Hacker News: creshal

New comment by creshal in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

creshal — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:19:07 +0000

> as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.

Are the 15% getting 80% of the compensation, though?

New comment by creshal in "German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews"

creshal — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:07:32 +0000

I'm baffled by just how much Google continues to screw up their AI overview. Even duckduckgo manages to provide significantly better results.

New comment by creshal in "Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring"

creshal — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:11:15 +0000

Step one: Decision makers who can change these processes need to be aware of this problem. Many companies fail this simple task.

Step two: These decision makers must be held accountable for the success of the process. Many companies fail this simple task.

Step three: These decision makers must be willing to admit that they made a mistake, and risk loss of prestige and political capital. Guess how likely that is.

And the bigger the company, the worse it gets. It's a good thing we didn't go through 20 years of consolidations and mergers. Oh wait.

New comment by creshal in "Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels"

creshal — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:31:38 +0000

Yeah, Elon's whole shtick is make things scale up that everyone else thinks can't scale up. Sometimes it works (batteries), sometimes it works spectacularly well (Falcon 9), sometimes it fizzles out because it turns out everyone else was right (tunnel boring, solar tiles).

New comment by creshal in "The vi family"

creshal — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:21:39 +0000

Jokes aside, I don't really see the appeal of a demake of helix; it only really makes sense to me as "vim but far more concepts integrated as first-class features rather than addons"; take that away and you have vi with less muscle memory. So, kakuone with the serial numbers filed off.

New comment by creshal in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

creshal — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:54:46 +0000

~90% of the failure modes grub can fix don't exist without grub. I can't remember any time when its needless complexity was actually a net benefit compared to literally any of its alternatives (and between gummiboot/syslinux/efilinux/isolinux/systemd-boot/efistub I've used a lot of them).

New comment by creshal in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

creshal — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:52:11 +0000

Grub is really impressive in how it consistently spent the last 30 years focused on improving everything except the UX of the one workflow 99.99% of its involuntary users need it for (boot linux as reliably as possible, and make it easy to debug when it does not).

New comment by creshal in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

creshal — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:23:38 +0000

Or use UKI and throw the current kernel to /efi/boot/bootx64.efi; there's plenty of solutions to sane bootloader/kernel management if you're willing to invest 15 minutes into the topic and not act like it's scary and complicated (it really is the opposite).

New comment by creshal in "StarFighter 16-Inch"

creshal — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:39:08 +0000

If your definition of refinement is "looks like a Macbook", sure. Personally, if I wanted a laptop that looks like a Macbook, I'd buy a Macbook.

New comment by creshal in "StarFighter 16-Inch"

creshal — Wed, 06 May 2026 07:44:08 +0000

Oh look, another generic Macbook clone.

New comment by creshal in "Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared"

creshal — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:44:06 +0000

> The point was usually not usability. It was identity.

And we're not even getting usability out of it! Each of those bland react-angles is subtly inconsistent with the OS, with each other, and very often, itself. And in 6 months everything will move around again, for no reason other than to keep the responsible managers employed, without improving UX. And a11y is crying in a corner somewhere, forgotten.

New comment by creshal in "Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan"

creshal — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:18:32 +0000

Don't be silly, this is the JS ecosystem. Why use your brain for a minute and come up with a 50 byte helper function, if you can instead import a library with 3912726 dependencies and let the compiler spend 90 seconds on every build to tree shake 3912723 out again and give you a highly optimized bundle that's only 3 megabytes small?

New comment by creshal in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

creshal — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:56:28 +0000

Scammers have no problem waiting 24 hours, so this doesn't protect incompetent people at all.

New comment by creshal in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

creshal — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:52:53 +0000

To be blunt: I don't care. Don't make their incompetence my problem.

New comment by creshal in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

creshal — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:48:37 +0000

> But putting my design hat on here: couldn't this be the whole approach?

No, because protecting users is just an excuse. The overreach is the goal.

New comment by creshal in "“This is not the computer for you”"

creshal — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:48:17 +0000

That includes school-issued Macs, so I don't see how that's an argument against Chromebooks.

New comment by creshal in "“This is not the computer for you”"

creshal — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:28:06 +0000

Yeah, you'd find out about it all in the newspapers a few hours later, and none if it was "clap to yourself in an empty room" impressive anyway. I was around back then and I didn't feel the need to act like a drug addict whenever Steve Jobs opened his mouth.

New comment by creshal in "“This is not the computer for you”"

creshal — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:30:40 +0000

And faking being sick so he could clap at Apple marketing events. He kinda lost me there.

New comment by creshal in "The MacBook Neo"

creshal — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:30:46 +0000

OTOH, client Windows is the smallest and least important building block in it. Microsoft is helpfully also setting all their native apps on fire too and replacing them with webslop that runs equally poorly on MacOS, ChromeOS and Linux as it does on Windows 11, so the biggest concern is (A)AD integration and centralized management… and all three are decently manageable these days. If Microsoft didn't throw in the Windows licenses for free, more orgs would already be looking at ditching Windows 11, and if it keeps getting worse, even that won't look like a good deal any more.

New comment by creshal in "15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram"

creshal — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:56:33 +0000

> Maybe what bothers you is that you have a branch for tags, yeah, that's an extra level of indirection, but this lets you separate between user facing information in the master branch commits and developer facing information in the release branches commits.

That's such a marginal niche use case to build your entire organization around… why would you make this the default approach?