Hacker News: evantbyrne

New comment by evantbyrne in "Exploit brokers pay $500k for WordPress RCEs. I found one with GPT5.6 and $25"

evantbyrne — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:36:40 +0000

Everything I've used from Automattic has felt that way. If you ever want to torture an engineer, just make them change the layout of WooCommerce checkout.

New comment by evantbyrne in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

evantbyrne — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:27:43 +0000

Not everyone is looking to save a buck at anyone's expense. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking we're the same.

New comment by evantbyrne in "New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium"

evantbyrne — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:40:42 +0000

Some guy floated the idea of putting in a small datacenter in the nearby city and asked for public comment. The next town hall had a huge turnout and multiple people got kicked out for rushing the podium. Meanwhile, people are also protesting and suing to try and stop the nearby solar farm construction. What I'm wondering is why can't we have this level of enthusiasm for actual environmental reform and the transition to clean energy? It almost feels like it is just an anti-progress movement in different clothes.

New comment by evantbyrne in "The revenge of the philosophy majors"

evantbyrne — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:29:18 +0000

Philosophy of science went hard and was hands down the most valuable course in my education. It's very strange that they don't force everyone to take at least some philosophy in university. Can you imagine living in a world where the average person not only thought about what they believed, but were also equipped to ask themselves hard questions about the nature of belief itself?

New comment by evantbyrne in "How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown"

evantbyrne — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:53:51 +0000

Thank you. Was beginning to feel like I was taking crazy pills seeing people claim that 300ms is fast when 30ms has been the target TTFB for as long as I can remember. Maybe Linear takes more time on the backend for totally valid reasons and it needs some help from the frontend, but that's not generalizable, and every bit of JS comes with its own costs.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Agents need control flow, not more prompts"

evantbyrne — Thu, 07 May 2026 20:27:41 +0000

I would hope that when engineers speak of LLM determinism they just mean it as shorthand for close to 1 under expected conditions

New comment by evantbyrne in "20 years on AWS and never not my job"

evantbyrne — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:28:42 +0000

The going rate for 1099 work tends to be higher than this to account for risk, unbillable work, and increased tax rate. Agencies that lend out their developers to clients charge 2-3x this. Remember that engineers can work remotely now which makes regional rates much fuzzier.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Boneyard: Generate pixel-perfect skeleton screens from your real DOM"

evantbyrne — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:07:26 +0000

I was going to say it seems potentially useful, but engagement stats for this on Github and X seem unnatural and the anon crypto author makes it a hard no for me

New comment by evantbyrne in "Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase"

evantbyrne — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:40:46 +0000

Getting up to speed on the business logic was arguably the easiest part of my last job where the product was a liquid biopsy. Regardless of industry, you have to learn how to communicate with stakeholders and collect requirements. The existing software being a mess was a much more significant challenge. They also had similar issues on the data science side, where I would argue they did not lean into modern ML nearly enough and instead opted to do the familiar thing.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase"

evantbyrne — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:32:36 +0000

There are certain non-software industries that seem to have strong hiring preferences for workers who started in the industry over computer science chops, and a lot of those tend to use Java. For example, biotechs.

New comment by evantbyrne in "MacBook Neo"

evantbyrne — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:18:43 +0000

Totally. 8GB is probably enough for most users. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 32GB for a development machine in 2026 that's all

New comment by evantbyrne in "MacBook Neo"

evantbyrne — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:47:28 +0000

I used to be able to get by with just 8GB on a mac. But these days I have to run entire clusters locally

New comment by evantbyrne in "Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk"

evantbyrne — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 23:33:56 +0000

Culture flows from the top down

New comment by evantbyrne in "Cloudflare acquires Astro"

evantbyrne — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:15:28 +0000

I experimented a lot with bootstrapping React projects this past fall, and Astro was by far the least painful to use. Notably, it was the least goofy of all of the React starter kits to use for server API development.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"

evantbyrne — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:28:03 +0000

It never stopped being possible to order a bare bones F-150 with a 8ft bed. Might not have the tradeoffs that many people are looking for, but difficult to argue something like that has less utility than a mini truck that can't drive on the highway.

New comment by evantbyrne in "A website to destroy all websites"

evantbyrne — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 23:11:50 +0000

> Hacker News, probably noticeably since 2016 or so, has been a negative, curmudgeonly place. It has become political (toward the left), sclerotic, and bitterly nostalgic. It's bad and no longer represents the future. I notice it every time I visit. It's sad.

An easy way to help with the negativity is to stop leaving bait comments

New comment by evantbyrne in "Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief"

evantbyrne — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 15:29:00 +0000

I would expect Windows to have better battery life than Linux, just because Linux is so much worse than MacOS on power consumption, but I also haven't run Windows on a laptop in over a decade so I really don't know.

New comment by evantbyrne in "Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief"

evantbyrne — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 21:10:48 +0000

It would be newsworthy if Linux laptops could compete with MacBooks on performance and quality. Maybe reconsider Windows if you feel the need to switch?

New comment by evantbyrne in "A two-person method to simulate die rolls (2023)"

evantbyrne — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 13:42:40 +0000

Ah yeah of course, there is a zero case as well. I was thinking you just restart as to not bias the result. That's an interesting alternative though

New comment by evantbyrne in "A two-person method to simulate die rolls (2023)"

evantbyrne — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:25:55 +0000

If you have a coin: Heads and tails represent bits. Flip a coin three times and add up the result to emulate a six-sided dice roll. e.g., heads, heads, tails = 3. If you get 7, then try again.