Hacker News: etse

New comment by etse in "A Server Lost Power at 00:32. We Found Out at 08:18"

etse — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:58:52 +0000

In my mind, postmortems with a human touch to be subtle defensiveness, passive aggressive blame, and unempathetic factual digs at others. I read the lack of empathy in the article as simply following best practices.

New comment by etse in "Generic Methods in Go 1.27"

etse — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:38:39 +0000

What was the reason for interfaces having to work at runtime?

New comment by etse in "Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents"

etse — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:03:07 +0000

Ah, got it. Still impressive.

New comment by etse in "Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents"

etse — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:19:24 +0000

The memory forking is really interesting. I wonder if copy-on-write at the VM level, O(1) with respect to machine size, won't scale cost with how many forks to take, but 320ms median seems good for the branch-and-explore pattern without reprovisioning every time.

One gap I'm noticing in these comments and in the current sandbox landscape is Windows. Every platform mentioned in these comments like E2B, Daytona, Fly Sprites, Sandflare appears Linux-native. Makes sense for coding agents targeting Debian environments, but a real category exists to automate Windows-specific workflows: enterprise software, ERP systems, anything that runs only on Windows.

If anyone wants to run agents in Mac or Linux and need to access Windows for computer use, Dexbox could be helpful. [github.com/getdexbox/dexbox]

I launched an open source developer tool called Dexbox to run agent workloads that quickly provision and run Windows desktops. It's a CLI and MCP experience that's different from Freestyle, but slightly closer to our Windows-specific production infra, Nen. I like Freestyle's cool UI that shows off the unique technical approach and developer friendliness. Nen's a bit closer to that experience.

New comment by etse in "Are you team MCP or team CLI?"

etse — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 02:12:11 +0000

So, neither?

New comment by etse in "Gemini 3 Pro vs. 2.5 Pro in Pokemon Crystal"

etse — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 18:31:36 +0000

Isn’t frontend more complex? If my task starts with a Figma UI design, how well does a code agent do at generating working code that looks right, and iterate on it (presuming some browser MCP)? Some automated tests seem enough for an genetic loop on backend.

New comment by etse in "Kaiju – General purpose 3D/2D game engine in Go and Vulkan with built in editor"

etse — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:07:11 +0000

What’s the challenge with getting it working in macOS? Vulkan?

New comment by etse in "Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig"

etse — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:20:46 +0000

That seems unusual. I would assume trivial means the default approach works for most cases. Perhaps mutable global variables are not a common use case. Unsafe might make it easier, but it’s not obvious and probably undesired. I don’t know Rust, but I’ve heard pockets of unsafe code in a code base can make it hard to trust in Rust’s guarantees. The compromise feels like the language didn’t actually solve anything.

New comment by etse in "Five years as a startup CTO: How, why, and was it worth it? (2024)"

etse — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 19:27:49 +0000

I have hardly come across aspiring-CEOs who do not have much ego and listen to other founders, let alone founders or serial-founders. After some founder dating last year, I am a bit jaded, though.

New comment by etse in "How Palantir is mapping the nation’s data"

etse — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 21:16:12 +0000

Morality is not about intelligence, but some folks believe living by morals is submitting oneself to the lack of intelligence (or stupidity even). The real [evil] geniuses prune their decision tree by not considering morality so they maintain optimum efficiency.

New comment by etse in "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work"

etse — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 04:19:52 +0000

There is a lot of sentiment in these comments about needing to scale still. I wonder how many need to do this in a pre-PMF stage vs growth stage? The trade off is faster growth if your PMF bet wins and loss of time if your bet goes south.

New comment by etse in "QueryLeaf: SQL for Mongo"

etse — Sat, 10 May 2025 15:48:09 +0000

Maybe not capabilities, but I'm wondering if Postgres has gotten any easier to scale horizontally. The administrative overhead of scaling and maintenance with MongoDB seemed lower to Postgres to me.

Would love to hear from others with more Postgres than I.

New comment by etse in "Mistaking Mary Magdalene"

etse — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 04:48:42 +0000

Interesting idea, but questionable scholarship.

New comment by etse in "Googler... ex-Googler"

etse — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 20:00:57 +0000

Hmm. Maybe you should test the site on a different phone. Not seeing an issue with responsiveness here.

New comment by etse in "Can American Drivers Learn to Love Roundabouts?"

etse — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 23:53:26 +0000

Not when the roundabouts are placed within the bounds of a 4 way stop. Not sure if those are called roundabouts, but I don’t like them.

New comment by etse in "Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC"

etse — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 20:11:19 +0000

We don’t need to overstate racism, but “bigwig at TI” is a down leveling for Morris. Doesn’t seem right to limit greatness if it’s about race and not based on track record or other meritocratic signals.

New comment by etse in "Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC"

etse — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 20:07:25 +0000

How? Morris didn’t get the job because he was born in the wrong country?

New comment by etse in "Family of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji demand FBI investigate death"

etse — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 08:47:20 +0000

Very wealthy people have access to very exclusive and potentially unethical and/or illegal capabilities. Many do not think they are bound to the same rules as the rest of society. Some are probably not.

OpenAI the company may not be responsible, but there are elites in the OpenAI sphere who might be.

New comment by etse in "Borgo Programming Language"

etse — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:52:03 +0000

I’m curious which are the well known projects or products that have ported or converted away from Go. Anyone have a shortlist?

New comment by etse in "Structured Editing and Incremental Parsing"

etse — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 20:34:11 +0000

> why structured editors haven’t taken over the world: most programmers find them so annoying to use in some situations that they don’t view the pros as outweighing the cons.

Seems like "annoying" refers to a user interface annoyance.

I'm guessing the following since I couldn't tell what structured editing is like from the article:

Keyboard entry is immediate, but prone to breaking the program structure. Structured editing through specific commands is an abstraction on top of key entry (or mouse), both of which add a layer of resistance. Another layer might come from having to recall the commands, or if recognizing them, having to peruse a list of them, at least while learning it.

What does the developer's experience with incremental parsing feel like?