Hacker News: esfandia

New comment by esfandia in "“Collaboration” is bullshit"

esfandia — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 03:55:21 +0000

Thought-provoking essay. I can see how responsibility and ownership are important to help identify, motivate and reward the high achievers (and conversely, identify and get rid of the "dead wood"). But I can also see how collaboration and the dilution of responsibility and ownership helps better integrate junior members who might otherwise stay on the sidelines for longer than they should. There's also the issue of personnel turnover: what happens if the one person who is responsible for a major piece of a project leaves the company? A collaborative setting is more resilient to churn. There are trade-offs, and possibly a middle ground to be found.

New comment by esfandia in "Java 26 is here"

esfandia — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 05:39:42 +0000

A couple of books were helpful to me, both by Venkat Subramaniam and published by Pragmatic Programmers:

- Functional Programming in Java

- Cruising Along With Java (this covers everything else that is "new" other than functional programming)

New comment by esfandia in "Intent-Based Commits"

esfandia — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 06:58:23 +0000

I imagine you could use AI as well to create a "squash prompt", but verifying using diff that the "squash commit" results in the same code.

New comment by esfandia in "An Update on Heroku"

esfandia — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 05:46:28 +0000

This looks nice! Wish they had a no-credit-card-required version for educational purposes. For the course I teach we use Spring Boot, and life was good with Heroku till they discontinued the no-credit-card version, and then the only choice we had (with support for Spring Boot) was to move over to Azure, which works but is a bit overkill and complicated for our purposes. I guess we could just use Docker and then many more platform would become available, but I'd rather not add one more step to the pipeline if possible.

New comment by esfandia in "Microsoft: "30% of Our Code Is AI." Also Microsoft: "Windows Is Broken.""

esfandia — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 03:00:37 +0000

So it's still a BSOD!

New comment by esfandia in "Patterns.dev"

esfandia — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 10:07:30 +0000

The OG site for patterns is of course the Portland Pattern Repository. I believe Ward Cunningham invented wiki for this purpose initially!

https://c2.com/ppr/

New comment by esfandia in "I refuse to date someone who uses ChatGPT"

esfandia — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 21:25:55 +0000

Yeah, it's a case of "don't let the perfect be the enemy of good". The conservative stance is happy with the status quo. The progressive stance isn't. We probably need a bit of both. Finding the right balance being key.

New comment by esfandia in "The Trouble with Elon"

esfandia — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 05:05:31 +0000

Looks like he removed the paywall for this article? I was able to read the whole thing, and I'm not subscriber.

New comment by esfandia in "Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history"

esfandia — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 17:54:36 +0000

Maybe the difference between the eval of the best move vs the next one(s)? An "only move" situation would be more risky than when you have a choice between many good moves.

New comment by esfandia in "SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)"

esfandia — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 23:31:19 +0000

The right book for the right problem. SICP isn't meant to teach you how to tackle fault-tolerance in a complex distributed system. Here is a textbook that talks about distributed systems (van Steen and Tannenbaum):

https://www.amazon.ca/Distributed-Systems-Maarten-van-Steen/...

New comment by esfandia in "How long til we're all on Ozempic?"

esfandia — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 21:05:45 +0000

Not the OP but I have tried to reduce my sugar intake, I'm walking more than before, and I still basically gain half a pound every year. I'd lose some weight for a few days, and gain it all back on the one day I'm a bad boy. It seems like there's an internal dial that decides what my weight is supposed to be, no matter how much I fight it. And the dial adds half a pound every year. I guess the dial is my metabolism as I age.

New comment by esfandia in "Google’s AI thinks I left a Gatorade bottle on the moon"

esfandia — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 05:24:32 +0000

"To ascribe beliefs, free will, intentions, consciousness, abilities, or wants to a machine is legitimate when such an ascription expresses the same information about the machine that it expresses about a person. It is useful when the ascription helps us understand the structure of the machine, its past or future behaviour, or how to repair or improve it. It is perhaps never logically required even for humans, but expressing reasonably briefly what is actually known about the state of the machine in a particular situation may require mental qualities or qualities isomorphic to them. Theories of belief, knowledge and wanting can be constructed for machines in a simpler setting than for humans, and later applied to humans. Ascription of mental qualities is most straightforward for machines of known structure such as thermostats and computer operating systems, but is most useful when applied to entities whose structure is incompletely known.” (John McCarthy, 1979) https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ascribing.pdf

New comment by esfandia in "Apple Watch Series 10"

esfandia — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 19:26:30 +0000

But now it's also apparently larger! I'm sure I'm not the only person hoping for an Apple Watch that is reasonably thin and small.

NHS soup and shake diet can beat type 2 diabetes

esfandia — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 00:54:59 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czjyy7280lzo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41166935

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

We Pay $6k for Private Clinic Memberships in Montreal

esfandia — Tue, 21 May 2024 12:15:46 +0000

Article URL: https://macleans.ca/society/health/private-health-clinic-membership-montreal/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40427376

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

British man tests first personalised melanoma vaccine

esfandia — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 04:37:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68897731

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40166000

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by esfandia in "Coroutines in C (2000)"

esfandia — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 23:17:02 +0000

Python was created in 1991; I imagine the "yield" keyword appeared either right then or not much later!

Also, the refinement at the end of the article: "We arrange an extra function parameter, which is a pointer to a context structure; we declare all our local state, and our coroutine state variable, as elements of that structure." sounds like implementing a closure to me. You make the callee a lambda which would use an outside var/context/state to determine what to do or with what value. Am I understanding this correctly?

New comment by esfandia in "Coroutines in C (2000)"

esfandia — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 23:03:35 +0000

The article says: "In many modern operating systems, you could do this using pipes between two processes or two threads. emit() in the decompressor writes to a pipe, and getchar() in the parser reads from the other end of the same pipe. Simple and robust, but also heavyweight and not portable. Typically you don't want to have to divide your program into threads for a task this simple."

New comment by esfandia in "In 2024, please switch to Firefox"

esfandia — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 19:32:29 +0000

I haven't done a re-install, but deleting the cache folder alone doesn't make it go away. Starting Firefox re-creates the folder obviously, and Defender gets triggered again.

New comment by esfandia in "In 2024, please switch to Firefox"

esfandia — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 17:11:46 +0000

I actually finally just switched to Chrome (I'm a long time Firefox user, all the way back to when it was called Firebird), because of this issue:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/microsoft-defende...

Windows Defender flags things in the Firefox cache as a Trojan. It probably isn't, and it could also have something to do with uBlock Origin, but until that is resolved (I'm keeping an eye on the above link) I can't risk it.