end.

Probably this one. Even if the drone sees the crane, there's no guarantee the cable won't move faster than the drone can react.

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Will Amazon S3 Vectors kill vector databases or save them?"

TheSoftwareGuy — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 13:25:42 +0000

You're right, people absolutely do rely on internal behavior intentionally and sometimes even unintentionally. And we tried our hardest not to break any of those customers either. but the point is that putting something in the docs is seen as a promise that you can rely on it. And going back on a promise is the exact opposite of the "Earns Trust" leadership principal that everyone is evaluated against.

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Will Amazon S3 Vectors kill vector databases or save them?"

TheSoftwareGuy — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:10:47 +0000

>It's not like there's some secret sauce here in most of these implementation details. If there was, I'd understand not telling us. This is probably less an Apple-style culture of secrecy and more laziness and a belief that important details have been abstracted away from us users because "The Cloud" when in fact, these details do really matter for performance and other design decisions we have to make.

Having worked inside AWS I can tell you one big reason is the attitude/fear that anything we put in out public docs may end up getting relied on by customers. If customers rely on the implementation to work in a specific way, then changing that detail requires a LOT more work to prevent breaking customer's workloads. If it is even possible at that point.

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Serverless Horrors"

TheSoftwareGuy — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 17:07:50 +0000

Sounds like your organization isn’t learning from these periods of high bill. What lead to the bill creeping up, and what mechanisms could be put in place to prevent them in the first place?

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Detection of hidden cellular GPS vehicle trackers"

TheSoftwareGuy — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 15:19:18 +0000

I'd be wary of draining the battery while the car is off. You don't want to prevent the car from starting

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "DoorDash to acquire Deliveroo"

TheSoftwareGuy — Wed, 07 May 2025 13:46:13 +0000

Your lack of empathy is obvious when you say the benefit of these services is that "people are lazy". Many many people simply don't have extra time, and taking one thing off of their plate makes life easier. For many decades, pizza was one of the only meals you could get delivered, these services just expand that to more restaurants.

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers"

TheSoftwareGuy — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 13:07:14 +0000

If you really wanted to look like Amazon codex you would write Java :)

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Show HN: I rewrote few of the common core string.h functions"

TheSoftwareGuy — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 15:25:43 +0000

Is this meant to be used in production systems, or is it just a learning exercise?

New comment by TheSoftwareGuy in "Big Book of R"

TheSoftwareGuy — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 14:13:26 +0000

Plotting is one task I find such huge benefits to AI coding assistants. I can ask "make a plot with such and such data, one line per " etc. Since its so east to validate the code (just run the program and look at the plots) iterations are super easy