Hacker News: cwilkes

New comment by cwilkes in "Python f-string cheat sheets (2022)"

cwilkes — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 14:13:59 +0000

Maybe should be called “iq-string” for Interview Question string.

New comment by cwilkes in "MCP overlooks hard-won lessons from distributed systems"

cwilkes — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 19:55:23 +0000

This implies that the input process did a check when it imported the data from somewhere else.

GIEMGO garbage in even more garbage out

New comment by cwilkes in "Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data, demanding $20M ransom"

cwilkes — Sat, 17 May 2025 05:05:48 +0000

Scammers attract scammers?

New comment by cwilkes in "Laziness Death Spirals"

cwilkes — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 21:23:49 +0000

I recommend the book “Unwinding Anxiety” by Judson Brewer for further reading. Another book of his “Hunger Habits” is really good.

New comment by cwilkes in "Posting a 5x5 crossword every day"

cwilkes — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 07:25:31 +0000

Most of these entries are Naticks where the two crosses are proper nouns. That’s really unpleasant as it usually means there’s no way to figure out the cross unless you know the two terms.

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

In 2008, he invented on his blog the crossword term "natick" (after Natick, Massachusetts) for an "unguessable" square crossed in both directions by proper nouns considered obscure.

New comment by cwilkes in "CrowdStrike global outage to cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4B"

cwilkes — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 22:47:19 +0000

I’ve heard of that for civil engineering firms but the amount of damages is capped at the yearly contract amount.

Which in this case is probably a lot less than what these companies are paying in clean up costs.

New comment by cwilkes in "Boeing may reacquire Spirit at higher price despite hating optics"

cwilkes — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 22:05:15 +0000

I cannot upvote this enough. They continuously squeeze suppliers either on a bill or to make more faster. Accidents are bound to happen.

New comment by cwilkes in "[dead]"

cwilkes — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 04:37:54 +0000

“Back in July 2025, six years before Apple introduced Siri, Susan Bennett made some recordings.”

The author is from the future?

New comment by cwilkes in "How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years"

cwilkes — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 06:12:27 +0000

You inherit some code. Is that string a username or a phone number? Who knows. Someone accidentally swapped two parameter values. Now the phone number is a username and you’ve got a headache of trying to figure out what’s wrong.

By having stronger types this won’t come up as a problem. You don’t have to rely on having the best programmers in the world that never make mistakes (tm) to be on your team and instead rely on the computer making guard rails for you so you can’t screw up minor things like that.

New comment by cwilkes in "Google shares sink following reports that some of their AI demo was faked"

cwilkes — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 10:51:28 +0000

MSFT today: $373. Yeah I would say 10x growth vs 4x isn’t comparable.

New comment by cwilkes in "JC converts the output of popular command-line tools to JSON"

cwilkes — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 16:53:34 +0000

Use “aws s3api list-objects-v2”

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3api/

New comment by cwilkes in "Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO"

cwilkes — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 22:59:56 +0000

“ChatGPT summarize last weeks events”

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that Dave. Not cuz I’m deciding not to do it but because I can’t for the life of me figure this shit out. Like what was the endgame? This is breaking my neural net”

New comment by cwilkes in "Trucking startup Convoy closes operations with no buyer"

cwilkes — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 03:48:44 +0000

Slight twist on that here: most employees are in Seattle and WA state law doesn’t mandate paying out unused vacation time.

Most (good) employers do that when employees quit but they don’t have to.

New comment by cwilkes in "Convoy cancels all shipments, load board is empty, announcement upcoming"

cwilkes — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 22:50:22 +0000

Curious I wanted to see who are the top players in this market and the hype around Convoy and found https://www.ttnews.com/logistics/freightbrokerage/2022

CH is the highest with $14.5B in revenue. Convoy is … 20th with $1.1B.

New comment by cwilkes in "Meta's Mandatory Return to Office Is 'A Mess'"

cwilkes — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 15:20:50 +0000

I’m envisioning carnival barkers trying to get other teams to use up their -15 seats as if they don’t sell out they have to pay the company a rental fee.

New comment by cwilkes in "Windows feature that resets system clocks based on random data is wreaking havoc"

cwilkes — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:09:43 +0000

Just have those machines randomly ask one another for the time. Because of the Wisdom of Crowds the time will eventually be right.

/ sarcasm

New comment by cwilkes in "Lidar-equipped, 30-pound robot dog can be yours for $1,600"

cwilkes — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 15:29:38 +0000

So kind of like breaking one of two compasses before going out to sea. Makes perfect sense.

New comment by cwilkes in "Air France denied my delay compensation, so I challenged them and won"

cwilkes — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 07:24:24 +0000

Similar rebooking: less than 24 hours before a flight from Seattle to Naples via Paris Air France says “lol flight canceled good luck as we aren’t rebooking you”

Had to scramble as flights were filling up. On hold for 45 minutes. Eventually cancel our refundable tickets and buy another pair of tickets on AF and have to make up the difference.

AF is now saying that we should have gone through the non working app to reschedule.

And to top it off the luggage didn’t make it to Naples, arriving 3 days (!) later even though there are multiple flights a day.

Plane and the staff were nice.

New comment by cwilkes in "Terrible real estate agent photographs"

cwilkes — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 14:03:28 +0000

What does a software engineer do? They type on a keyboard.

New comment by cwilkes in "LLM Powered Autonomous Agents"

cwilkes — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 23:39:28 +0000

Mentally impaired humans sounds like the US Congress, so we are living it in a way.

So imagine that world but with garbage coming out 100x faster as it can tailor political talking points down to a fractional percentage point of voters. Oh your car was stolen by a minority? Here’s an ad that mentions car thefts, going beyond the prior ad of just generic minority-hate.