Hacker News: _mocha

New comment by _mocha in "Localsend: An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop"

_mocha — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 01:33:39 +0000

I'm retired now, but love seeing the new generation tackle age old problems. I built something similar to this (albeit, close sourced) about 12 years ago. It was called "bullet" and was aimed at transferring text based content using a custom stickies app.

New comment by _mocha in "Owning a Domain Increases Digital Self-Reliance"

_mocha — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 03:26:19 +0000

I wouldn’t necessarily agree. I owned a few domains related to my name (e.g., variants of .com), but nothing as obsessive as what Steven Wolfram is known for, and I’ve probably owned them for as long as domains have been available. I never found much utility in it. Toward the end of my career, I considered using one as a professional profile not tied to LinkedIn, but I wouldn’t say it was a better use of my time than spending it with my grandkids. Many people in our industry could benefit from stepping away from creating work solely to stand out and instead enjoying their free time.

New comment by _mocha in "The most banned books in U.S. schools"

_mocha — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 21:05:27 +0000

France bans hijabs in schools, so there's certainly more work left across the pond...

New comment by _mocha in "Stackoverflow Outage"

_mocha — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:31 +0000

I'm a top 5% contributor to SO with around 300-400 answers (haven't actively answered a question in a while). One of the highlights of my career was seeing people benefit from those answers, post commentary, and update my answers. In the last year, there's actually been 0 engagement on all of my questions. One of the rare/sad aspects of how ChatGPT has impacted our community.

New comment by _mocha in "Becoming a compiler engineer"

_mocha — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 10:46:20 +0000

This is honestly one of the worst blog posts I've ever read, and probably does a disservice to representing MIT grads (who shaped my entire career 20-30 years ago). Anyways, as someone who was in this space, my 2 pieces of advice are: 1) either get a PhD in the field (and Apple would pick you up relatively easily) 2) have a small history of contributing to languages like rust, go or be prominent on the clang committees, llvm, ghc.

At least up until 5 years ago, the bar to join compiler teams was relatively low and all it required was some demonstration of effort and a few commits.

(Disclosure: am retired now)

New comment by _mocha in "SierraDB: A distributed event store built in Rust"

_mocha — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 17:51:05 +0000

I've wanted to do this for the last 7 years and never got around to it. Couldn't be more proud that you put in the grit to bring this to fruition!

New comment by _mocha in "We put a coding agent in a while loop"

_mocha — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:27:35 +0000

I'm retired from the industry, and posts like these take me back to the early days of cybersecurity (where people memorized scripts). Talking with my nephews and nieces, I can already tell that many new grads struggle with fundamentals—things like choosing the right data types and containers for short-lived strings, understanding how memory allocation works, or even marginally improving a basic hashing function. I worry the next decade will bring an influx of undertrained engineers.

New comment by _mocha in "Writing memory efficient C structs"

_mocha — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:05:47 +0000

I'm somewhat surprised to see this on the front page of HN. I distinctly remember this material being covered in a single lecture during our freshman CS course 20 years ago. I doubt this would've reached the front page in HN's early days, and it makes me wonder if we've moved away from teaching these fundamentals due to the heavy reliance on abstraction and ai agents in today's industry.