Hacker News: ampersandy

New comment by ampersandy in "Cloudflare claimed they implemented Matrix on Cloudflare workers. They didn't"

ampersandy — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:12:22 +0000

My take has nothing to do with charity to Cloudflare, but to the author. I can't help remembering that quote from the 50's where an IBM exec said they weren't going to fire an employee who made a costly mistake for the company, they just spent $$$ training them.

I think it's fair to assume, given the historical quality of the CF blog, that this was a (big) mistake by an individual, and not "Cloudflare", as an entity, making this claim.

New comment by ampersandy in "Cloudflare claimed they implemented Matrix on Cloudflare workers. They didn't"

ampersandy — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:13:41 +0000

My charitable read on this is that an individual vibe-coded both the post and repository and was able to publish to the Cloudflare blog without it actually being reviewed or vetted. They also are not an engineer and when the agent hallucinated “I have built and tested this and it is production grade,” they took it at face value.

You can tell since the code is in a public repository and not Cloudflare’s, which IMO is the big giveaway that this is a lesson for Cloudflare in having appropriate review processes for public comms and for the individual to avoid making claims they cannot substantiate or verify independently.

Meta: Automating Dead Code Cleanup

ampersandy — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 16:56:34 +0000

Article URL: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/10/24/data-infrastructure/automating-dead-code-cleanup/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38001914

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ampersandy in "Psytrance Guide"

ampersandy — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 13:16:16 +0000

Have any examples in mind of the “really good tracks?”

New comment by ampersandy in "Gallery – Making Molecules"

ampersandy — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 13:15:35 +0000

It looks like they've copied the template/page from a previous diagram file and forgot to remove one of the lines, probably just an accident.

New comment by ampersandy in "Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React"

ampersandy — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 11:53:07 +0000

Because users do not know that there's some hypothetical "better" experience they could have had and do not care, unless your service/tool/whatever is not functioning correctly. Prioritizing your employees' enjoyment and experience to deliver more, faster, and consistently, is in all likelihood a better decision than prioritizing some subjective improvement to user experience.

Of course there are exceptions. But it's definitely a hot take to say you should never prioritize DX over UX.

New comment by ampersandy in "Vim Boss"

ampersandy — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 18:11:47 +0000

The implied disagreement for why neovim exists to provide functionality that wouldn’t have been merged into vim.

New comment by ampersandy in "A child’s privacy is worth more than likes (2022)"

ampersandy — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 16:26:56 +0000

There’s a difference between “I don’t want any photos of my kids in a server anywhere” and “please don’t share pictures of my kids to other people unless we do it privately”, which your wife immediately violated by screenshotting an obviously private message.

Why the CIA destroys $10k watches agents receive as gifts

ampersandy — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 21:10:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/why-cia-destroys-10000-watches-given-agents-gifts-foreign-government-officials

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34940513

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by ampersandy in "How to prioritize tasks?"

ampersandy — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 14:47:33 +0000

It’s not prioritization if it doesn’t hurt.

New comment by ampersandy in "Code reviews need to shift-left"

ampersandy — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 11:57:34 +0000

I don't really buy the two main criticisms around code review. They're stated as intractable downsides but are really just cultural issues around how you perform code reviews.

If your coworkers are sending changes for review that don't explain why the changes are being made (and therefore provide the context), reject it until they write a proper summary/test plan that does explain it. You should review the "metadata" of changes before you ever review the code itself and if done well, you'll probably be able to guess what a lot of the incoming changes are before reviewing the code. This makes it easier to spot code that deviates from the stated purpose of the changes and can help identify faults in both understanding of the overall problem or the system being built, especially in more junior engineers.

If your coworkers are taking to long to review changes, work with your team to incentivize expedient code reviews, or talk to the people that aren't reviewing enough code to help everyone else get more done. You should also utilize a stack that lets you continue progressing with your work even when waiting for reviews (like stacked diffs).

New comment by ampersandy in "Graph showing level of Covid, flu and RSV in US wastewater systems, by city"

ampersandy — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 20:25:35 +0000

What about staying inside with cool/dry air causes these infections? Genuinely curious.

New comment by ampersandy in "FBI is hiding details about a raid on Americans’ safe deposit boxes"

ampersandy — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 21:14:46 +0000

> it was assuredly brought high up into the DoJ and approved.

The warrant was approved, but the issue at hand is that these safety deposit boxes were raided when "the warrant authorizing the raid explicitly forbade the FBI from seizing the safe deposit boxes or their contents."

New comment by ampersandy in "The History of ‘Ampersand’ (2020)"

ampersandy — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 14:32:16 +0000

I love learning more about the ampersand, for obvious reasons.

I've used this unixname for a long time and it's always immensely satisfying when people realize it's just my real name.

New comment by ampersandy in "The History of ‘Ampersand’ (2020)"

ampersandy — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 14:18:03 +0000

I would have used it! :)

New comment by ampersandy in "The Go Programming Language and Environment"

ampersandy — Tue, 31 May 2022 11:43:16 +0000

I really dislike this meme of pointing out that Google has deprecated a lot of projects. Do people actually expect Google to staff people & resources running every project they've released forever?

A more interesting comparison would be open source projects that Google has abandoned or failed to properly hand over control of to the community, especially if we're talking about Go.

New comment by ampersandy in "Ask HN: Does your team use feature flags?"

ampersandy — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 20:49:52 +0000

You can totally implement A/B tests on top of a feature-flag framework. Your “pass” function should be hashed on the User ID/Cookie/whatever and then you can distribute users into pass/fail. You should do this anyway for reproducibility. If you log whether they passed/failed and then have metrics, you compute experimental results.

New comment by ampersandy in "Tinder just permabanned me or the problem with big tech"

ampersandy — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 08:57:58 +0000

Er, I don't really think dine-and-dashing is quite the same as being treated to your meal because you are on a date.

New comment by ampersandy in "Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps"

ampersandy — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 16:28:09 +0000

Do you have any resources on how you learned to create such loaders? I hacked together a custom loading animation for some tools I've built just using images & css transforms, but would love to learn to make things even slicker.

New comment by ampersandy in "Dracula Theme – A dark theme for many different apps"

ampersandy — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 09:05:33 +0000

You may like Tomorrow, which has several sub-themes and is available for dozens of apps. I use Tomorrow Night Bright for everything.

https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow-theme