Hacker News: akhleung

New comment by akhleung in "If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?"

akhleung — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 12:19:59 +0000

For about a year back in 2003-2004, I only had dial-up internet, no TV, and no social media (because it didn't exist yet). It was the most productive and creative time of my life. Then I got broadband, and I never reached those highs again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New comment by akhleung in "Amazon to end commingling after years of complaints from brands and sellers"

akhleung — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 04:15:05 +0000

I once was the victim of an empty box scam when I purchased an expensive item off Amazon a few years ago (luckily I got a refund), and since then I've used Amazon much less, and only for inexpensive things. Maybe enough people have reduced their spending such that Amazon has been forced to take notice.

New comment by akhleung in "Is Robert Frost Even a Good Poet?"

akhleung — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 22:30:20 +0000

  > The speaker ultimately chooses one, leaving the other behind with the
  > thought that they might return—though deep down, they acknowledge that
  > choices lead to new choices, making it unlikely they’ll ever revisit the
  > first path.

Not unlike TODO comments! An interesting analogy for life in general.

New comment by akhleung in "Ask HN: Is Inflation Affecting You?"

akhleung — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 00:20:59 +0000

Luckily, Pepsi products are much cheaper in my area; 2L bottles regularly go on sale for 3/$5, or even 4/$5. Coke seems to be the super premium brand around here for some reason.

New comment by akhleung in "Ask HN: Is Inflation Affecting You?"

akhleung — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 23:55:30 +0000

I've noticed it mostly at the supermarket. E.g., Coca Cola products are much more expensive than they were at the beginning of the year, and they're never on sale anymore. Certain meats and vegetables are noticeably more expensive too. Aside from that, I luckily haven't been affected too much (yet), as my energy and fuel consumption is relatively low. I'll be surprised if my HOA fee doesn't get raised again next year, though.

New comment by akhleung in "Ask HN: Are you in a senior role and relocated far from HQ since pandemic?"

akhleung — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 07:20:35 +0000

I’m in a senior role working for an SF company, and my permanent address is in the Bay Area. Although I haven’t relocated per se, I work from the EU for months at a time because my partner lives there. It’s occasionally inconvenient for me because meetings occur when it’s evening / nighttime in Europe —- sometimes quite late —- but fortunately I don’t have too many such meetings, and I’m a night owl anyway. For coding tasks, sometimes it can actually work out better because I can do my day’s tasks before anyone in the US is awake, then submit my PRs, attend my standups, and sign off. Sometimes it works out worse because if I’m waiting on a code review or need help during the daytime in Europe, it won’t come till nighttime. And of course there are the random times when someone in the US legitimately needs to chat with me near bedtime etc. I do believe that being so remote so often means that I wouldn’t be a good fit for roles that require more leadership, because the time zone difference makes it hard to maintain a very high level of responsive communication and availability, particularly when it comes to meetings and chat. However, I’ve more or less accepted it for now as a reasonable trade-off of being a bit of a digital nomad.

New comment by akhleung in "Jet Li rejected The Matrix as he didn’t want his kung fu moves recorded (2018)"

akhleung — Sat, 17 Jul 2021 12:11:04 +0000

You might be thinking of the Kuleshov effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect

New comment by akhleung in "Ask HN: What should I say to my manager when my performance starts suffering?"

akhleung — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 10:42:17 +0000

I think the analogy is that software engineering used to be like carpentry and woodworking, but now it's more like assembling Ikea furniture. Sure, the final result is the same from a purely practical point of view, but if you learned and loved the former, then it definitely feels like something has been lost in the latter.

New comment by akhleung in "‘Tokenized’: Black Workers’ Struggles at Coinbase"

akhleung — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 03:43:34 +0000

I think you might be overlooking the fact that bias comes in different forms against different groups. E.g., a hypothetical racist might be comfortable around Asians because he thinks they're subservient and weak, whereas he might be uncomfortable around black people because he thinks they're angry and violent. If this hypothetical racist ran a company, it's plausible he'd hire Asians, but not hire black people at all.

New comment by akhleung in "'Drinkable' Potato Chips: The Products Keeping Your Phone Grease-Free"

akhleung — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:44:16 +0000

I use chopsticks to eat potato chips. I find that it works pretty well for keeping my keyboard grease-free. (And spoons are good for popcorn, btw.)

New comment by akhleung in "What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)"

akhleung — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 16:59:35 +0000

Heh, when I was a kid I used to draw a lot, and I remember being bothered that I didn't know how to draw a bike, so back then I explicitly memorized the shapes (parallelogram in the back, and another line for the front wheels). Wonder if that's common for doodlers.

New comment by akhleung in "Show HN: SCSS live editing with Sublime Text"

akhleung — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 21:04:43 +0000

LibSass maintainer here -- it's really great to see another project pick it up, and although we're aware that we still have a fair bit of catching up to do, things like this give us all the more incentive!

New comment by akhleung in "Libsass – C implementation of a Sass compiler"

akhleung — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 06:56:50 +0000

Ah, that's because Travis is running all of the "to-do" tests as well. Reorganizing the tests and making Travis happy is ... well, it's on the to-do list.

New comment by akhleung in "Libsass – C implementation of a Sass compiler"

akhleung — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 04:32:26 +0000

We do want to support the indented syntax eventually (and I believe it should be possible with a relatively simple pre-processing step), but it's still a low priority compared to reaching feature parity with the canonical implementation.

New comment by akhleung in "Libsass – C implementation of a Sass compiler"

akhleung — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 04:29:17 +0000

We did a lot of development during the summer (including a rewrite that was long overdue), so there were a few segfaults back then. The library should be pretty stable now though -- we've embedded it into our SDK and build system, and it's been working fine.

As for the parser -- that started out as an experiment of sorts. I wanted to do something like parser combinators (but for scanning), and I decided to templatize the whole thing so that all of the scanning code would be generated at compile-time. If I were to redo it, I'd probably use expression templates (which I didn't know about at the time).

New comment by akhleung in "Libsass – C implementation of a Sass compiler"

akhleung — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 02:39:20 +0000

Thanks, I'll give it a try and benchmark it. Also, pull requests are welcome for this sort of thing!

New comment by akhleung in "Libsass – C implementation of a Sass compiler"

akhleung — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 02:07:29 +0000

Yes, playing catch-up with Ruby Sass has been difficult (the sophistication and subtlety of some of Sass's features are impressive), but we're hoping to make some big leaps by the end of the year!

New comment by akhleung in "Libsass – C implementation of a Sass compiler"

akhleung — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 01:55:38 +0000

On huge projects, Ruby Sass can be quite slow, taking several seconds or even minutes to compile. If you have an interactive, iterative workflow where you're constantly refreshing the styles, having a faster Sass compiler can be a godsend.

New comment by akhleung in "State Machines"

akhleung — Tue, 15 May 2012 07:35:11 +0000

I once wrote a toy video-player program, and I was able to implement robust, interactive playback controls fairly cleanly by structuring it as a state machine.

New comment by akhleung in "A C implementation of a Sass compiler"

akhleung — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:05:52 +0000

There's a proof-of-concept Ruby gem, which will mature as libsass matures.

https://github.com/hcatlin/sassc-ruby