Hacker News: boie0025

New comment by boie0025 in "The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain"

boie0025 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:30:06 +0000

After a re-read, I realized the claim wasn't "single purpose", it was "primary purpose", in which case this makes even more sense to me. I guess everything else comes from understanding what's in a given PR. It is difficult to find bugs in code that you don't understand, and it's difficult to understand code that doesn't follow convention, etc. I think I've worked this way and just not thought about it from this perspective. I review a lot of code, and what I generally do is fire up my editor in the relevant repo and follow along. If there's a method call to outside of the PR, depending on what it is and what I know about it, I'll pull that up in my editor and review there to make sure I understand what's happening. That understanding is where the comments come from. Maybe "I understand this and it's right" or "I understand this, and it seems wrong because [something]" or "I do not understand this because [whatever]" etc. Maybe "primary purpose" isn't perfect.. perhaps "overarching goal" or similar.. :shipit:

New comment by boie0025 in "The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain"

boie0025 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:56:03 +0000

I agree with all of this, I read into the "single purpose" of understanding the code and complaining about what you don't understand implying that if you understand it, you will be able to point out and comment on things that are wrong /foolish/unsafe/etc after understanding it. From that perspective on the OP, it makes sense to me. Particularly with regard to modularity and factoring; once I understand all of a gigantic PR I will have modeled it in my mind and will begin to either see that it will be maintainable, or will be a total nightmare one day... or somewhere in between.

New comment by boie0025 in "I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude"

boie0025 — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 20:20:09 +0000

Thanks for sharing that. I read through a lot of this. Interesting to read those perspectives in the context of today.

New comment by boie0025 in "Reverse math shows why hard problems are hard"

boie0025 — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 06:08:31 +0000

Thanks for pulling that thread with me. It would be interesting to see if the lower bound on information needed is ever swappable with the upper bound on the speed of information transfer.

New comment by boie0025 in "OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race"

boie0025 — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 05:15:09 +0000

I appreciate this narrative; relatable to me in how I have experienced and watched others around me experience the last few years. It's as if we're all kinda-sorta following a similar "Dunning–Kruger effect" curve at the same time. It feels similar to growing up mucking around with a ppp connection and Netscape in some regards. I'll stretch it: "multimodal", meet your distant analog "hypermedia".

New comment by boie0025 in "Reverse math shows why hard problems are hard"

boie0025 — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 07:30:20 +0000

I'm pretty far away from learning about these things in school, but this made me wonder on the connection between the mentioned communication complexity lower bound and special relativity limits on how fast information can travel.

New comment by boie0025 in "ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web"

boie0025 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 05:13:33 +0000

This sentiment has been rolling around in my head for a while. I assume one day I'll be using some hosted model to solve a problem, and suddenly I won't be able to get anything out beyond "it would actually work a lot better if you redeployed your application on Azure infra with a bunch of licensed Windows server instances. Here's 15 paragraphs about why.."

New comment by boie0025 in "Claude now has access to a server-side container environment"

boie0025 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 05:00:23 +0000

I think you missed a critical step: 1.5: know that "allowed tools" is the correct incantation required to summon the relevant documentation; which, at least to me, is not obvious at all in the context of the OP.

New comment by boie0025 in "Kevo app shutdown"

boie0025 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 04:48:38 +0000

I definitely agree with the spirit of this, but I also know a lot of non technical people who aren't as paranoid about things like this as I am (we have a keypad lock, backup keys in mounted lockboxes along with a 9v battery to power the keypad if need be), and they just expect that paying for something fairly critical like a door lock means it will either work normally, or give an indication that stuff might go sideways soon ("low battery! Replace or be locked out", for example).

I suspect stories like "I left my house without my keys on the day they shut it down to go for a walk and couldn't get back into my home." Or "I somehow locked my keys in my car, including the backup house key. Luckily my backup car key is in the house." Only to realize the lock isn't working normally and there are 100 emails warning them about this in their "updates" tab.. buried under a mountain of spam.

There will definitely be people who wind up stuck with this, especially with such short notice, and it won't necessarily be because they didn't plan. Now I'm going to go double check my lockbox.

New comment by boie0025 in "Claude now has access to a server-side container environment"

boie0025 — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 07:33:03 +0000

I think a link would have been far more helpful than "RTFM". Especially for those of us reading this exchange outside of the line of fire.

New comment by boie0025 in "A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data"

boie0025 — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 06:10:30 +0000

While I agree with your sentiment, there's a pretty good chance that at least some of this is, for example, data that inadvertently leaked while someone accidentally exposed an automatic index with Apache, or perhaps an asset manifest exposed a bunch of uploaded images in a folder or bucket that wasn't marked private for whatever reason. I can think of a lot of reasons this data could be "public" that would be well beyond the control of the person exposed. I also don't think that there's a universal enough understanding that uploading something to your WordPress or whatever personal/business site to share with a specific person, with an obscure unpublished URL is actually public. I think these lines are pretty blurry.

Edit: to clarify, in the first two examples I'm referring to web applications that the exposed person uses but does not control.

New comment by boie0025 in "What MS-DOS Can Do That Linux Can't"

boie0025 — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 06:38:33 +0000

When I first began experimenting with Linux my first frustration was that it "didn't support" cd.. my mind was blown when I mentioned it to a friend who promptly demonstrated that the use of a space between "cd" and ".." worked in both environments. I decided I should RTFM after that.

New comment by boie0025 in "CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops"

boie0025 — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 17:56:13 +0000

A tiny bit of thought about your situation IMO should lead anyone to conclude that you just first-hand experienced the fallout of today's nightmare, and then took a step back and realized you were likely one of millions if not billions of other people experiencing the same, and relayed that thought in terms of immediately understandable loss. Someone else might see "wrong" but I saw empathy.

New comment by boie0025 in "The least impactful way to spend $300M?"

boie0025 — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 03:53:56 +0000

This is a fascinating question. It's incredibly rhetorical, and I've sat here pondering it for a bit. It's very easy to reply to this question with "well I suppose it depends." And then tack on "What do we consider 'doing good/more good'? What is the nature/species/alignment of the lives being saved, and how are are they equal? Who decides which two lives are better to save than the one, if it's somehow decided that one is better than two? Does the two lives vs one life involve picking between the same two lives, or is it an entirely different set of lives?" and a whole mountain of other questions. It's like asking a magical wish granter to "save two lives" and it does something predictably spiteful like saving two single celled organisms and causing a kitten to die. Thanks for giving me that to chew on.

New comment by boie0025 in "Slack is down"

boie0025 — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 17:12:30 +0000

I never knew this, but I think it makes sense. Is there any documentation that explains why this is the case? I suspect it is to distribute bias to the first option, but I'd love to read about it.

[edit] Nevermind, I just needed the right combination of terms to find it: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ram/latest/userguide/working-wit...

New comment by boie0025 in "Sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation"

boie0025 — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 17:41:27 +0000

Thanks for the link; I had no idea what to even search for to understand this.

New comment by boie0025 in "Sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation"

boie0025 — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 15:51:09 +0000

This reveals my severe ignorance about quantum mechanics; but I've always wondered if entanglement could be used to transmit binary data by way of timing and presence or lack of presence of a transmission. So maybe every 1ms is a position, and either something is sent or not.

New comment by boie0025 in "A New Search Engine"

boie0025 — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 08:08:09 +0000

This malice metric is confusing. How malacious is Google then? They misspelled "googol" for over two decades, but there's only one domain. Do we count the 1e100.net as a misspelling?

New comment by boie0025 in "Cancer ‘vaccine’ eliminates tumors in mice"

boie0025 — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 17:41:33 +0000

Thanks for this. My beloved aunt was diagnosed with cancer years ago, and has been fighting an awe inspiring battle against it the whole time. She was given bad news last week -- a short and definite time scale. It was hard news for me and more so for her husband, children and grandchildren, but everyone is keeping close in support of her through the hardest part of the fight so far. These battles are so hard to watch, but at the same time just as inspiring. Anyhow, that's the back story, I really just wanted to thank you for posting these words. <3

+1, Fuck cancer.

New comment by boie0025 in "Verelox Wiped by Ex-Admin"

boie0025 — Sat, 10 Jun 2017 14:12:25 +0000

Very insightful question. This gives me an alternative context in which to frame the "wage slave" concept. Thank you.