Hacker News: gcbirzan

New comment by gcbirzan in "UUIDv7: Timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities"

gcbirzan — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 19:13:19 +0000

>Unfortunately, the timestamp embedded in a UUIDv7 ID may not relate to the object creation time. The Postgres docs for uuid_extract_timestamp helpfully warn that “the extracted timestamp is not necessarily exactly equal to the time the UUID was generated”.

Just like NOW() won't have the current time.

New comment by gcbirzan in "Third Drone Shot Down in Three Days in Romanian Territory"

gcbirzan — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:20:09 +0000

I would call it using. Because we could've sent troops there, we just chose not to. You are obviously doing it for your own reasons, but we are just happy to see you get slaughtered, as long as our people don't get killed.

New comment by gcbirzan in "Third Drone Shot Down in Three Days in Romanian Territory"

gcbirzan — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:08:51 +0000

We (or at least not the insane part of) in NATO are using you, in the sense that it's easier for us to throw money at you fighting Russia than not, you losing, then us having to lose people.

I don't know how I feel about that, on one hand, we are helping you defend, on the other we are just going "well, at least it's not our civilians and soldiers dying".

But, either way, thank you!

New comment by gcbirzan in "Third Drone Shot Down in Three Days in Romanian Territory"

gcbirzan — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:07:15 +0000

Yes, it is in the interest of Ukraine, but that doesn't mean they're pushing for it or prove that Ukraine attacked Romania. And since these were Russian drones, are you suggesting that, unlike the previous times Russia bombed indiscriminately, this time Ukraine stole Russian drones and launched them at Romania?

As for the second part of your comment, your point is that Russia occupied and committed a genocide against that 'fake' country, when they became free tried to exercise soft power, failed, then invaded, but yet it's NATO that is waging war there?

The only part where you're right is that it is in NATO's interest that Ukraine keeps fighting, since it only costs us money, not people, while still killing the enemy. And that's why we're (and I include the EU here) giving them money, because we're terrified of what will happen when Russia is done with Ukraine.

New comment by gcbirzan in "Third Drone Shot Down in Three Days in Romanian Territory"

gcbirzan — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:57:06 +0000

They are all just as easy to shoot down, if you're willing to spend half a million dollars doing it. When you're Romania that hasn't been fighting a war for years and you get one a day, it's trivial to shoot them down. When you get tens to hundreds a day and you're Ukraine, it's harder since you cannot afford to use F16s and sidewinders to shoot them down. And even if you do, you cannot shoot down all of them, but when you just get one a day, it'll be a while until the 95% interception rate gives you a miss.

Oh, wait, Romania actually got hit by one. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93x4nxlkjeo

It's just a matter of numbers, both percentages and money.

New comment by gcbirzan in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

gcbirzan — Sat, 23 May 2026 01:37:44 +0000

Why did you post an archive.is link?

New comment by gcbirzan in "All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)"

gcbirzan — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:07:41 +0000

Sadly, it's populated.

New comment by gcbirzan in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

gcbirzan — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 08:56:05 +0000

> Trump's landslide victory in 2024.

What are you talking about?

New comment by gcbirzan in "Many Small Queries Are Efficient in SQLite"

gcbirzan — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 20:47:55 +0000

We shouldn't compare doing stupid stuff on sqlite vs doing stupid stuff on postgresql, we should compare doing stupid stuff on sqlite vs not doing stupid stuff on sqlite.

How much faster are the better queries?

New comment by gcbirzan in "Scott Adams has died"

gcbirzan — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:16:26 +0000

He, on the other hand, was an absolute piece of shit.

New comment by gcbirzan in "Scott Adams has died"

gcbirzan — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:15:17 +0000

We're talking about his political views, try to keep up.

New comment by gcbirzan in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

gcbirzan — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 10:19:45 +0000

I'm using Easy Move+Resize, though, I don't recommend using cmd as the only modifier (you're already using ctrl+cmd, so shouldn't be a big deal), since that screws up with cmd clicking on links to open in a new tab.

New comment by gcbirzan in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

gcbirzan — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:47:43 +0000

I think you got it wrong. It might be better for Venezuela, but it will for sure be great for those companies.

New comment by gcbirzan in "Google is dead. Where do we go now?"

gcbirzan — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 23:32:38 +0000

But they still READ. So, if you 'interact' (and by that I mean do any write-like action, like commenting, posting, liking, whatever) less, that's gonna show up.

New comment by gcbirzan in "Graphite is joining Cursor"

gcbirzan — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:54:43 +0000

What I don't understand why people would go all in on one IDE/editor and refuse to make plugins for others. Whether you prefer the CLI or the integrated experience, only offering it on vscode (and a shitty version of it, as well) is just stupid.

New comment by gcbirzan in "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"

gcbirzan — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 20:01:49 +0000

> I see it as a competent software developer but one that doesn't know the code base.

I know what you mean, but the thing I find windsurf (which we moved to from copilot) most useful (except writing opeanapi spec files) is asking it questions about the codebase. Just random minutiae that I could find by grepping or following the code, but would take me more than the 30s-1m it takes it. For reference, this is a monorepo of a bit over 1M LoC (and 800k YAML files, because, did I mention I hate API specs?), so not really a small code base either.

> I will break down the tasks to the same size as if I was implementing it. But instead of doing it myself, I roughly describe the task on a technical level (and add relevant classes to the context) and it will ask me clarifying questions. After 2-3 rounds the plan usually looks good and I let it implement the task.

Here I disagree, sort of. I almost never ask it to do complex tasks, the most time consuming and hardest part is not actually typing out the code, describing it to an AI takes me almost as much time as implementing for most things. One thing I did find very useful is the supertab feature of windsurf, which, at a high level, looks at the changes you started making and starts suggesting the next change. And it's not only limited to repetitive things (like . in vi), if you start adding a parameter to a function, it starts adding it to the docs, to the functions you need below, and starts implementing it.

> For me this method allows me to focus on the architecture and overall structure and delegate the plumbing to Copilot.

Yeah, a coworker said this best, I give it the boring work, I keep the fun stuff for myself.

New comment by gcbirzan in "Mixpanel Security Breach"

gcbirzan — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 13:35:25 +0000

Only the supervisory authorities are required to be informed in 72 hour, and even there, it's not a hard rule, you can have excuses.

New comment by gcbirzan in "Python is not a great language for data science"

gcbirzan — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 18:47:35 +0000

There's also itertools.groupby, maybe not much shorter (need to define the keyfunc, sort, then iterate), but it does make the intent obvious.

New comment by gcbirzan in "France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors"

gcbirzan — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 15:51:34 +0000

When I say history, I mean more than just the decision, which might look like "oh, they didn't like the results", but also the events that lead up to it, the campaign. I'm not even going to go into the coup d'etat he attempted after the elections with a group of far right mercenaries, or the things that came out about the campaign and Georgescu that weren't known at the time (which, obviously, couldn't have been a factor, but confirm that this was the right decision).

I'm not sure what the accusations you're talking about are

New comment by gcbirzan in "France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors"

gcbirzan — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 15:49:03 +0000

I don't. I do remember when they were annulled after Russian interference and there were other fundamental issue with the first first round and Georgescu's campaign that broke the law.