Hacker News: amackera

New comment by amackera in "Show HN: Rails UI"

amackera — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 20:28:47 +0000

I'm generally in favor of "Show HN" posts that are products, but this post just seems like blatant advertising.

New comment by amackera in "Formally verifying Advent of Code using Dijkstra's program construction"

amackera — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 23:47:05 +0000

To me it seems more like a lot of _thinking_ just to save a tiny bit of thinking.

It was a fun read though, and obviously this exercise is not about efficiency so much as exploring an interesting idea.

New comment by amackera in "Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files"

amackera — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:10:14 +0000

TOS != law

They will stop letting you use the service. That's the recourse for breaking the TOS.

New comment by amackera in "How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not"

amackera — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 02:04:35 +0000

Can you expand on why you avoid Rails? I'm legitimately curious!

Edit: I see your other replies, nvm!

New comment by amackera in "Heroku Is Down"

amackera — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 17:33:06 +0000

Very worrying. This outage is serious and we're getting almost nothing from the official channels.

New comment by amackera in "Void: Open-source Cursor alternative"

amackera — Thu, 08 May 2025 17:12:56 +0000

I've got a great setup going with Emacs and Aidermacs[1]. I just can't stand using VS Code, it's impossible to configure to my liking.

[1]: https://github.com/MatthewZMD/aidermacs

New comment by amackera in "Firing Myself"

amackera — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 20:53:25 +0000

Less "Firing yourself" and more like liberating yourself from a toxic unprofessional clown show.

New comment by amackera in "Temporal Python – A durable, distributed asyncio event loop (2023)"

amackera — Thu, 09 May 2024 17:42:24 +0000

I love Temporal-- we use it at my company. It's very very good for our use case, but took a while to understand how to use it. We're still figuring things out (Workflow versioning is one thing we suck at still).

That said, I'm not sure why this post from 2023 was posted here today. There've been multiple updates to the Python SDK since this post.

New comment by amackera in "Show HN: Bumpgen – upgrade NPM packages using AI"

amackera — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 14:58:07 +0000

This is the kind of gen AI that I can really get behind. Great repo and easy to understand with the attached video. Is such a thing possible for Python? Or does the AST parser and code planner work best with static typing?

New comment by amackera in "Peter principle"

amackera — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 05:00:27 +0000

People aren't static, nor are companies or roles within them. Treating every person as unchanging and treating the requirements of each level in the hierarchy as unchanging are just plain bad assumptions to make.

People grow. Companies change.

This book was meant as satire, and the fact that so many people take it as fact is honestly quite concerning.

New comment by amackera in "Vancouver’s new mega-development is big, ambitious and Indigenous"

amackera — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 21:12:13 +0000

Part of the point of reconciliation is to accept unequivocally the sovereignty of indigenous peoples. Is it not morally questionable to ignore indigenous peoples' sovereign rights (over fishing, forests, lands, etc.) as we have been doing up until now?

New comment by amackera in "Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic"

amackera — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 09:07:58 +0000

And hopefully all of us plebs as well? I might be too optimistic about the future of AI.

New comment by amackera in "Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic"

amackera — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 09:06:27 +0000

This sounds nice, and the information on https://www.anthropic.com/company seems to back up your claim, but do you know of anything on Anthropic's corporate governance level that will help ensure this mission is followed (forever)?

The profit motive is _very_ resilient. Right now I will take it on face value that it's fuel for the ethical mission, but in the future that might change. It's far (far) more likely that the ethical mission will change than the profit motive will change.

More funding doesn't change it, it just raises the stakes.

New comment by amackera in "Ask HN: Is SICP/HtDP still worth reading in 2023? Any alternatives?"

amackera — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 16:40:55 +0000

SICP is an amazing book that will make you a better programmer, but might not help you with the task of writing better professional Python programs. If you aspire to understand computing systems from first-principles, there's no better resource that SICP. I've read it multiple times and I learn something new each time.

Do the exercises too!

New comment by amackera in "You can't stop the business, or why rewrites fail"

amackera — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 21:29:43 +0000

I'm failing to see how the rewrite you mentioned delivered any value _to Netscape_.

New comment by amackera in "You can't stop the business, or why rewrites fail"

amackera — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 21:23:54 +0000

Right, but sort of the point of this article is that launching a long rewrite that delivers no value doesn't help the business aka it's NOT everybody working together. It's the tech team going off working by themselves.

New comment by amackera in "Outlook now ignores Windows' Default Browser and opens links in Edge by default"

amackera — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 14:29:48 +0000

They also reinforce their reputation of using dark UI patterns hostile to their paying customers.

This type of thing doesn't come for free, IMO. There's a cost to this, even if they don't pay it in the short term.

New comment by amackera in "Their Crypto Company Collapsed. They Went to Bali"

amackera — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 17:30:02 +0000

Still waiting for the string of articles about the superyachts that all the bank executives bought after the 2009 bailouts.

/sarcasm

New comment by amackera in "Flutter Web: A Fractal of Bad Design (2020)"

amackera — Fri, 05 May 2023 14:37:45 +0000

Do any of the web accessibility issues come up for other platforms as well? How does the iOS screenreader handle Flutter-generated views on iOS?

"It doesn't seem like the Semantic HTML issue will ever be solved too, the Flutter team did mention in the latest conference that they're aiming it more to be used for web apps than websites."

I'm not sure I understand the distinction between web apps and web sites. Don't both of those experiences need to be accessible?

Thanks for sharing your input! Helpful to hear from folks actually using the tech and not just arm-chair analysis.

New comment by amackera in "Ageing studies in five animals suggests how to reverse decline"

amackera — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 21:52:37 +0000

A feature for who?