Hacker News: julik

New comment by julik in "Show HN: Performative-UI – a react component library of design tropes"

julik — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:54:32 +0000

That is absolutely delightful

New comment by julik in "Cloudflare Flagship"

julik — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:44:59 +0000

New comment by julik in "Stop Using Conventional Commits"

julik — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:23:42 +0000

It is bad terminology, yes. But also - a pretense that you know the overarching influence of a commit ahead of time, which you don't - but once you have conventional commits everyone on the team and the LLMs have to spend time/tokens inventing that stupid nomenclature.

New comment by julik in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

julik — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:22:47 +0000

Previously: https://blog.julik.nl/2020/04/do-not-use-tickets-in-commit-t... with honorable mention of conventional commits. There is nothing conventional about them - it's ceremony that's wasting valuable characters that can have a better use.

The article is 100% on the mark.

New comment by julik in "Cloudflare Flagship"

julik — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:06:28 +0000

Which is not hard to do (it is a modulo over a mersenne twister or something similar), but in my recent gigs just Flipper with optional "state of the flags table as of now" endpoint was more than enough. That modulo+random combo required tools like LaunchDarkly to ship SDKs in several languages, and the ones I had to work with were just plain horrible fit for their language of choice. But because the evaluation was relegated to the edge, the whole system got way more complex than desirable. In actuality, I think a refetch of the current flags table "for this customer" every so often is just fine, and way less of a nuisance.

So glad Flipper exists and I don't have to deal with this stuff anymore.

New comment by julik in "The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code"

julik — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:05:48 +0000

But - albeit briefly - a lot of value for the shareholders has been created

New comment by julik in "Moldova broke our data pipeline"

julik — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:55:53 +0000

This. Pulling in Parquet and all of its dependencies is utter overkill.

We have to re-learn to walk alone

julik — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:42:03 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.julik.nl/2026/01/go-fast-and-go-alone

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46736855

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by julik in "Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie"

julik — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 10:09:22 +0000

This is the next evolution of the "My film does not use CGI" sneering. Sure, doing proper pre-rendered VFX with photo-realism is great and also people doing it love it. But can it be done on the budgets/fixed bids/turnarounds when the producer comes with "...and all of that will be a full virtual set and it should be streaming next Monday morning", for peanuts?..

If it's Gore saying it - maybe he should talk to his producers then, and ask them whether they actually have budgeted the "proper" VFX talent/timelines for the show. He has creative control - the people doing the work do not.

Your workflow system just runs DAGs

julik — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 11:56:11 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.julik.nl/2026/01/on-the-way-to-step-functions-part-2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677976

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Dreams of Marshalable Stacks

julik — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:20:33 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.julik.nl/2026/01/on-the-way-to-step-functions-part-1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46666206

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by julik in "I switched from VSCode to Zed"

julik — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:55:13 +0000

Mine is 2560x1440 which is a pretty nice "sweet spot" size. A comparable 5k to 6k display still commands a substantial price, and - given that I work at two locations - would need me to have two of them. The screen I use as my current (a 3x2 BenQ) also has some amount of subsampling going on, because running it at 2x ("Retina native HiDPI") all the UI controls are too damn big, and space is not enough. Running it at 1x (everything teeeny-tiny) is just not very good for my eyesight and not very workable - and, again, with Zed bumps into the same broken antialiasing rasterizer they have.

And it is not an OS thing. The OS renders subpixel antialiased fonts just fine. But Zed uses its own font rasterizer, and it completely falters when faced with a "standard passable resolution" screen - the letters become mushy, as if they have been blurred - and rather sloppily at that.

New comment by julik in "I switched from VSCode to Zed"

julik — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:46:31 +0000

I would have switched in a pinch if Zed had their low-DPI font rendering in order. At the moment it just looks bad.

New comment by julik in "Permission Systems for Enterprise That Scale"

julik — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 17:36:24 +0000

Interesting article, but it mixes up two concerns, I would say. One is retrieving trees from the DB and storing them - which can be annoying but has nothing to do with permissions. Another one is "hiding" unpermitted nodes/branches from the viewer (if that is what applying permissions is about - it can also handle read-only things, for instance). If these two concepts get separated and it is not a big deal to "overfetch" for the current user before doing the filtering - things become way easier. When the tree is reconstructed, you can do breadth-first traversal and compute permissions for every item in there - or retrieve the permissions for items at that level, if you are doing ACL stuff. From there - if there is no permission for the current viewer on that node - you exclude it from further scans and you do not add its' children to further traversals as you go down. Max. number of scans = tree depth. With some PG prowess you could even fold this into sophisticated SQL stuff.

Trees with RDBMSes do stay a pain, though :-)

New comment by julik in "Be Careful with GIDs in Rails"

julik — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 23:02:17 +0000

Yes, you need both

New comment by julik in "We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)"

julik — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 21:22:18 +0000

Having built an image sequence player using JPEGs back in the day - I can attest that it slappps.

Be Careful with GIDs in Rails

julik — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 02:03:58 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.julik.nl/2025/12/a-trap-with-global-ids

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226779

Points: 44

# Comments: 20

New comment by julik in "Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight"

julik — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 12:53:40 +0000

It depends on whether the ELAC is an LRU (line-replaceable unit, i.e. a box with ports that can be swapped at an airport) and whether a software update can be uploaded into a unit that is installed (not all aircraft have a "firmware update via cable or floppy", so to speak)

New comment by julik in "Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight"

julik — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 12:52:26 +0000

This ELAC version is 100-something, and the A320 first flew around 1988. Why the updates - for example, there are updates to flight control law transitions, like after 1991 where the aircraft would limit flight control inputs during landing, thinking it would be preventing a stall - because it would not go into the flare law appropriately. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberia_Flight_1456

The cause could have also been an extra check introduced in one of the routines - which backfired in this particular failure scenario.

New comment by julik in "Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight"

julik — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 12:47:48 +0000

True. I would say, however, that every "concept" of airliner flight deck has its own gimmicks that can kill. The Airbus "dual input" is such a gimmick. Even though there was, for example, an AF accident with a 777 where there was hardware linkage between yokes and the two pilots were fighting... each other. Physically.