Hacker News: gmassman

New comment by gmassman in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

gmassman — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:25:01 +0000

Usually these were the developers who said their code didn’t need tests because it’s obviously correct/too simple to need them. And then their bug causes a crash that needs to be fixed over the weekend :/

New comment by gmassman in "Number in man page titles e.g. sleep(3)"

gmassman — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:00:30 +0000

I guess the joke is you can scale a file system or a fish, but can only tune a file system?

New comment by gmassman in "Show HN: Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search"

gmassman — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:47:17 +0000

Very exciting! Congrats on the release, this will be a huge benefit to all folks building RAG/rerank systems on top of Postgres. Looking forward to testing it out myself.

New comment by gmassman in "OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent"

gmassman — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 06:30:36 +0000

Seems like an anti-pattern to me to run AI models without user’s consent.

New comment by gmassman in "Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?"

gmassman — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 05:12:04 +0000

I’ve been using a zenbook for about 8 years now. Hardware and battery are still surprisingly solid, although one of the hinges is starting to fail…

New comment by gmassman in "Brain has five 'eras' with adult mode not starting until early 30s"

gmassman — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:14:01 +0000

Fiction can reveal a lot of real wisdom if you’re open to receiving it.

New comment by gmassman in "Tell HN: Azure outage"

gmassman — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:26:46 +0000

I’ve been migrating our services off of Azure slowly for the past couple of years. The last internet facing things remaining are a static assets bucket and an analytics VM running Matomo. Working with Front Door has been an abysmal experience, and today was the push I needed to finally migrate our assets to Cloudflare.

I feel pretty justified in my previous decisions to move away from Azure. Using it feels like building on quicksand…

New comment by gmassman in "My first impressions of Gleam"

gmassman — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 15:19:30 +0000

The BEAM is an amazing piece of technology. It’s built to scale massive concurrent systems and has great developer ergonomics. I’ve used it with Elixir and it’s really a breath of fresh air as far as running a webserver goes. Much more flexible and simpler to manage than a python or nodejs runtime, and also capable of scaling up with far fewer resources than you would think. Highly recommend giving it a go!

New comment by gmassman in "Ask HN: What are you working on this weekend?"

gmassman — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 15:53:17 +0000

My band is playing a small bluegrass festival this weekend. We’ve been recording an album since last year and are starting the work of promoting it by playing more gigs!

New comment by gmassman in "Where Do Scientists Think This Is All Going?"

gmassman — Sat, 03 May 2025 16:13:27 +0000

Would we consider the calculator useful if it sometimes told us 2+2=22? Would this at all be considered a sign of creativity or abstract thought?

New comment by gmassman in "Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?"

gmassman — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 06:00:27 +0000

Nice work, both to the prompter and the promptee!

New comment by gmassman in "Designing Electronics That Work"

gmassman — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 22:02:02 +0000

Nice work Hunter! I’m starting a hardware side project so I’ll definitely be giving the book a read. Hopefully it helps me avoid some of the common electronic pitfalls.

New comment by gmassman in "Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests shipped to cloud"

gmassman — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 19:22:44 +0000

It’s always the year of the linux desktop!

New comment by gmassman in "Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees"

gmassman — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 15:42:59 +0000

More than 50% voted for not-Trump

New comment by gmassman in "400 reasons to not use Microsoft Azure"

gmassman — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 04:47:35 +0000

Add Intune to the list of bad MS dashboards…

New comment by gmassman in "Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code"

gmassman — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 21:41:40 +0000

> Spends more time explaining why TypeScript in Svelte is problematic than actually fixing TypeScript in Svelte.

Damn, that’s brutal. I mean, I never said I knew how to fix ComponentProps or generic components, just that they have issues…

New comment by gmassman in "Do you want to be doing this when you're 50? (2012)"

gmassman — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 17:04:28 +0000

Morals aren’t always involved in commercial software development, and likely they never have been in any of your workplaces. However, I think it’s a gross mischaracterization to claim that morals and business don’t have any overlap. I work in the health tech industry, and I feel good knowing that patients benefit from using our device. I know I wouldn’t feel the same way if I was working at some fintech optimizing stock trading to the Nth degree.

New comment by gmassman in "Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code"

gmassman — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 21:12:03 +0000

I agree with your point in general, but saying one needs to be great at using AI tools gives way too much credit to companies’ ability to identify low performers. Especially in large organizations, optics matter far more than productive output. Being able to use AI tools is quite different from saying you are using AI tools!

New comment by gmassman in "Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim"

gmassman — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 02:11:35 +0000

I’ve been pretty happy with aider. I have it running in a separate tmux window and can switch between it and nvim easily.

New comment by gmassman in "PostgreSQL Anonymizer"

gmassman — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 20:42:46 +0000

This is a very handy postgres extension! We've been using it at my job for a couple years now to generate test datasets for developers. We have a weekly job that restores a prod backup to a temporary DB, installs the `anon` extension, and runs pg_dump with the masking rules. Overall we've been very happy with this workflow since it gives us a very good idea of how new features will work with our production data. The masking rules do need maintenance as our DB schema changes, but that's par for the course with these kinds of dev tools.

All that said, I wouldn't rely on this extension as a way to deliver anonymized data to downstream consumers outside of our software team. As others have pointed out, this is really more of a pseudonymization technique. It's great for removing phone numbers, emails, etc. from your data set, but it's not going to eradicate PII. Pretty much all anonymized records can be traced back to their source data through PKs or FKs.