Hacker News: fl0ki

New comment by fl0ki in "Reinventing the pull request"

fl0ki — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:06:54 +0000

Like I said, if you prefer an integrated graphical UI, you can file feature requests against the one you prefer. What git itself does makes a lot of sense for the canonical CLI tool to do, though even then you can propose or prototype changes if you have ideas. This is how projects like jj started in the first place.

New comment by fl0ki in "Reinventing the pull request"

fl0ki — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:56:11 +0000

If that's the kind of UX you prefer, please consider filing a feature request against your git UI of choice. My point is that git itself already has the core capability, and how convenient it is to use usually depends on your editor. (e.g. in vim, dd to cut a line and p to paste it in a new position is a very quick way to reorder)

New comment by fl0ki in "Reinventing the pull request"

fl0ki — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:57:33 +0000

> I think it would be great to have the ability to easily reorder/modify commits while in active development

Take a look at `git rebase --interactive`.

New comment by fl0ki in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

fl0ki — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:12:01 +0000

I only agree if you have a bounded dataset size that you know will never grow. If it can grow in future (and if you're not sure, you should assume it can), not only will many data structures and algorithms scale poorly along the way, but they will grow to dominate the bottleneck as well. By the time it no longer meets requirements and you get a trouble ticket, you're now under time pressure to develop, qualify, and deploy a new solution. You're much more likely to encounter regressions when doing this under time pressure.

If you've been monitoring properly, you buy yourself time before it becomes a problem as such, but in my experience most developers who don't anticipate load scaling also don't monitor properly.

I've seen a "senior software engineer with 20 years of industry experience" put code into production that ended up needing 30 minute timeouts for a HTTP response only 2 years after initial deployment. That is not a typo, 30 minutes. I had to take over and rewrite their "simple" code to stop the VP-level escalations our org received because of this engineering philosophy.

New comment by fl0ki in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

fl0ki — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:49:55 +0000

> Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants.

I get where he's coming from, but I've seen people get this very wrong in practice. They use an algorithm that's indeed faster for small n, which doesn't matter because anything was going to be fast enough for small n, meanwhile their algorithm is so slow for large n that it ends up becoming a production crisis just a year later. They prematurely optimized after all, but for an n that did not need optimization, while prematurely pessimizing for an n that ultimately did need optimization.

New comment by fl0ki in "An ode to bzip"

fl0ki — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:07:33 +0000

Yeah, I make it a habit to read the changelogs of every update to every direct dependency. I was anticipating this change for years, thanks for doing it!

New comment by fl0ki in "I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me"

fl0ki — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 18:12:17 +0000

My best professional relationships are between people who are confident enough to take direct feedback and appreciate it rather than resent it.

However, my worst professional relationships are with people who will rebuke your feedback whether you Crocker it or not. If you're direct, they'll say you should have been more diplomatic about it, but if you're diplomatic, they'll say you're being dishonest and should have been direct. There is no right way to approach it, these people will always find a way to criticize the delivery, and to delegitimize the feedback because of it.

New comment by fl0ki in "An ode to bzip"

fl0ki — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 18:04:37 +0000

This seems as good a thread as any to mention that the gzhttp package in klauspost/compress for Go now supports zstd on both server handlers and client transports. Strangely this was added in a patch version instead of a minor version despite both expanding the API surface and changing default behavior.

https://github.com/klauspost/compress/releases/tag/v1.18.4

New comment by fl0ki in "The MacBook Neo"

fl0ki — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:45:27 +0000

Try Sikarugir for PC gaming on macOS. It runs everything I've cared to try, with little or no tweaking.

https://github.com/Sikarugir-App/Sikarugir

New comment by fl0ki in "The MacBook Neo"

fl0ki — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:34:01 +0000

I think the big difference is that if you just want to optimize for some objective, it's usually very clear how to do that from Apple's options, so there's not much research to be done. It can still be challenging to choose what's the best value when it's your own money, but at least you know what you're getting, and the quality hasn't been a concern for years.

New comment by fl0ki in "UUID package coming to Go standard library"

fl0ki — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:33:16 +0000

"Former Googlers" were probably used to using protobuf so they could get from a function call straight out to a struct of the right schema. It's one level of abstraction higher and near-universal in Google, especially in internal-to-internal communication edges.

I don't think it's a strong hiring signal if they weren't already familiar with APIs for (de)serialization in between, because if they're worth anything then they'll just pick that up from documentation and be done with it.

New comment by fl0ki in "Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR"

fl0ki — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:52:08 +0000

I've been using a work-issued one since 2018, and my only complaint in 2026 is that some of its rear USB ports are failing.

New comment by fl0ki in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

fl0ki — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:21:50 +0000

For those who don't already know, you can get a lot of PC gaming performance out of these machines using Sikarugir. You can install all of Steam via winetricks and go from there, or launch DRM-free games directly.

https://github.com/Sikarugir-App/Sikarugir

New comment by fl0ki in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"

fl0ki — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 02:07:24 +0000

"I'm now completely immersed in the problem" is my new catchphrase, thanks for sharing.

New comment by fl0ki in "Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19"

fl0ki — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:36:40 +0000

It's really nice springing for 64G RAM and being increasingly glad you did for every year that passes. (And this year more than most)

New comment by fl0ki in "D Programming Language"

fl0ki — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 15:49:25 +0000

There are two kinds of post on HackerNews: (1) Trolling Walter, (2) Other

New comment by fl0ki in "The Little Bool of Doom (2025)"

fl0ki — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:00:10 +0000

You also have the directive in go.mod which sets this for the entire module, which is very similar to the Rust edition approach, but each Go version is a small "edition".

New comment by fl0ki in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

fl0ki — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:32:49 +0000

This is the only way, because anything less would create a loophole where any abuse or slander can be blamed on an agent, without being able to conclusively prove that it was actually written by an agent. (Its operator has access to the same account keys, etc)

New comment by fl0ki in "Spec driven development doesn't work if you're too confused to write the spec"

fl0ki — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:09:52 +0000

Once you have those real world integrations, no spec is ever complete enough. You can have a whole industry agree on decades-old RFCs and still need "but actually" details diffused through every implementation that actually gets used. There is always more detail in implementations than can be specified by any less than the code itself, and it's multiplied by the set of all possibly deployed versions, and again by possible configurations.

Fun fact: The most costly incident I ever "caused" was because I fixed a bug in an API to make it match the spec. The affected client escalated and forced me to restore the defect, even though it also affects many other clients.

Working in almost any mature space requires you to be extremely conservative in ways that have always proven difficult to specify.

New comment by fl0ki in "How to effectively write quality code with AI"

fl0ki — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:27:49 +0000

This sounds like all of the things you should be doing anyway in a team environment, only now you can't trust your own judgment of where to spend the effort or knowingly leave gaps, because agents with no judgment of their own will be the ones to encounter the consequences.