Hacker News: jppittma

New comment by jppittma in "Claude Design"

jppittma — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:42:02 +0000

I think that the beauty of the human experience is that all you need to learn is to practice. You automatically improve at what you're doing. The kinds of skills that atrophy when you use AI are skills that AI can already automate. And nobody is going to pay you to do slowly what a machine can do quickly/cheaply.

When you deploy AI to build something, you wind up doing the work that the AI itself can't do. Holding large amounts of context, maintaining a vision, writing apis and defining interfaces. Alongside like, project management. How much time is spent on features vs refactoring vs testing.

New comment by jppittma in "Fast and Easy Levenshtein distance using a Trie (2011)"

jppittma — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:16:30 +0000

It depends on if or not you're trying to correct for typos, or do something semantic. Also, embedding distance is much much more expensive.

New comment by jppittma in "Code has always been the easy part"

jppittma — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 03:54:06 +0000

coding is getting your foot in the door to software engineering, which is really like, computer systems engineering. We do so much more than code...

New comment by jppittma in "Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents"

jppittma — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 13:09:19 +0000

The bikeshedding is coming from in the room. The point is that the feature didn't cause any regression in capability. And who tf wants a plugin system with only support for first party plugins?

New comment by jppittma in "Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret"

jppittma — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:20:42 +0000

That's a fair point. If you want to calculate the real total water usage of any person, you must first invent the universe. You have to cut it off somewhere.

New comment by jppittma in "Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them"

jppittma — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 13:50:03 +0000

Isn't this part of what containers/flatpaks solve?

New comment by jppittma in "Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock"

jppittma — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 13:32:53 +0000

See, I have no problem with searches that involve warrants and probably cause. They could already violate the shit out of your privacy with a warrant. That's kind of the point of a warrant.

New comment by jppittma in "Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them"

jppittma — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:25:08 +0000

The k8s api server is the thing that's configured to talk to your Thales or whatever. On managed kubernetes, these are usually preconfigured to talk to the vendor -- that's the difference between a secret and a config map. The secret is encrypted when it's stored in etcd.

You'd be forgiven for being mistaken however, because this encryption is handled in a way that's transparent to the application.

If you're talking about your application making a call to the k8s api server, then you shouldn't do that unless you're developing a plugin. The kubelet knows how to retrieve and mount secrets from the k8s api server and display them as environment variables to the application. You just declare it as a part of your deployment in the podspec.

New comment by jppittma in "Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them"

jppittma — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 19:57:26 +0000

If you're not developing k8s operators, you're calling the api server directly, then complaining about lock in, then that's a skill issue. If you're developing k8s operators, then you should use a tool like kind for integration tests and dependency injection for other stuff and the concept of lock in doesn't make sense. You can also deploy your helm chart directly to kind.

New comment by jppittma in "Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them"

jppittma — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:39:59 +0000

Yes you can? The container should be completely agnostic to the fact that it's running in kubernetes. You can do config the same way. Configmaps are mounted as regular files and environment variables. The application doesn't care if the configmap came from the cluster resource or a file your created on your dev machine with dev credentials. You can mount local files into the container yourself. It's docker run -v "source:destination" I think.

New comment by jppittma in "Environment variables are a legacy mess: Let's dive deep into them"

jppittma — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:04:54 +0000

How is the kubernetes secret API lock in? Genuinely wondering - were you trying to use that deployment yaml for something other than a kubernetes deployment? For most applications, you should be mounting the secret on your application, then you can inject it as either an environment variable or a json file that your application reads in an environment agnostic way.

Then, on the backend, you can configure etcd to use whatever KMS provider you like for encryption.

New comment by jppittma in "Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests"

jppittma — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 23:30:39 +0000

But is every feature in a browser supposed to be standardized? Like, it's against the rules somehow to develop features without asking permission from Apple and Mozilla?

New comment by jppittma in "Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests"

jppittma — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 21:53:33 +0000

OTOH, are all of the browsers supposed to move in lock step? Is chrome supposed to wait for everyone else's approval before launching any kind of feature?

New comment by jppittma in "John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta"

jppittma — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 04:36:02 +0000

Other teams decommitting is just how it goes.

New comment by jppittma in "John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta"

jppittma — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 04:34:23 +0000

I think the hope is that you just start there. They might have migrated the meeting room devices. Why would you set out to replace *everything* at once? Do something, get some revenue/experience, then try to fan out.

New comment by jppittma in "Looking back at my transition from Windows to Linux"

jppittma — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 20:54:04 +0000

Still a ways to go. I found out part of the reason for my linux bluetooth woes is that a settings in bluetooth called “JustWorks” and “FastConnect” default to off. Like. Why?

As if most linux users who enable bluetooth want it to connect slowly and not work.

Being a bit hyperbolic intentionally but the point still stands

New comment by jppittma in "AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents"

jppittma — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 12:01:32 +0000

Because you're not an (llm) agent and they're not for your consumption? You probably don't need the context in those docs.

New comment by jppittma in "The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States"

jppittma — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:48:28 +0000

Not sure where I fall on that one. In business, it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest. Why shouldn’t a country do the same? Should low level manufacturing be a core competency of the US? Why? Turning steel into screws is certainly lower margin than turning screws and engines into airplanes.

New comment by jppittma in "I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer"

jppittma — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 11:17:31 +0000

Btw, he has a YouTube channel and streams. I recommend it if you’re seeking imposter syndrome.

New comment by jppittma in "6 weeks of Claude Code"

jppittma — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 10:25:30 +0000

Here's the hope that the demand for software continues to increase as developer productivity rises, and that increases in developer productivity are partially captured in higher salaries.