Hacker News: desbo

New comment by desbo in "Reflections on AI at the End of 2025"

desbo — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 10:24:32 +0000

Yeah, it’s called “Reflections”.

New comment by desbo in "The Last Programmers?"

desbo — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 12:24:31 +0000

Thank you.

New comment by desbo in "Against Best Practices"

desbo — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 15:01:53 +0000

I think that is what you want. From Wikipedia:

> In 2016, the IEEE Computer Society kicked off the SWEBOK Evolution effort to develop future iterations of the body of knowledge. The SWEBOK Evolution project resulted in the publication of SWEBOK Guide version 4 in October 2024.

So the thing called "SWEBOK Guide" is actually the reference text for SWEBOK.

New comment by desbo in "Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction"

desbo — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 17:20:45 +0000

The idea that someone's response to being fired should be the same as a manager's response to one of their reports quitting is hilariously out of touch.

New comment by desbo in "Don't use "click here" for link text"

desbo — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 16:30:52 +0000

Good advice! A rule of thumb I use is that the sentence should make sense if it was read outside of a browser, which results in roughly the same thing.

New comment by desbo in "Refactoring Python with Tree-sitter and Jedi"

desbo — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 19:22:23 +0000

Would’ve been easy with fastmod: https://github.com/facebookincubator/fastmod

New comment by desbo in "The worst programmer I know"

desbo — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 20:09:01 +0000

And if there’s pairing on a sub-task…?

New comment by desbo in "Extremely Linear Git History"

desbo — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 00:19:12 +0000

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rerere

New comment by desbo in "Ask HN: Teach me something new"

desbo — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 06:44:52 +0000

If I’m a Boltzmann brain that can only survive for an instant, why do I experience existing for a whole lifetime?

New comment by desbo in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2022)"

desbo — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 15:07:30 +0000

Permutive is hiring Scala Software Engineers (100% remote, full-time, optional London office)

Permutive is powering the future of targeted advertising on the Open Web today. As the only Audience Platform built on edge computing, we enable premium advertisers and publishers to plan, build and activate cohorts — all while keeping everyone’s data safe.

We’re a remote-first B2B SaaS company with 180+ people—centered around our London and New York hubs—and growing rapidly. We have received funding from some of the world’s best investors, including a recent $75m Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

We’re hiring for Scala engineers in a number of teams. To find out and apply for each one, visit the links below:

* Activations: https://boards.greenhouse.io/permutive/jobs/5949475002

* Cohorts: https://boards.greenhouse.io/permutive/jobs/5849831002

* Dashboard: https://boards.greenhouse.io/permutive/jobs/5756225002

* Insights: https://boards.greenhouse.io/permutive/jobs/5851223002

Our tech stack: Functional Scala (Typelevel: cats, fs2, http4s), GCP, some Haskell and Elm.

If you have any questions or would like more info, please email sam.jackson at permutive.com!

New comment by desbo in "Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time"

desbo — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 23:10:21 +0000

This is great. But it seems to fail with words containing repeat letters, for example, with my word as BOOKS, not on hard mode:

SOARE JUMBY BOOST (at this point, it claimed to have won!)

New comment by desbo in "Ask HN: Is learning math useful to be a good computer scientist?"

desbo — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 10:26:42 +0000

What do you call yourself?

New comment by desbo in "Ask HN: Which tools/services have your favorite UI/UX?"

desbo — Tue, 25 May 2021 16:37:11 +0000

It's a small detail, but after moving to iOS from Android recently I discovered Universal Clipboard: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT209460.

You copy text on one device and paste it on the other. A great piece of UX, and an example of the best interface being no interface at all.

New comment by desbo in "From First Principles: Why Scala?"

desbo — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 22:01:41 +0000

You don't necessarily lose the stack trace. Typically the left side of an either is an Exception (or an error ADT that wraps one). When you want to handle the left case, you can log out the full trace as you would without Either.

The Monad instance for Either means that chaining them together with flatMap has a short-circuiting effect and the first failure will stop the rest of the chain from being evaluated. I find this actually makes it easier to know where your errors are happening, and also allows you to centralise your error handling logic.

New comment by desbo in "Show HN: Multi-armed bandit optimisation service"

desbo — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 13:02:02 +0000

Hi HN,

I'm looking for help validating an idea for a product that provides multi-armed bandit optimisation over an API. The idea is that client sites will provide impression and conversion events to our API, which provides recommendations about which variant to display, optimising performance over time.

I think this could be useful to businesses that currently use A/B testing but am trying to understand if an API on its own is useful enough to be a standalone product.

Please have a look at the site and let me know if it's clear what the product is and if you think it'd be useful. I'd also appreciate any advice on how to validate an idea like this, how to identify problems this kind of product to solve, etc. Thank you!

Show HN: Multi-armed bandit optimisation service

desbo — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 13:02:02 +0000

Article URL: https://contextshift.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591775

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by desbo in "Ask HN: How do you handle conflicts with your peers?"

desbo — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 16:46:33 +0000

How do you distinguish between "quibbles" and changes that are worth making yourself? I suspect it's quite a subjective thing.

I'd also suggest using a less disparaging term than quibblers.

New comment by desbo in "Ask HN: What’s the best city/state for self-taught web devs without a degree?"

desbo — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 22:30:22 +0000

London is good. I'm a self-taught dev who moved from tech support to QA to engineering. There's a lot of work here and quite a bit of competition, but I wouldn't say not having a degree has been a problem.

New comment by desbo in "Elements of Clojure"

desbo — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 09:09:30 +0000

I recently started my first Clojure/ClojureScript project using the Reagent template for Leiningen[1]. It gives you Ring/Compojure/Hiccup on the backend for simple routing and views, and Reagent with a client-side routing framework on the frontend. It took me 10 minutes to get it running and figure out what the different components were doing. I'm sure ultimately I'll roll my own setup but this is a good way to get going if you're new.

1: https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent-template

New comment by desbo in "Political Speech Generator"

desbo — Wed, 27 Jan 2016 17:08:46 +0000

__START__ mr. speaker , the gentleman is 110 percent right . the gentleman from ohio mentioned an issue about being nonpartisan and being , i would say , third-party validators , i just want to make clear the supreme court cases made it clear that you could discriminate with your personal church money , but not with federal money . all of the cases are consistent . in fact , if my colleagues read the cases , they point out that if you are using federal money , you can not discriminate . __END__