Hacker News: jamesfinlayson

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "No way to parse integers in C (2022)"

jamesfinlayson — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:50:46 +0000

Yep, lots of the Windows API does it this way.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Handling the great code forge fragmentation"

jamesfinlayson — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:00:46 +0000

> Businesses I've spoken to hate the idea of moving their code forge. Migrations like that suck and they're expensive. There isn't a meaningful differentiator between the other managed options, so the goal would just be to stand still. Unless GitHub's stability spirals fast I don't see a big wave of businesses leaving.

Yep, been through a somewhat pointless GitHub to GitLab migration because, at the time, GitLab was cheaper. Now GitHub is cheaper again and the migration was a big annoying and expensive project.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"

jamesfinlayson — Thu, 21 May 2026 01:34:57 +0000

I remember working at a company with at least 5,000 repos across five or six GitHub orgs, plus more stuff in Perforce.

Probably some old experiments in there but the company had its fingers in a few pies and some departments didn't mind creating yet another service to solve a problem.

I definitely archived the old stuff in my department (we had eight repos and that felt like enough for three people).

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Enough with the AI FOMO, go slow-mo, says Domo CDO"

jamesfinlayson — Tue, 19 May 2026 03:24:35 +0000

Gosh, haven't heard of Domo in years. I remember a previous company used it but I never had anything to do with the implementation. Based on some of the other silliness that company bought into, this now makes sense.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]"

jamesfinlayson — Mon, 18 May 2026 00:01:45 +0000

Possibly? I'm sure I read that the first "release" of git was five barely documented binaries that could be strung together to do version control.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Fired Atlassian engineer posts breakdown of every system he built"

jamesfinlayson — Sun, 17 May 2026 23:58:26 +0000

A friend of a friend works/worked at Atlassian and was apparently slogging through legacy JSP when working on Jira.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain"

jamesfinlayson — Thu, 14 May 2026 23:58:59 +0000

Oh, I thought Chrome did have a similar list - maybe I got confused with WebKit. This very site has one quirk: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/25738effd8eeca9b8d15e4...

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Composer leaks contents of tokens configured as GitHub OAuth tokens"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 13 May 2026 23:08:59 +0000

Yeah this what I've always done too - already had to migrate from GitHub to GitLab once and a test.sh script saved me a lot of time.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Remembering Planet Source Code: Sharing Code Before GitHub Made It Easy"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:13:56 +0000

Yeah I'd never heard of it either - 1997 to 2013 then 2015 to 2020 from what I can see. I was definitely around for half of its life but never saw it.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Docker images are hundreds of MB; a full game engine compiles to 35MB WASM"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:10:03 +0000

I thought it had always been pretty lean - I remember someone telling me that when Google launched, its homepage was borderline broken HTML to save on bytes.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

jamesfinlayson — Tue, 12 May 2026 01:22:54 +0000

GitHub had good search but it's been terrible for years now. More recently I think it's only returned results when logged in.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did"

jamesfinlayson — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:27:08 +0000

Possibly sleeping longer to make up for it? In the early days you might lose up to an hour per night feed but if you go to bed a little earlier and have a sleep in then you should hopefully be able to mitigate that two hour decrease.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did"

jamesfinlayson — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:23:59 +0000

Agreed, and extended families are getting smaller (which the article mentions as well). For most of my childhood I had my two siblings, one set of a grandparents, an auntie and four cousins all living on the same block. Babies are a bit harder to pass around between family members but the older children could easily be sent to play with their cousins/to spend some time with their grandparents after school and on weekends etc.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Why airlines are always going bankrupt"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:53:39 +0000

I'd never given a lot of thought but the proliferation of budget airlines creating a race to the bottom always made it seem like airlines were a bad investment.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:20:06 +0000

Yeah I don't know - my experience is that a manager's competence is essentially the toss of a coin. The only non-technical manager I've had was great and the only hands-on player-coach manager I've had was terrible so not enough of a sample size to drill down.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:03:58 +0000

Sounds like Australian police. I remember 15 or so years ago being in a big team assisting the Australian police with something on a remote farm. There were 20 people that needed to be taken back to base and one 10 seater car. Someone asked the police if everyone could get in the car and policeman shrugged and said you can try. So the policeman drove a four wheel drive across farmland with 16 people stuffed into the back.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

jamesfinlayson — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:47 +0000

Oh agreed - I was at a company that was the result of two companies merging and while the reduced head count was an easy synergy (don't need two legal, HR, cyber-security etc teams), everything else was pretty slow.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"

jamesfinlayson — Tue, 05 May 2026 05:23:49 +0000

Agreed! I love programming and have a bunch of side projects that realistically will only ever get anywhere close to completion once I'm retired.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"

jamesfinlayson — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:57:39 +0000

Low sample size but two sets of ancestors from agricultural societies that married in the 1920s weren't especially happy together from what I've been told. One of the marriages was definitely a result of adjacent land though in neither case was it child of wealthy person getting married off to child of another wealthy person.

New comment by jamesfinlayson in "Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"

jamesfinlayson — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:53:02 +0000

> Money is a really good motivator for people not to quit on the first frustrating experience.

So true. I volunteer in an organisation with many older members, and a few of the older members have a thinly-veiled disdain for the younger people who don't contribute the same time and effort that they do... so some young people just stop turning up because they don't want some retiree with no life judging them for having a job, family commitments etc.