Hacker News: alex_smart

New comment by alex_smart in "The Emacsification of Software"

alex_smart — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:25:49 +0000

Which is where the "emacsification" analogy breaks for me.

The reason people who like emacs write their one-off program in emacs is that it is an extraordinarily introspectable and debuggable programming environment. There is no "code, compile, run" loop - you just write code against the live running environment. Devoid of that fast feedback loop, writing code just isn't as much fun.

New comment by alex_smart in "Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)"

alex_smart — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:21:22 +0000

That is because the terminology (and the keybindings) come from the Emacs tradition, not vim. Most shells come with “vim mode” as well, but at least in my experience, the dual mode editing paradigm of does not feel like a good fit for the shell.

New comment by alex_smart in "Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)"

alex_smart — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:43:24 +0000

> US has privacy laws in place that will protect you

They don't protect us at all. Thanks to Snowden, we all know that the US government has extremely sophisticated and wide-ranging ability to get access to any data we share with American companies.

> but China is worse

And why so?

New comment by alex_smart in "Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)"

alex_smart — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:40:16 +0000

The original comment was neither false dichotomy nor whataboutism. It was a simple point that the rest of the world is already used to their data being snooped by the US government. So apart from US exceptionalism, there is no particular reason they would be especially alarmed by the prospect of their data being sent to "Chinese servers".

New comment by alex_smart in "Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)"

alex_smart — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:37:59 +0000

Getting snooped on by the US government being so normalized is obviously not propaganda though? Right?

New comment by alex_smart in "Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)"

alex_smart — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:19:38 +0000

You overestimate how much the rest of the world cares about data being sent to “chinese servers”, when all this while our data was being sent to “American servers” anyways.

New comment by alex_smart in "“Your frustration is the product”"

alex_smart — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:56:30 +0000

> No print publication on the planet does this

At least in India, most popular newspapers actually do this nowadays. Several full page ads including on the front page have become the norm.

It is mostly a function of how little the reader is willing to pay for content. When the price point is too low (which for online content is too low), publishers make their money by other means. It is not rocket science.

New comment by alex_smart in "I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”"

alex_smart — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:02:29 +0000

It’s worth nothing, to the point it makes people wonder why you even volunteer that information.

New comment by alex_smart in "Ratchets in software development (2021)"

alex_smart — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:22:47 +0000

I know Jenkins is not fashionable these days, but the warnings-ng plugin is perfect for solving this in a tool-independent way. :chefskiss:

The way it works is - the underlying linter tool flags all the warnings, and the plugin helps you keep track of when any particular issue was introduced. You can add a quality gate to fail the build if any new issue was added in a merge request.

New comment by alex_smart in "How the Mayans were able to accurately predict solar eclipses for centuries"

alex_smart — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 08:18:56 +0000

If that is the case, why did the trial absolve him of all crimes and why did get consecrated as a bishop by the king of Spain?

New comment by alex_smart in "How the Mayans were able to accurately predict solar eclipses for centuries"

alex_smart — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 08:17:37 +0000

It is also worth noting that he was absolved of all crimes and eventually consecrated as a bishop.

New comment by alex_smart in "China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990"

alex_smart — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 14:36:25 +0000

India’s problems have nothing to do with population and everything to do with complete collapse of all government institutions.

New comment by alex_smart in "ChatGPT Atlas"

alex_smart — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 13:56:51 +0000

> Browser memories let ChatGPT remember useful details from your web browsing to provide better responses and suggestions, while maintaining privacy and user control. Users can opt-in during setup or in Settings > Personalization > Reference browser memories.

> As you browse in Atlas, web content is summarized on our servers. We apply safety and sensitive data filters that are designed to keep out personally identifiable information (like government IDs, SSNs, bank account numbers, online credentials, account recovery content, and addresses), and private data like medical records and financial information. We block summaries altogether on certain sensitive websites (like adult sites).

So the actual content of every page you visit is sent to ChatGPT servers. That is WAY more invasive than anything Chrome does afaik.

New comment by alex_smart in "We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3""

alex_smart — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 11:38:23 +0000

From the article, individual video segments were 2-6 MB in size and SQS and Kinesis have a 1MB limit for individual records so they couldn’t have used either service directly. At least not without breaking their segments into even smaller chunks.

New comment by alex_smart in "Scripts I wrote that I use all the time"

alex_smart — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 07:39:15 +0000

It's an omz thing.

New comment by alex_smart in "Rating 26 years of Java changes"

alex_smart — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 14:34:21 +0000

So goalpost moved from “libraries can solve visibility problem with package level visibility” to “libraries should not try to solve the visibility problem because it is not even a problem at all”?

New comment by alex_smart in "Rating 26 years of Java changes"

alex_smart — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 08:40:22 +0000

Compare with the functionality offered by async job systems of other full stack frameworks - eg django with celery and rails with solid-queue. It’s not even close.

I am on the latest version of Spring Boot.

New comment by alex_smart in "Rating 26 years of Java changes"

alex_smart — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 07:41:43 +0000

> Many libraries can solve visibility problem with package level visibility

The only way of doing this would be to put all classes in the same package. Any nontrivial library would have hundreds of classes. How is that a practical solution?

New comment by alex_smart in "Rating 26 years of Java changes"

alex_smart — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 18:47:11 +0000

I was making exactly the point that you can use your own libraries along with a batteries included framework like Spring Boot.

I don't even understand what the source of confusion is. I literally said exactly the same thing in the comment you first you replied to.

New comment by alex_smart in "Rating 26 years of Java changes"

alex_smart — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 16:19:03 +0000

> you did start this with writing your own

I really did not. I only said that if you were to create your own cronService, you can reuse it by creating your library rather than copy pasting code (which is obviously insane).

> which is about as insane as writing your own database driver

No, it is not. Spring Boot’s support for async jobs and scheduled jobs is lacking. A lot of people roll their own. Including yours truly.

It is also much easier than writing a database driver so there is that.