Hacker News: biesnecker

New comment by biesnecker in "3.4M Solar Panels"

biesnecker — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:26:39 +0000

It had a very 90s/early-2000s tech blog feel to it. Only thing missing was his custom Gentoo build.

New comment by biesnecker in "Hungary's Viktor Orbán Concedes Defeat in Election"

biesnecker — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:56:01 +0000

Good riddance.

New comment by biesnecker in "The software engineers willing to pay $10k to help them land a coding job"

biesnecker — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 21:55:25 +0000

$10k is such an insanely small amount of money (compared to SWE salaries) for someone at a big tech company to risk their job for.

New comment by biesnecker in "U.K. demand for a back door to Apple data threatens Americans, lawmakers say"

biesnecker — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 20:24:43 +0000

This was the first example that popped to mind: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...

Not having Google accounts isn't the end of the world, but given the amount that many (most?) of us rely on their services (I think of all the accounts I have tied to my @gmail email and cringe, but still I'm there), this is fairly disasterous.

New comment by biesnecker in "Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China"

biesnecker — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 20:32:38 +0000

This. People tend not to realize how sprawling enterprise software stacks tend to be, how many implicit dependencies have to be untangled, etc. Even simple things can take years and complicated things often just don’t get done at all.

New comment by biesnecker in "My son (9 yrs old) used plain JavaScript to make a game, and wants your feedback"

biesnecker — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 09:02:00 +0000

All my feedback has been covered by others, so just +1 on “this is awesome, he (and you) should be proud!” Looking forward to seeing his internship projects in a decade or so.

New comment by biesnecker in "CSS gets a new logo and it uses the color `rebeccapurple`"

biesnecker — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 17:29:35 +0000

I don’t click on HN articles expecting to cry, but here we are.

New comment by biesnecker in "Chimpanzees' performance on computer tasks changes when people watching them"

biesnecker — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 22:58:43 +0000

Pretty soon the apes in charge are going to be using this study to demand that the chimps return to the office 5 days per week.

New comment by biesnecker in "It's 10am and Dad's Doing Jell-O Shots. Must Be Parents' Weekend"

biesnecker — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:09:33 +0000

There are 330 million of us, too. The vast majority can be reasonable people and that still leaves millions of batshit crazy Americans out there to write about.

Edit: typo

New comment by biesnecker in "Why Pascal Deserves a Second Look"

biesnecker — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 14:28:06 +0000

Pascal was the language that AP Computer Science was taught in in the mid-90s when I took it. We used Turbo Pascal 6.0 for DOS, and I have fond memories. I think I'd still prefer C, but I appreciate the nostalgia.

New comment by biesnecker in "12 Months of Mandarin"

biesnecker — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 20:36:56 +0000

Chinese grammar only really seems like English in the beginning. It diverges fairly aggressively from intermediate onwards.

New comment by biesnecker in "How a four-day workweek works, from the companies pulling it off"

biesnecker — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 18:23:53 +0000

Does your employer pay you for hours or output? I'm a salaried employee, I get paid for output, not the time it takes to produce.

I think if anything you're stealing from yourself, robbing yourself of the opportunity to take on more responsibility, grow faster, etc.

New comment by biesnecker in "Maccarone: AI-managed code blocks in Python"

biesnecker — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 02:16:06 +0000

Sorry I thought that was too obvious to warrant an /s but I suppose not.

New comment by biesnecker in "Maccarone: AI-managed code blocks in Python"

biesnecker — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 23:16:01 +0000

Thorough code review is why we as an industry stopped shipping bugs.

New comment by biesnecker in "Like all workers, federal employees need to get back to the office"

biesnecker — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 20:38:10 +0000

I interviewed with them in 2022 and was offered a position, but decided not to take it and pursue another opportunity elsewhere. At the time it was remote and I was told that "technically you could be asked to RTO at some point, but we don't expect we ever will be."

Honestly I love DC but would be pretty pissed right now if I'd taken that position expecting to work remotely.

New comment by biesnecker in "Franz Kafka was a healthcare claims administrator and insurance underwriter"

biesnecker — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 14:23:40 +0000

I was fully expecting this to be an article showing how Kafka-esque the American health insurance system is.

New comment by biesnecker in "FedNow Is Live"

biesnecker — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 21:22:12 +0000

To be fair only about half of US ACH traffic flows through the Fed (the other half goes through the Clearing House Payments Company), but the Fed is very much involved (and a critical component of) the ACH network, even if the system is not explicitly a government one.

New comment by biesnecker in "Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout"

biesnecker — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 21:27:28 +0000

I’m sure Facebook could too (their disaster recovery planning and drills were always top notch) but I’m glad I won’t be oncall if it ever happens :-D

New comment by biesnecker in "Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout"

biesnecker — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 20:47:28 +0000

Makes sense to me. I remember several lunch conversations at FB about whether or not we even could restart the site with totally cold caches. I’m sure it was possible but it wouldn’t have been clean or pretty.

New comment by biesnecker in "Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”"

biesnecker — Thu, 04 May 2023 20:25:22 +0000

I use GPT-3.5 for a lot of terminology lookup, and it's generally pretty great.

"In the context of [field I'm ramping up in], what does X mean, and how is it different than Y" -- it's not as good as GPT4 but it emits so much quicker and it normally gets me where I needed to go.