Hacker News: andy800

New comment by andy800 in "OpenJDK: Panama"

andy800 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:29:02 +0000

Really cool, thanks.

New comment by andy800 in "OpenJDK: Panama"

andy800 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:39:24 +0000

Part of Panama is the Vector API, currently in "incubation". Kotlin Notebooks are a great dataframe alternative to pandas or polars in Python (and dplyr in R), and work fine for relatively small data sets, but are indeed slower when dealing with calculations on large data. Vectors should reduce that gap significantly.

New comment by andy800 in "Doctorow: American tech cartels use apps to break the law"

andy800 — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 17:06:20 +0000

Sorry, not giving McDonald's a pass. They have a large team of data scientists and technologists working on their app and customer data. Even with a massive base, running a query to find individuals whose spend has dropped 50% y-o-y is not too difficult, and should be an urgent priority at a company that reported "negative comparable guest counts" (i.e. fewer customers y-o-y) for fiscal 2024.

New comment by andy800 in "Doctorow: American tech cartels use apps to break the law"

andy800 — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 01:13:13 +0000

They must be doing a very poor job of optimizing their marketing. I had a long history or ordering the same items using the same "deal", dozens of times a year. They removed that deal and my spend at McDonald's dropped 90%. I didn't place a single order for 6 months - unprecedented. Have the noticed? Have they adjusted their marketing towards me? Did they bring back that deal or offer alternative promotions on the same items? No, no, and no. The purpose of apps and big data and especially AI is to be able to achieve the goal of 1-to-1 marketing based on individual preferences and patterns. Yet it appears a massive corporation like McDonald's is unable to achieve any of these goals, it's just continuing "mass marketing" - same deals to huge portions of their customer base, without differentiation - the same as the 1990's.

I admit to being especially sensitive since I worked in personalized loyalty marketing for nearly 20 years, so failures and missed opportunities really annoy me as both a customer and practician of the art.

New comment by andy800 in "Mesh: I tried Htmx, then ditched it"

andy800 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 19:51:45 +0000

"top talent" lol

New comment by andy800 in "Tell HN: I kinda want to go back to Java"

andy800 — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 21:10:55 +0000

Honest question, going back to Java, dont you miss scope functions (let, apply, also, etc)? Extension functions? Using sealed classes and "when"? I am happy to see Java (and the JVM) improve but it still seems to be missing some of Kotlin's best language features.

New comment by andy800 in "Kotlin-Lsp: Kotlin Language Server and Plugin for Visual Studio Code"

andy800 — Thu, 22 May 2025 18:07:06 +0000

With the proliferation of JS, TS, Python, Go, etc, Kotlin is probably not even a thought for many young developers. Any efforts by JetBrains to bring Kotlin to where the people are at (as opposed to expecting people to come to IntelliJ) is welcomed. Call me a stan, whatever, but Kotlin is the best, most productive language I've ever used, by far. Yes, it takes some effort to understand how to effectively utilize some of its features, but once you do, productivity (and enjoyment) elevates tremendously.

New comment by andy800 in "There Was a Texas Lottery Arbitrage"

andy800 — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 23:48:38 +0000

Because you'd also have to submit the money it would cost to buy every combination, and also, you likely couldn't fit every ticket (tens of millions of combinations) with a realistic-looking ticket generation time (approx 1-5 seconds between each ticket created). i.e. if 50,000,000 tickets all had the same timestamp (or were off by nanoseconds) it would be a dead giveaway.

New comment by andy800 in "There Was a Texas Lottery Arbitrage"

andy800 — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 23:44:35 +0000

Tldr- about 20 years ago, when off-track betting systems were less sophisticated, an insider past-posted horse racing jackpot winners by waiting until the first 4 races of the Pick-6 were final before creating the ticket. They got busted and served time in federal prison because they had multiple winning tickets for the Breeders Cup Pick-6, basically the Super Bowl of horse racing, where scrutiny was extremely high.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Breeders%27_Cup_betting...

New comment by andy800 in "There Was a Texas Lottery Arbitrage"

andy800 — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 23:20:46 +0000

Organized crime ran very small, very basic "numbers" games that are the equivalent to the low-profile "Pick 3" or "Quick 4" games most states run. Hundreds, maybe a few thousand dollars of prizes. No organized crime ring paid out multi-million dollar jackpots -- this is entirely the invention of government lotteries and the private administration companies that run them, like G-Tech. When 8-digit jackpots weren't enough to draw desired participation, states joined together (MegaMillions, Powerball) to create 9- and even 10-digit jackpots.

New comment by andy800 in "Things you can do to clean up a fresh install of Windows 11 24H2 and Edge"

andy800 — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 23:17:49 +0000

Install StartAllBack and choose the Windows 7 theme. Even if you dont care about the other UI improvements like the older Start Menu, it's worth it just for the improvements to the clock and calendar - the analog clock especially.

New comment by andy800 in "Is the world becoming uninsurable?"

andy800 — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 08:01:02 +0000

you can either isolate the LA customers and charge them the "real" price of the risk, which will be unviable as a business

NOT lining up the premium with the actual risk is what's non-viable.

New comment by andy800 in "Modern JavaScript for Django developers"

andy800 — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 03:18:58 +0000

As a CEO of HTMX, I'm qualified to say that recursivedoubts is best described as a grug-brained developer.

https://grugbrain.dev/

New comment by andy800 in "Modern JavaScript for Django developers"

andy800 — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 01:34:53 +0000

Kotlin is an awesome back-end language with strong typing, tons of libraries and multiple HTTP frameworks (http4k, ktor, vert.x, many more) and templating options (jte is terrific, and fully typed). Guessing it's too late to switch now but worth checking out.

New comment by andy800 in "Modern JavaScript for Django developers"

andy800 — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 01:28:27 +0000

This is often why people get frustrated switching HTMX for the first time. The idea isn't to "translate" the code, but to completely rethink concepts like state and pages and things like components. Not everyone is able to conceptualize their application outside the boundaries of a specific framework.

New comment by andy800 in "Modern JavaScript for Django developers"

andy800 — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 01:20:55 +0000

Somewhat pedantic - Using HTMX represents a modern approach to building a web front-end. However, I'm confident that recursivedoubts (creator of HTMX) would agree HTMX is not itself written in modern Javascript. No Typescript, no modules, no functional programming, no async, etc.

https://htmx.org/essays/no-build-step/

New comment by andy800 in "All clocks are 30 seconds late"

andy800 — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 07:34:52 +0000

I'm simply communicating the point of the article. Take it up with the author if you don't like it or don't agree. And he'll tell you that if sub-minute precision is necessary (i.e. someone would be reprimanded for being under 30 seconds late to a meeting) the simple solution is to include a second hand on those clocks, and there won't be any confusion. (Of course, what's the likelihood of a basic office wall clock being accurate to within 30 seconds anyway, but that's a whole other rabbit hole)

New comment by andy800 in "I got OpenTelemetry to work. But why was it so complicated?"

andy800 — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 23:01:49 +0000

Not sure about this, I think the vendors were happy with their own proprietary code, agents and backends because the lock-in ensures that switching costs (in terms of writing all new code) are very high.

New comment by andy800 in "Magic/tragic email links: don't make them the only option"

andy800 — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 20:26:39 +0000

This can work in a lot of industries - I am skeptical fast food is one of them. Switching costs are low, alternates are plentiful, and collecting information (reviewing deals/prices across companies) is relatively easy.

If McDonald's enshittifies its deals while continuing to raise prices, it's way too easy for loyal customers to go elsewhere. I'm saying this as a huge fan and extremely loyal customer of McDonald's for decades... they are at serious risk of losing people like me. As I stated, I've gone from 15-20 visits to 1 since last June/July, whenever they made the big change.

New comment by andy800 in "Magic/tragic email links: don't make them the only option"

andy800 — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 20:20:35 +0000

Perhaps. Let's assume that the value meals is a massive hit and they are collecting far more revenue from customers who like it, than they are losing from people like me.

That's the whole point of data analytics and personalized marketing - even if the value meal works for most people they can still go back to sending me the offers and promotions I responded to previously, in an attempt to reverse my recent decline in spend/visitation. The app makes it possible to send individualized offers. There shouldn't be an entire "B" group where they just say, oh well.