Hacker News: bcoughlan

New comment by bcoughlan in "Richard Stallman on ChatGPT"

bcoughlan — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 03:37:29 +0000

Perhaps we are putting human intelligence on a pedestal. I have often caught myself having a supposedly original idea only to find I inherited it from something I read months before.

We are mostly autocomplete with a mild capacity to synthesise new ideas. It’s the network effect of communicating that creates the feedback loops which amplify our collective intelligence.

Also if you think intelligent life has to have a regard for truth, not just a regard for self, tune in to any news channel.

New comment by bcoughlan in "37signals Says Goodbye to AWS: Full S3 Migration and $10M in Projected Savings"

bcoughlan — Fri, 09 May 2025 14:07:00 +0000

Something an older and wiser programmer taught me, is to think of the infrastructure costs as a per-user cost. These numbers look enormous next to my bank balance, but if you save 500k per year to service 1 million users, it's nothing to your bottom line.

Meanwhile there's the opportunity cost of moving. All of the people who put effort into this migration, who could otherwise be building something revenue-generating. I think that's why in many companies cloud costs are a problem, but never enough to make it high up the backlog.

New comment by bcoughlan in "TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale"

bcoughlan — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 12:54:44 +0000

I’m talking youtube-dl and VLC player. No YouTube logos, no concept of what YouTube even is.

Even the sidebar of recommendations is a dark pattern for a 3 year old. Unlike Netflix etc where you have to exit the video to browse something else.

New comment by bcoughlan in "TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale"

bcoughlan — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 15:56:55 +0000

I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid.

So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site. Works for my 3.5 year old, not sure the plan when they outgrow it.

New comment by bcoughlan in "The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine"

bcoughlan — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 21:31:03 +0000

I would guess it comes down to that the best researchers in the world want their work out in the open

New comment by bcoughlan in "The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done"

bcoughlan — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 14:09:50 +0000

I'm nearly certain that the images and the text are AI generated from other sources and perhaps tweaked a bit. The headings are the giveaway. Low signal-to-noise ratio.

Google search results is full of this stuff, but first time seeing it at the top of HN

New comment by bcoughlan in "The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE"

bcoughlan — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 23:15:37 +0000

As a non-american I also thought the same. Reading a synopsis of evidence completely changed my mind [1]. Pipe bombs planted at party headquarters to divert the police, maps of tunnels under the Capitol building and so on. Not amateur stuff.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_of_the_January_6_Unit...

New comment by bcoughlan in "Show HN: App that asks ‘why?’ every time you unlock your phone"

bcoughlan — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 21:05:55 +0000

Can't uninstall the browser, and occasionally it's needed for legit reasons. I quite literally can't resist drifting towards mindless scrolling apps, though I know that's hard to fathom for some people.

New comment by bcoughlan in "Show HN: App that asks ‘why?’ every time you unlock your phone"

bcoughlan — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 14:03:25 +0000

My approach for iPhone:

- Set time limits on apps. - Block App Store. - Set a Screen Time pin, then forget it.

Downside: if you need to install a new app, you need to do a iTunes backup, factory reset and restore the backup,. Also apps won't continue to update with this approach.

Worth it though. I don't miss wasting 10-20 hours a week on brain rot apps.

New comment by bcoughlan in "Backlog size is inversely proportional to how often we talk to customers"

bcoughlan — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:47:30 +0000

On the flip side, putting a ticket on the backlog knowing it will never be high enough priority to be done is an effective way to manage people's feelings without outright nopeing their idea.

New comment by bcoughlan in "Drawing.garden"

bcoughlan — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 01:33:02 +0000

Then you would love https://theuselessweb.com/

New comment by bcoughlan in "Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?"

bcoughlan — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 09:58:11 +0000

I made a tool to generate command line clients from OpenAPI definitions out of pure frustration from trying to stitch together incantations of curl commands to work with APIs.

I haven't revisited it in a while, and the docs could probably do with some love, but I use it every day.

[1] https://github.com/bcoughlan/openapi-commander

New comment by bcoughlan in "The Bogus CVE Problem"

bcoughlan — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 12:23:50 +0000

The solution at my workplace is a bot that opens PRs to bump dependencies and automatically merges if the tests pass.

It's taken a lot of workload off devs to meet security targets. But I worry it makes supply-chain attacks more attractive. If an attacker can compromise a package and it's instantly merged into the codebases of thousands of different companies that's a huge danger.

New comment by bcoughlan in "Linear code is more readable"

bcoughlan — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 09:00:40 +0000

This was always my interpretation of "Flat is better than nested." from "The Zen of Python".

I often run into conflict with developers who believe in the single return statement. This is flatter but irks a lot of devs:

if (!condition) {

  return

}

more code

return

New comment by bcoughlan in "Death by a Thousand Microservices"

bcoughlan — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 07:42:20 +0000

Starting with a monolith is nearly always great advice. However, monoliths tend towards spaghetti because it's too easy essentially to draw new lines on the architecture diagram by importing from anywhere.

To scale a monolith codebase without devolving into spaghetti you need to have a well defined layered structure for modules. The other aspect is being able to hide internal code to prevent it being imported by other modules.

I did a write-up a while ago about how we do this on my current project [1], and published the Maven enforcer rule and ArchUnit test example as an open source project [2].

[1] https://bcoughlan.github.io/posts/modulithic-architecture/ [2] https://github.com/bcoughlan/base-package-enforcer-rule/ https://github.com/bcoughlan/base-package-enforcer-rule/blob...

New comment by bcoughlan in "Scientists may have found mechanism behind cognitive decline in aging"

bcoughlan — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 12:47:28 +0000

Strength training is so good for desk jobbers! I recommend joining some small group circuit training or CrossFit groups, where the trainers will show you how to lift correctly and safely.

New comment by bcoughlan in "Myths about Cooking with Salt"

bcoughlan — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 09:54:46 +0000

I stopped adding salt in my cooking when I had to cook for a young baby. Pleasantly surprised to find I didn't miss it much, and pretty soon my tastebuds reset and when I eat out everything tastes wayyy too salty.

New comment by bcoughlan in "The Fall of Stack Overflow"

bcoughlan — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 09:40:50 +0000

I used to follow topics to try to answer questions. It's a great way to learn a topic in depth. But I find that the bulk of questions about {topic} have already been asked, and the stream of questions are like "How do I get {topic} to work with {other niche tool}?". The Venn diagram of people who know both topics is way smaller. If you want an answer, narrowing the question to a single topic really helps.

But I have asked a few questions, and the quality of answers have really declined, mainly because people are rushing to answer and not reading the question. They could address this by delaying voting on answers.

New comment by bcoughlan in "Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)"

bcoughlan — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 09:23:51 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Modulithic Architecture

bcoughlan — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 22:07:13 +0000

Article URL: https://bcoughlan.github.io/posts/modulithic-architecture/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854922

Points: 2

# Comments: 0