Hacker News: havkom

New comment by havkom in "What makes you senior"

havkom — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 20:07:47 +0000

Some people that are immune to listen to people with more experience will continue to be ”junior” forever. They may eventually not have the title junior, but they really are.

New comment by havkom in "The highest quality codebase"

havkom — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:31:47 +0000

There are fundamental differences. Many people expect a positive gradient of quality from AI overhaul of projects. For translating back and forth, it is obvious from the outset that there is a negative gradient of quality (the Chinese whispers game).

New comment by havkom in "Agent design is still hard"

havkom — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 15:02:06 +0000

My tip is: don’t use SDK:s for agents. Use a while loop and craft your own JSON, handle context size and handle faults yourself. You will in practice need this level of control if you are not doing something trivial.

New comment by havkom in "Inflammation now predicts heart disease more strongly than cholesterol"

havkom — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 05:08:53 +0000

What about GLP-1 antagonists to lower inflammation / hs-CRP?

New comment by havkom in "GitHub was having issues"

havkom — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 15:27:16 +0000

Does this matter much? Git is a ”distributed source control system”. Are you using git in the wrong way? :)

New comment by havkom in "JavaScript's New Superpower: Explicit Resource Management"

havkom — Sat, 17 May 2025 08:55:36 +0000

Reminds me of C#.. IDisposible and IAsyncDisposible in C# helps a lot to write good mechanisms for things that should actually be abstracted in a nice way (such as locks handling, queue mechanisms, temporary scopes for impersonation, etc).

New comment by havkom in "Show HN: Semantic Calculator (king-man+woman=?)"

havkom — Thu, 15 May 2025 04:49:37 +0000

I tried:

-red

and:

red-red-red

But it did not work and did not get any response. Maybe I am stupid but should this not work?

New comment by havkom in "AI code is legacy code?"

havkom — Sun, 04 May 2025 19:29:51 +0000

What is the difference between them? Both seems like quite trivial implementations?

New comment by havkom in "Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4"

havkom — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 10:04:00 +0000

Good investigation!

Software developers nowadays barely know about transactions, and definitely not about different transaction models (in my experience). I have even encountered "senior developers" (who are actually so called "CRUD developers"), who are clueless about database transactions.. In reality, transactions and transaction models matter a lot to performance and error free code (at least when you have volumes of traffic and your software solves something non-trivial).

For example: After a lot of analysis, I switched from SQL Server standard Read Committed to Read Committed Snapshot Isolation in a large project - the users could not be happier -> a lot of locking contention has disappeared. No software engineer in that project had any clue of transaction models or locks before I taught them some basics (even though they had used transactions extensively in that project)..

New comment by havkom in "Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI"

havkom — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 12:54:23 +0000

The big threat of LLM:s is not the diminishing skills of established skilled developers, but rather the skill set building of junior developers.

New comment by havkom in "Better Error Handling"

havkom — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 09:57:48 +0000

try catch - where you catch the right types of errors at the right level is hard to beat.

However, many make the mistake to handle any errors at the wrong level. This leads to really buggy and hard to reason about code and in some cases really bad data inconsistency issues.

A rule of thumb is to never catch a specific error which you are not in a good position to handle correctly at that precise level of code. Just let them pass through.

New comment by havkom in "The Frontend Treadmill"

havkom — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 12:54:19 +0000

Amen!

New comment by havkom in "Posthog/.cursorrules"

havkom — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 10:01:14 +0000

How to apply these rules on junior co-workers (who think they know what is best from reading a hyped blog post)?

New comment by havkom in "DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL"

havkom — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 19:27:45 +0000

Yes. It shines with real problems.

New comment by havkom in "That's not an abstraction, that's a layer of indirection"

havkom — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 13:04:27 +0000

I have seen tons of ”abstractions” in recently created code bases from ”senior developers” which in actual fact is only titanic-grade mess of complicated ”indirection”. Many people nowadays are unfortunately not fit to work in software development.

New comment by havkom in "Build systems, not heroes"

havkom — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 07:49:51 +0000

BTW, I am currently working in an enterprise with a small team mixed with experienced developers (heros - but still always learning because of new complexities) and new developers (heros in becoming).

Absolutely fantastic and we create wonders, but it requires management to acknowledge skill and exceptionalism.

New comment by havkom in "Build systems, not heroes"

havkom — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 07:44:55 +0000

Yes. Focus on building all your team members to heros instead.

The other way around is possible, but you will end up with a team of 1000 people doing the same work as 10.

New comment by havkom in "Microsoft formally deprecates the Windows Control Panel"

havkom — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 08:28:22 +0000

Windows 2000 Professional was the best OS ever. Only downhill from there.

New comment by havkom in "Launch HN: Undermind (YC S24) – AI agent for discovering scientific papers"

havkom — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 12:59:08 +0000

This looks cool!

New comment by havkom in "U.S. Department of Defense – Detecting Agile BS [pdf] (2018)"

havkom — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 22:13:04 +0000

Using these technologies or frameworks may just as well indicate that they are not agile. Nowadays much more common that the wrong technologies are used in the wrong places.