Hacker News: devjam

New comment by devjam in "The IBM-ification of Google?"

devjam — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:59:04 +0000

While Apple does make nice hardware and appear to be listening to their users in that respect, don't forget that Tahoe has not been particularly well-received.

New comment by devjam in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

devjam — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 22:48:16 +0000

While I agree with your sentiment, the actual quote is subtly different, which changes the meaning:

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

New comment by devjam in "Alan.app – Add a Border to macOS Active Window"

devjam — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 05:25:20 +0000

That was my first thought too! but then realised Allan Border has a double L, while the app's name is "Alan"

New comment by devjam in "AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power"

devjam — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 10:48:56 +0000

Nothing is in its "final form" today.

I'm a long time SWE and in the last week, I've made and shipped production changes across around 6 different repos/monorepos, ranging from Python to Golang, to Kotlin to TS to Java. I'd consider myself "expert" in maybe one or two of those codebases and only having a passing knowledge of the others.

I'm using AI, not to fire-and-forget changes, but to explain and document where I can find certain functionality, generate snippets and boilerplate, and produce test cases for the changes I need. I read, review and consider that every line of code I commit has my name against it, and treat it as such.

Without these tools I'd estimate being around 25% as effective when it comes to getting up to speed on unfamiliar code and service. For that alone, AI tooling is utterly invaluable.

New comment by devjam in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

devjam — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 22:16:09 +0000

> Easiest day for engineers on-call everywhere

I have three words for you: cascading systems failure

New comment by devjam in "RSS is awesome"

devjam — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 05:18:28 +0000

> ... Feedly that pretend to care about RSS but layer on features unrelated to the protocol

I've been using Feedly since Google killed reader, and while I like the RSS functionality it offers, I do agree that they've slowly been adding more and more features I don't care for.

Maybe it's time to migrate to something like TFA suggests.

I also agree with your other comments; it's huge a shame.

New comment by devjam in "I'm Archiving Picocrypt"

devjam — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 12:00:33 +0000

I see what you did there

New comment by devjam in "Is It JavaScript?"

devjam — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 08:11:45 +0000

There appears to be a link to an RFC1918 address on that page: http://192.168.4.56:5001

New comment by devjam in "You might want to stop running atop"

devjam — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 03:18:49 +0000

"Don't put your hand in the fire."

New comment by devjam in "Better Shell History Search"

devjam — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 03:13:09 +0000

I've been using McFly [1] recently, and like it a lot.

> McFly replaces your default ctrl-r shell history search with an intelligent search engine that takes into account your working directory and the context of recently executed commands. McFly's suggestions are prioritized in real time with a small neural network.

[1] https://github.com/cantino/mcfly

New comment by devjam in "Bug squash: An underrated interview question"

devjam — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 04:45:45 +0000

As was also pointed out in the TFA, while you may not be "marking people down" because of unfamiliarity with syntax, an interviewee who has more experience with the language (and it's debugging tools) used in the interview will have an inherent advantage over someone who isn't as familiar.

New comment by devjam in "Adventures Making Vegemite"

devjam — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 01:43:02 +0000

I agree, nice and thick, with lots of butter! Don't listen to the advice in the article :-)

> The trick is not to spread it thickly like peanut butter; instead, you take about a quarter of a teaspoon’s worth and scrape it thinly over the entire slice.

New comment by devjam in "Go run"

devjam — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 02:48:45 +0000

And if your main.go is in a sub-directory, e.g. cmd/pathto/cli/main.go:

    $ go run ./cmd/pathto/cli

New comment by devjam in "What you've got is in fact a people problem"

devjam — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 03:52:21 +0000

From the Wikipedia entry:

> After his death Machiavelli's name came to evoke unscrupulous acts of the sort he advised most famously in his work, The Prince. He claimed that his experience and reading of history showed him that politics have always been played with deception, treachery, and crime. He also notably said that a ruler who is establishing a kingdom or a republic, and is criticized for his deeds, including violence, should be excused when the intention and the result are beneficial to him.

New comment by devjam in "The Catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell (2002)"

devjam — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 11:09:26 +0000

Save, open FTP/SCP client, copy to webserver, maybe poke/restart a service via SSH, back to browser, refresh... dammit, error, rinse repeat.

We're certainly spoiled having formatting, linting, tests and coverage all run on save these days :-)

New comment by devjam in "The Catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell (2002)"

devjam — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 10:43:06 +0000

What a gem! And a few more from the HTML source:

As well as a style tag missing a closing '>' on the page template:



New comment by devjam in "How Programming Languages Got Their Names"
devjam — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 10:04:05 +0000

Practical Extraction and Reporting Language



New comment by devjam in "From slow to SIMD: A Go optimization story"
devjam — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 10:19:39 +0000

Sure, I understand that from the POV of making your code explicit. Personally I  have always tended towards, for example:
    var x string

when initializing empty (zero-value) vars, versus:
    x := "hello"

when initializing variables that should hold an initial value.To me as a Go programmer at least, this is more obvious and intuitive as to the intent of the declaration.



New comment by devjam in "From slow to SIMD: A Go optimization story"
devjam — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 07:58:34 +0000

The author used:
    sum := float32(0)

Over Go's zero-value default initialization e.g.
    var sum float32

A nit stylistically but wondering if there was a good reason to do so?



New comment by devjam in "The merge vs. rebase debate"
devjam — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 21:04:14 +0000

I feel the same way.
My commits on a PR are always rebased as I go, into one or two or at most three neat changes. Meanwhile (some) others I work with seem to have no problem creating PRs consisting of a dozen or more changes, most of which with messages like “wip”, “typo”, “fix comment” etc.