Hacker News: icedchai

New comment by icedchai in "Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good"

icedchai — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:05:26 +0000

Yep. My job was code review heavy before AI. Now it's even worse because I can't even trust that the developer understood what they were "developing", so I have to be even more vigilant. I may have to institute a "prompt review" process for some.

New comment by icedchai in "Let's Encrypt had a higher error rate for 90 minutes today"

icedchai — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:20:16 +0000

So true. The last time I worked with a person with an actual "system administrator" title was 2009!

New comment by icedchai in "Many Let's Encrypt renewals had errors today"

icedchai — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:30:03 +0000

Do you remember the early days of SSL certificates? It took an act of god just to get a certificate: verification rituals like faxing corporate paper work, phone calls, manually reissuing certs because someone forgot the "www", forgotten renewals...

Let's Encrypt is incredible.

New comment by icedchai in "America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek"

icedchai — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 01:21:29 +0000

I use Claude Code. I bet that doesn’t help you much. Also, that was not the main point of my comment, which is why it didn't have much detail.

New comment by icedchai in "America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek"

icedchai — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:21:55 +0000

Yep. Someone will copy-and-paste a Jira ticket into AI and blindly accept the output without thinking about the actual intent and context behind the request. It's frustrating. I use AI sparingly, mostly on personal projects where I am prototyping and the quality is not of the greatest concern.

New comment by icedchai in "Ask HN: What is the job market like?"

icedchai — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:06:53 +0000

Yep, I feel stuck. Almost everyone I talk to is unhappy.

New comment by icedchai in "Ask HN: What is the job market like?"

icedchai — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:05:46 +0000

Same. I'm still employed, but am looking. I've had a few interviews but they're all for jobs I wouldn't really want. I know talented people who were laid off and have been looking for 6 to 9 months+. It's very rough out there. I've witnessed the dot-com crash, great financial crisis... this is the worst I've seen. Maybe other industries are better.

New comment by icedchai in "Ask HN: Is our data warehouse setup normal or over-complicated?"

icedchai — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 23:26:51 +0000

These sorts of odd projects are relatively common. A few years ago I was brought on near the end of a data engineering project where somebody had decided they needed multiple databases, a crap load of JSON exports, and dozens of python, R, and shell scripts running inside some job orchestrator to support what amounted to a few megabytes of data being processed each day. Maybe 5 megabytes max.

There wasn't even a lot of transformation going on. It was just... strange. I witnessed some true eldritch horrors like Python calling R calling a shell script that called the mysql client, which wrote data to a temporary file that was eventually read by the great-grand-parent python script.

New comment by icedchai in "Ask HN: Is our data warehouse setup normal or over-complicated?"

icedchai — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:43:22 +0000

What was the point of creating the "canonical form" if you already had reports being generated in-app? Was it just someone's pet project, or were there supposed to be other benefits?

New comment by icedchai in "Ask HN: Is our data warehouse setup normal or over-complicated?"

icedchai — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:48:12 +0000

Without understanding differences between the "source" and "canonical" forms, it is tough to say. Also how much data are we actually talking about? The pipeline you describe may be entirely reasonable, or it may be an over engineered, convoluted contraption that could be replaced with a single DB replica and a few views to simplify queries.

My experience with QuickSight has been pretty negative. The overall UI/UX is pretty meh. If you're embedding it in your product you may be better off generating your own reports, in app.

New comment by icedchai in "Iroh 1.0"

icedchai — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:08:22 +0000

I registered this one back in the early 90's, predating the existence of ARIN. No fees only on legacy ones, assuming one has not signed a registration agreement. I assume, at some point, I will be forced into signing an agreement, but it's worked well so far.

New comment by icedchai in "What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes"

icedchai — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:40:38 +0000

Google's Cloud Run is also pretty simple.

New comment by icedchai in "Tribblix: The retro Illumos distribution"

icedchai — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:05:05 +0000

I'm tempted to try this on my Ultra 10! Looks like I need to upgrade the RAM first...

New comment by icedchai in "Iroh 1.0"

icedchai — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:10:39 +0000

I've been running my own AS for years. You can get an ASN and IPv6 from a RIPE LIR for $200/year or less. Then you need a couple of VPSes that are BGP capable. You can get those for $20 month. Then you can tunnel traffic back to your location with a Wireguard tunnel or whatever you prefer. It's relatively cheap! I also have a legacy IPv4 block I'm routing, which doesn't cost me anything.

New comment by icedchai in "Doing nothing at work"

icedchai — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:53:15 +0000

If you're lucky, the managers are clueless and you can easily pad your estimates by 2 to 3x and still appear incredibly productive. The trick is pacing yourself.

New comment by icedchai in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

icedchai — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:31:45 +0000

These elements weren't "abused." It was the only alternative before CSS was around! Then CSS took years (decades?) to catch up to the simplicity of table-based layouts.

New comment by icedchai in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

icedchai — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:58:02 +0000

If you remember earlier versions of HTML, with all the tables and font tag soup, it was not always the case. Sadly, it was easier building layouts with tables instead of CSS for a very, very long time.

New comment by icedchai in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

icedchai — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:30:17 +0000

"Annual reviews" are another joke. They're, more often than not, a huge time waster for everyone involved. I've seen performance evaluation forms with such convoluted questions, they were obviously the result of insanely muddled group think.

New comment by icedchai in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

icedchai — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:15:53 +0000

If I had not witnessed something similar myself, I wouldn't believe it either. How many "sync" meetings do you possibly need? How does anyone get any actual work done with all this going on?

New comment by icedchai in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

icedchai — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:38:19 +0000

I will agree 1:1's can potentially be useful, however, having them on a weekly basis often is way too frequent. I can count on one hand the number of useful 1:1's I've had over the past 10 years.