Hacker News: ivankelly

New comment by ivankelly in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

ivankelly — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:18:12 +0000

There’s a big difference between using AI well and using it badly. Judgement is what needs to be learnt

New comment by ivankelly in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

ivankelly — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 10:17:06 +0000

Not at all. It’s a tool. It can be used well and it can be used badly, the difference often being others things thought in a CS curriculum. But a well trained engineer using the tool will be more productive than that engineer doing everything by hand, so leaving that tool out of the curriculum is doing a disservice to the students

New comment by ivankelly in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

ivankelly — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:41:29 +0000

Given the way things are going, not knowing how to use AI will be like coming out not knowing about revision control

New comment by ivankelly in "Leaving Google has actively improved my life"

ivankelly — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:32:49 +0000

There’s queries and there’s queries. Many queries are effectively undefined bookmarks. You know this exists but haven’t saved it but your know a few key words to get to it. “Rustdoc moka api”. And then there’s the “I’m researching a subject queries”. Google used to be useful for both. But for the later case it send to have gotten worse. Which is irrelevant because LLMs are so much better. So people will use LLMs for these usecases. So Google search basically becomes a phonebook. And that’s easy to emulate. Their calculator is still my go to though

New comment by ivankelly in "The original vi is a product of its time (and its time has passed)"

ivankelly — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:27:56 +0000

He's right man ^X^S

WTF, why isn't my terminal responding

New comment by ivankelly in "IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)"

ivankelly — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 14:26:24 +0000

I recall CodeWarrior being the official ide for SymbianOS when I started there. And it sucked, but likely more due to the integration. I think sucky custom rarely working IDEs is what pushed me to full time emacs

New comment by ivankelly in "Why are hyperlinks blue? (2021)"

ivankelly — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 21:48:17 +0000

They’re blue because pmarca was a democrat back then

New comment by ivankelly in "Why are there no good dinosaur films?"

ivankelly — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 08:17:46 +0000

> At the time of Jurassic Park’s release, the meteor as the cause for the dino-extinction was still a nascent theory and more than a decade out from being cemented as fact.

This assumed me. Like many people who were interested in dinosaurs, the interest didn't last much past by early teens, so the "nobody knows for sure, maybe meteor" reason for their disappearance was the accepted explanation until something triggered me to look a 2 or 3 years ago and see that the science had changed.

New comment by ivankelly in "Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)"

ivankelly — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 09:29:24 +0000

From the wording, it sounds like it applies to contracting non-US resident software development as well.

New comment by ivankelly in "What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)"

ivankelly — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 12:10:02 +0000

For a headline “what x looks like today”, I expected more pictures

New comment by ivankelly in "Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)"

ivankelly — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 23:08:54 +0000

The bees in a swarm have filled themselves with food before swarming, so they’re stuffed, so it’s hard to flex the abdomen to make a sting

New comment by ivankelly in "Ask HN: My 12 year-old nephew just got diagnosed with ADHD, any advice?"

ivankelly — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 21:07:58 +0000

Keep him away from cigarettes, vapes.

New comment by ivankelly in "Introducing S2"

ivankelly — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 19:49:01 +0000

A interesting difference is the ability to have exclusive access to writes on the log (the fencing token). This allows you to use the logs as write ahead logs.

New comment by ivankelly in "Therapeutic Benefits of Alcohol?"

ivankelly — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 10:12:13 +0000

The gripe water that parents in Ireland and the UK used to give to babies used to be a mixture of sugar and alcohol. 3.6%. They took that formulation off the market in the 90s though.

New comment by ivankelly in "Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus"

ivankelly — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:13:21 +0000

100% agree. I haven't read the raft paper in years, but I remember thinking there's just too much stuff in there. That stuff in important, but if you want people to understand what's happening they internalize the fundamental idea of being able to block other writers by bumping a number. Which is all covered in the single decree paxos section in part time parliment.

New comment by ivankelly in "Irish museum solves mystery of Bronze Age axe heads delivered in porridge box"

ivankelly — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 12:38:39 +0000

The farmer is from Westmeath. The find was in banagher in co Offaly

New comment by ivankelly in "Irish museum solves mystery of Bronze Age axe heads delivered in porridge box"

ivankelly — Sat, 14 Sep 2024 12:37:56 +0000

The oats in clonakilty puddings are all flahavans too

New comment by ivankelly in "The LaTeX fetish (Or: Don't write in LaTeX It's just for typesetting) (2016)"

ivankelly — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 14:41:42 +0000

> nobody is making anyone do anything.

Not now. Now there’s plenty of ways to collaborate on a document. But 20 years ago, you couldn’t edit a word file on Linux and send it back in a form that hadn’t mangled the formatting. And everyone was using word for everything back then.

New comment by ivankelly in "Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed"

ivankelly — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 12:59:57 +0000

> Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it

Is this uniform across all of portugal? In spain, it differs by neighbourhood. Where I live, you drop landfill rubbish beside front door between 20:00 & 22:00 and it gets picked up. 100m away in another neighbourhood they have underground depots that you drop it into. In the newer parts of the city they do have containers on the corner of each block.

New comment by ivankelly in "Postgres: A better message queue than Kafka?"

ivankelly — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 07:53:50 +0000

Since they're already doing offload to S3 for older log messages, it seems like they could do this from the get-go and save a bunch of storage and interzone transfer costs in RDS. Depends on the log message sizes though of course.