Hacker News: andreimackenzie

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling"

andreimackenzie — Thu, 21 May 2026 01:56:50 +0000

Fair enough. I use plenty of disposable stuff in other contexts.

The habitual part is what makes a difference for me with my local coffee shop. I usually walk over around midday when I WFH, mostly to move around and re-energize for the second half of the day. Since I know I will be coming right home after, it is easy for me to adjust my ritual to include the cup.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Tracking Starbucks' 'widely recyclable' cups: none ended up at recycling"

andreimackenzie — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:48:13 +0000

My local Starbucks offers a 10 cents discount and extra loyalty points for bringing your own cup. I've started bringing an insulated one that keeps coffee hot for longer & doesn't sweat with an iced beverage. I seldom see others bringing their own cups, even regulars I see there every week, even when Starbucks themselves sell reusable cups. It is almost like there is a weird stigma about handing the barista something that doesn't come from behind the counter. I encourage trying it, especially if you visit the same coffee shop habitually like I do.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Photos: New Phoenix Microcenter is a 'tech-heaven' for geeks"

andreimackenzie — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 03:18:33 +0000

The Cambridge, MA location still has an aisle of keyboards and mice outside of their packaging. It's very nice to be able to hold and feel those peripherals as part of the shopping experience.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year"

andreimackenzie — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 21:56:59 +0000

From my experience: re-orgs and limiting backfills for attrition can lead to these awkward states. Someone starts off with a sensible number of directs, but it can devolve over time.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Google is illegally monopolizing online advertising tech, judge rules"

andreimackenzie — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 19:28:52 +0000

> In limiting the number of bidders, Google inflated the prices for ad inventory.

This part doesn't make sense to me. Limiting bidders should drive the price down, because fewer advertisers are competing for the same potential ad impression. The article describes Google's influence as "Google controls the auction-style system," which is a bit more open-ended about the specific alleged practices.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Google edits Super Bowl ad for AI that featured false information"

andreimackenzie — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 15:07:08 +0000

I think it does because a researcher can pick up context about the quality of their sources through the course of web research. The BigCo chatbot AIs are marketed to represent that BigCo, and people generally trust Google, in this case. It's good when they cite sources, but a major point of the chatbot is to abstract that legwork for most people.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Quiet Quitting: Why Employees Are Demanding Fairness and Boundaries"

andreimackenzie — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 23:28:13 +0000

"Lack of obstacles" really resonates. If we're talking about software dev, it's fun to get into a flow state and solve problems. Whether you actually get to do that at a BigCo seems like a roll of the dice. For every team that seems happy & effective, there are two encumbered by lack of agency, bureaucracy, pointless meetings, etc. Most people who got into software dev will work hard when there is actually something to do that is fun and engaging.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Hit men aren't what you think"

andreimackenzie — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 03:55:14 +0000

Most people don't decide about their own medical "needs." They trust doctors, who are by and large expert and professional, yet frequently discredited by insurance companies.

Insurance companies have too much power in this dynamic, and there should be limits to what they can deny once doctors deem it needed.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson"

andreimackenzie — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 04:25:44 +0000

I would be surprised if they don't already do this. The question is how big a buffer to trade off for delay...

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Writing secure Go code"

andreimackenzie — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 15:31:11 +0000

A lot of BigCo people's (myself included) perception of Java is tainted by the challenges of old, inherited code bases. Java has been ubiquitous for a long time, and it's not surprising to accumulate code bases that have been underserved maintenance-wise over the years. Updating dependencies on a Java 8 codebase isn't much fun, especially because semvar wasn't widely followed back in those days.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction"

andreimackenzie — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 16:52:21 +0000

Early-in-career folks are more vulnerable. Even before major family/life costs start to play a role, it can be difficult to save enough for a safety net after moving to an apartment (even w/ roommates) from college & managing student debt, etc. I remember it took me a couple of years of stability to not feel at risk.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says"

andreimackenzie — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 01:51:49 +0000

I've observed that the quality of third-party SDKs for Microsoft office formats improved substantially. The .xls format was notoriously fickle to process or produce from outside of Excel. As of .xlsx, the open source community produced myriad SDKs in various languages, and the ones I have experience with worked quite well. The format becoming less arcane and better documented was important to enable this.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL"

andreimackenzie — Thu, 30 May 2024 19:10:49 +0000

Assuming the query language for the graph DB you have in mind is declarative like SQL, I recommend templated queries. I have found this technique scales pretty well for query complexity, makes it relatively trivial to "get to the query" if something needs to be debugged in the details more easily outside of the app, and it makes performance-oriented optimization work far easier.

I've had my share of headaches with the various flavors of ORM and GraphQL and always come back to query templates, e.g. MyBatis in the JVM ecosystem or Go's template package. There is still value in abstracting this from the REST web service interface to make it possible to change the app<->database connection without disrupting REST clients. It's possible to reuse parameter structs/classes between the REST client and DB+template client layers to avoid a lot of rote translation. It seems simple and repetitive, but actually saves time compared to the GraphQL/ORM complexity as apps & query complexity scale, in my experience.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Go Enums Suck"

andreimackenzie — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 19:09:04 +0000

Simplicity is a feature. Sure, how complicated can effective enums really be, but Go's general philosophy is to think hard (& sometimes for a long time) before adding every bell and whistle.

I have a far easier time delving in to previously unknown Go code for the first time compared to something like Scala (or even Java). Go is a solid language for those who value that and want to enable the experience for others.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Winding down Google Sync and Less Secure Apps support"

andreimackenzie — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 21:45:25 +0000

About 10 years ago we set up a pretty slick integration from our office wifi controller to Google's account directory using WebDAV and Radius. It allowed us to have a WAP for insiders who could authenticate with their Google-issued one-time-passwords (needed because normally a Google login requires MFA if configured) and access our internal network with their individual Google accounts (no sharing of wifi credentials; no separate wifi login to manage for offboarding).

It was certainly Less Secure by modern standards, but it saved a boatload of time for everyone to be right on our internal network as soon as they connected to wifi instead of having to VPN in.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "The Twelve-Factor App (2011)"

andreimackenzie — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 00:43:33 +0000

Agree. The main benefit of environment variables is portability. They work pretty much the same way in every platform I have encountered. As soon as a system gets into files, it's possible to get bogged down in the complexity of Windows vs. Unix, file permissions, SELinux, etc. The simplicity is often worthwhile over the extra security theoretically possible with well-managed files.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Twitch.tv Lays of 400 Employees"

andreimackenzie — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 01:15:45 +0000

Advertisers not spending as much

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Equifax used records it collects from companies to fire employees with 2nd jobs"

andreimackenzie — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 02:58:10 +0000

I wondered about this exact risk as I learned about the "overemployed" phenomenon. It feels like a matter of time before credit bureaus offer this as a service to the many corps that already pay them for credit checks. It's hard to be legitimately employed without a data trail these days.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Scala isn't fun anymore"

andreimackenzie — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 13:03:47 +0000

I've really enjoyed Golang for this reason. The powers that be take a cautious approach before adding major new stuff, even when the community complains loudly about lack of important features (e.g. generics for many years until recently). Go code I've written years ago is easy to adapt to new versions and ways of doing things, even when I have to switch gears to others languages for months/years at a time. Go is predictable.

New comment by andreimackenzie in "Build your career on dirty work"

andreimackenzie — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 19:41:13 +0000

How estimation is marketed matters, too. Don't let your stakeholders think of it as an over-estimate. It's an estimate that considers the needs of the full software development lifecycle: automating tests, developing monitoring, refactoring to clean up old tech debt, etc.