Hacker News: hcayless

New comment by hcayless in "A dumpster arrived behind my university's library"

hcayless — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:59:47 +0000

On the one hand, I empathize with the desire to keep as many books as we can, but on the other, librarians have to practice collection management, and they have to do it in the context of dropping budgets and greater demands for student meeting and study space. What do you expect to happen? Faculty often don’t have any idea how the systems that support them actually function, but things have to actually be made to work.

New comment by hcayless in "Lines of code got a better publicist"

hcayless — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:04:43 +0000

Many mid size to large companies are hilariously inefficient and the executives have no idea how work actually gets done. This means you can (in theory) fire a decent percentage of your workforce without affecting your output. You can then claim they’ve been replaced by AI without anyone ever challenging that assertion. I’m not making a pro or anti AI claim here, just saying that you won’t know whether you were wrong about it until/unless things start to go really badly.

New comment by hcayless in "AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet"

hcayless — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 03:03:20 +0000

If it can’t be copyrighted, then no. Licenses rely on the copyright holder’s right to grant the license. But that would also mean it’d be essentially public domain. I’m not sure there’s really settled legal opinion on this yet. Iirc it can’t be patented.

New comment by hcayless in "Oedipus is about the act of figuring out what Oedipus is about"

hcayless — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 02:42:22 +0000

You might enjoy Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction by Fred Ahl (https://a.co/d/ditCwg5). It explores this idea, concluding that Oedipus’ investigation is flawed, but the audience is primed to believe it because they know the myth.

New comment by hcayless in "Xee: A Modern XPath and XSLT Engine in Rust"

hcayless — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 12:37:23 +0000

This sounds fantastic! Thank you for your work. Now I gotta go learn Rust :-).

New comment by hcayless in "Larry Ellison's half-billion-dollar quest to change farming"

hcayless — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 17:33:37 +0000

I was at a large public university in the 90s / early 2000s that used Oracle. The database product itself was absolutely rock solid if well-administered. They also kept trying to sell us enterprise services built on top of the database that were pure trash. "Oracle Forms" was one of those things iirc. We never bought that stuff, but it did get us a nice free lunch or two.

New comment by hcayless in "For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed"

hcayless — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 18:41:54 +0000

I remember a sysadmin at the company I worked at in 2006(?) remarking that this would be the third time he had migrated to and then away from Lotus Notes.

New comment by hcayless in "Spain’s Lessons for American Decline"

hcayless — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 14:59:43 +0000

Of course not. What does that have to do with anything? People with different lives and experiences will have different perspectives that are likely to be helpful. We all care deeply about the things that directly affect us and our loved ones and less about the things that do not. You can cover more bases with a diverse workforce and avoid making dumb mistakes. I don’t get why this is controversial.

New comment by hcayless in "Spain’s Lessons for American Decline"

hcayless — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 13:40:12 +0000

Binaries are cool and all, but maybe it's better for your organizational health to have (for example) your company look something like the population they're selling to? Maybe not everyone gets the same level of boost in their education? Maybe they've overcome some adversity and that will make them a better, more resilient colleague, but it also meant their grades weren't as high? Like I said, this isn't easy stuff, and binary thinking doesn't really help.

New comment by hcayless in "Spain’s Lessons for American Decline"

hcayless — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 13:10:03 +0000

It’s astonishing to me how obviously intelligent people can just be put into the mental equivalent of an unrecoverable flat spin by ideology. The essay is interesting, but then just flips into silly mode. DEI is not the Spanish Inquisition. The idea that we should try to hire, retain, and promote people besides white men seems straightforwardly good to me. Obviously it’s hard to execute on, particularly without making some people uncomfortable. Such groups will make mistakes or be ineffective at times, but they’re not some sort of thought police. It’s quite hard to understand the opposition to them without hypothesizing that it’s simply racism.

New comment by hcayless in "A conversation with a newspaper owner raided by cops"

hcayless — Sat, 12 Aug 2023 19:10:22 +0000

But QI still exists, and Uvalde happened. It wasn’t fear of reprisal, but fear of being shot. So your argument doesn’t work.

New comment by hcayless in "Brexit Could Be Reversed - Here's How"

hcayless — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 17:13:11 +0000

More to the point 2/4 countries in the UK voted remain and got dragged out of the EU anyway.

New comment by hcayless in "Is ORM still an anti-pattern?"

hcayless — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 01:49:39 +0000

My favorite thing about Hibernate is that it’s sophisticated enough that it has its own query language, which is very, very similar but not identical to SQL. Makes me want to take a drink just thinking about it.

New comment by hcayless in "Visual Studio’s IntelliSense list can now steer GitHub Copilot code completions"

hcayless — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 17:36:44 +0000

That’s good. It really did feel like they were fighting each other sometimes.

New comment by hcayless in "The End of the English Major"

hcayless — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 16:29:39 +0000

This is the thing I find really puzzling. Being able to read between the lines of virtually any kind of communication (but especially business communications) is kind of a superpower. I can only come up with cynical reasons why it’s deprecated.

New comment by hcayless in "What Is Anglish?"

hcayless — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 02:58:17 +0000

It’s interesting to me how comparatively impoverished Anglish seems. Here’s to promiscuity!

New comment by hcayless in "Iatrogenics: Why Intervention Often Leads to Worse Outcomes"

hcayless — Sun, 12 Feb 2023 16:51:42 +0000

I had an interesting experience as a child. I grew up in Barbados, where circumcision is not a common practice. In Biology class on day, the teacher talked about the practice, and basically everyone in the class went “Eww”. I moved to the US the next year, and when the same topic came up in Biology, the teacher mentioned that in other countries, most men are uncircumcised. And the class went “Eww”.

New comment by hcayless in "Is this poison ivy?"

hcayless — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 01:23:07 +0000

I was you until a couple of years ago. Could have rolled naked in the stuff. Then it got me. And Lord, it was horrible. Weeks of agony. I’m super careful with it now.

New comment by hcayless in "The myth of the myth of the 10x programmer (2020)"

hcayless — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 13:48:05 +0000

Yes, but: a programmer who has made it to age 25 without learning how to ssh into a server where their code will end up running is to me demonstrating that they are remarkably incurious about the larger ecosystem within which they’re working. One sign of a better developer is that their horizons are broader.

New comment by hcayless in "A Brief Defense of XML"

hcayless — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 03:50:43 +0000

I thought the expansion of YAML was YAML Ain’t Markup Language?