<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: jrockway</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jrockway</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 30 May 2026 20:10:54 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=jrockway" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is something appealing about "it's just a file" (it really isn't; it has locks and a WAL), but I agree with you.<p>I think people are afraid to read the documentation for postgres.  You can start it up in milliseconds.  Fast enough and light enough to run one copy for every test case in your test suite, or whatever you're using it for.  (mkdir /tmp/whatever; initdb -D /tmp/whatever --no-instructions -A reject -c listen_addresses= --auth-local=trust --no-sync -c fsync=off -c unix_socket_directories=/tmp/whatever -U postgres --no-locale; postgres -D /tmp/whatever)  Now you have a test database that behaves exactly like production because it's exactly like production.  (OK, turning fsync off makes it a lot faster than production, so be careful.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 30 May 2026 03:19:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48332178</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48332178</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48332178</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "Incident with Actions and Pages"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think they were intending to evoke the image of RAID rather than literally referring to a redundant array of inexpensive disks.  You host your code on Github, Gitlab, and at home, then you survive a Github outage.  It's a redundant array.  Not sure it's inexpensive, though.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 16:20:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281841</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281841</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281841</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think you can ever trust one service with critical data.  Some Claude instance deletes your prod database, you have to restore from an offsite backup because it also deleted your local backups.  Even at small startups we did pg_dump to AWS from GCP because ... who knows what is going to happen to GCP, and we want to continue to be in business if that happens.<p>I don't feel safe with any one single point of failure.  "Your credit card bounced", "you thought it was dev", "you got hacked", etc. are all the same problem to me and no cloud provider solves those merely by setting up an account.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 02:44:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48202500</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48202500</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48202500</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Kind of a random aside, but I never realized how obnoxious LEDs were until I got a studio apartment and started sleeping in the same room as my homelab / workstation / networking hardware.  Electrical tape saved me, but wow.  You sure can produce a lot of light with a milliwatt of electricity :)<p>(And yes, my workstation has a clear case and LED RAM.  Yes, I'm an idiot.  Whenever Windows applies an update late at night, I wake up if it turns back on.  I don't know what I was thinking when I built that thing, but never again.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 21:25:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055274</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055274</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055274</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "Appearing productive in the workplace"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Unfortunately, there is pressure to treat this stuff in good faith.  Maybe the PR author really did write all this.  Maybe they really did spend 6 hours writing this document.<p>So, I approach it in good faith, but I do get upset when people say "I'll ask claude".  You need to be the intermediary, I can also prompt claude and read back the result.  If you are going to hire an employee to do work on your behalf, you are responsible for their performance at the end of the day.  And that's what an AI assistant is.  The buck stops with you.  But I don't think people understand that and that they don't understand they aren't adding value.  At some point, you have to use your brain to decide if the AI is making sense, that's not really my job as the code/doc reviewer.  I want to have a conversation with <i>you</i>, not your tooling, basically.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2026 19:59:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48040947</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48040947</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48040947</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "I built my own hair electrolysis machine"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am not sure who would find your comment funny.  It's just misogyny, bro.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 03 May 2026 22:14:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002152</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002152</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002152</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "Refuse to let your doctor record you"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Doctors have always been into "more patients", though.  To some extent, if you're a doctor, the upper bound on your pay is how much you charge * how many patients you see.  This is why you occasionally get seen well after your appointment time; people are double booked because some % reliability doesn't show up, but sometimes everyone DOES show up to their appointment and now it's your problem.<p>So if AI scribes mean "less double booking" then that's kind of a win/win.  Less patient time is wasted.  Doctors can make more money by seeing more people on a given day.  Seems fair.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:35:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47894799</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47894799</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47894799</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "jj – the CLI for Jujutsu"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>jj is great and while it was an adjustment at first, I've never looked back.  I feel like when you're working with other people, things never get reviewed and merged as quickly as you'd like.  With jj, it's pretty low-cost to have a bunch of PRs open at once, and you can do something like `jj new <pr1> <pr2> <pr3>` to build stuff that requires all 3.  This lets me do things like... not do a big refactoring in the same PR as adding a feature.  I can have them both self-contained, but still start on the next step before they're all merged.  It's easy to add changes on top, switching between the individual PRs as comments come up, etc.<p>I always liked doing things like this.  At Google where we used a custom fork of Perforce, I told myself "NEVER DO STACKED CLs HAVE YOU NOT LEARNED YOUR LESSON YET?"  If one CL depended on another... don't do it.  With git... I told myself the same thing, as I sat in endless interactive rebases and merge conflict commits ("git rebase abort" might have been my most-used command).  With jj, it's not a problem.  There are merge conflicts.  You can resolve them with the peace of mind as a separate commit to track your resolution.  `jj new -d 'resolve merge conflict` -A @` to add a new commit after the conflicted one.  Hack on your resolution until you're happy.  jj squash --into @-.  Merge conflict resolved.<p>It is truly a beautiful model.  Really a big mental health saver.  It just makes it so easy to work with other people.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:20:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766022</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766022</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766022</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, sorry.  Claude Code in my case.<p>I do use the browser version on occasion.  I have no strong feelings one way or the other there.  I like it better than Google search in many cases, but probably just search more often.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:36:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47744798</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47744798</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47744798</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have read the HN articles and seen the grumbling from coworkers, but I haven't felt it myself.  I am not really a one-shotter, though.  I kind of think about how I would refactor / write something myself and walk Claude through that, and nitpick it at each step... and the recent changes haven't really bothered me there.  Likely due to being new at it.<p>Sometimes Claude can be a little weird.  I was asking it about some settings in Grafana.  It gave me an answer that didn't work.  I told it that.  "Yeah, I didn't really check, I just guessed." Then I said, "please check" and it said "you should read the discussion forums and issue tracker".  I said "YOU should read the discussion forms and issue tracker".  It consumed 35k tokens and then told me the thing I wanted was a checkbox.  It was!  I am not sure this saved me time, Claude.  I am not experienced enough to say that this is a deal breaker.  While this is burned into my mind as an amusing anecdote, it doesn't ruin the service for me.<p>My coworkers have noticed a degradation and feel vindicated by some of the posts here that I link.  A lot of them are using Cursor more now.  I have not tried it yet because I kind of like the Claude flow and /effort max + "are you sure?" yield good results.  For now.  I'm always happy to switch if something is clearly better.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:24:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47744670</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47744670</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47744670</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "An open-source 240-antenna array to bounce signals off the Moon"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>ITAR feels a lot like Bernstein v. US all over again.  Until very recently, everyone who can do anything that would be covered by ITAR was a giant corporation that likes the moat that regulations create, so it's unthinkable to challenge it.  But that is changing, just like cryptography was in the early 90s.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:45:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663347</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663347</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663347</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "Go on Embedded Systems and WebAssembly"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It gets better every release, but there are missing language features:<p><a href="https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/" rel="nofollow">https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/</a><p>And parts of the stdlib that don't work:<p><a href="https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/stdlib/" rel="nofollow">https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/stdlib/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:00:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632892</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632892</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632892</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "Amazon is adding a fuel surcharge to fees it collects from third-party sellers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sometimes I wonder if we just do these wars so that companies can raise prices and when the war ends, not lower them.  Do we ever see "oil prices are down 3.5%, we are lowering our prices by 3.5%"?  Never.  "But the free market will force someone to do this to gain marketshare."  But Amazon is the only Amazon, so I doubt that will happen.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:50:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619997</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619997</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619997</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Don't tell me about the Space Shuttle<p>The Space Shuttle sure blew up a lot for something with that much process applied.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:32:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47505272</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47505272</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47505272</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's worth pointing out that plenty of pilots take off and land safely at uncontrolled airports.  ATC is a throughput optimization; the finite amount of airspace can have more aircraft movements if the movements are centrally coordinated.  It feels like we are nearing the breaking point of this optimization, however, and it's probably worth looking for something better (or saying no to scheduling more flights).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:37:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493424</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493424</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493424</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think the choice of breed has meaning.  The border collie is the smartest breed of dog, and its origin is in herding sheep.  Calling your coworkers sheep isn't particularly nice.  Calling yourself the smartest breed of dog isn't particularly humble.  That's why the person you're replying to objects.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:46:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47478733</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47478733</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47478733</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "How kernel anti-cheats work"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I still don't understand why people don't cheat in FPSes by looking at the video stream and having a USB mouse that emits the right mouse movements.  (The simplest thing is to just click when someone's head is under your crosshair, in games with hitscan weapons.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 04:05:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384245</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384245</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384245</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'd call it write-only memory.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Mar 2026 16:52:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47378564</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47378564</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47378564</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've been on a grand jury... the cops lied through their teeth, couldn't keep their stories straight through a prepared monologues reading from notes and ... everyone in the room picked up on it and didn't indict the suspects.  Our grand jury was so cynical the DAs stopped giving us cases and made the other two grand juries stay late to make up for the lost capacity.  It was great.  We did something good.  And it was just a bunch of random people from Brooklyn.<p>The establishment likes to pat the establishment on the back but ordinary people seem to know what's up.  In my minimal experience, anyway.<p>(One thing to keep in mind... grand juries really are a cross-section of the population, whereas lawyers get to select jurors after talking to them, so there is some selection bias on ordinary juries that grand juries don't have.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:09:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47369190</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47369190</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47369190</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jrockway in "The MacBook Neo"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Back in 2000 I got the M1 Air with 8G of RAM (needed the cheapest Mac to test some arm64 stuff) and that laptop served me very well.  I never felt RAM-limited.  I was always expecting to run out of memory during a big Bazel build or something, but never did.<p>It isn't the most powerful computer in the world but I never ran into any problems... so it's probably an OK compromise for most people, especially in the world where RAM is scarce because of AI datacenter buildouts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:49:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341495</link><dc:creator>jrockway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341495</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341495</guid></item></channel></rss>