Hacker News: kaiby

New comment by kaiby in "Blizzard manager departs in protest of employee ranking system"

kaiby — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 02:45:56 +0000

I've heard that at companies that did stack ranking, managers of groups with high performers would actually seek out poor performers who didn't care about their ranking from other groups, to add to their group so that they wouldn't have to give a poor mark to their own people. These poor performers became hot commodities. Talk about gaming the system...

New comment by kaiby in "Tales of the M1 GPU"

kaiby — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 16:16:33 +0000

> It feels like Rust’s design guides you towards good abstractions and software designs.

> The compiler is very picky, but once code compiles it gives you the confidence that it will work reliably.

> Sometimes I had trouble making the compiler happy with the design I was trying to use, and then I realized the design had fundamental issues!

I experience a similar sentiment all the time when writing Rust code (which for now is admittedly just toy projects). So far it's felt like the compiler gives you just enough freedom to write programs in a "correct" way.

I don't really do unsafe/lower-level coding, so I can't speak to much there however.

New comment by kaiby in "Dad takes down town's internet by mistake to get his kids offline"

kaiby — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 18:47:40 +0000

> kid's devices need to be charged over night downstairs in the kitchen

How do you prevent them from going downstairs after you've fallen asleep?

New comment by kaiby in "Buy it for life: Durable, Quality, Practical"

kaiby — Sun, 18 Apr 2021 02:31:46 +0000

I've seasoned my cast iron pan many times. I don't think it ever beats teflon, though it gets to a point where things wash off of it pretty easy with just water and a chainmail ringer.

New comment by kaiby in "On Small Games"

kaiby — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 06:06:56 +0000

I have to add Outer Wilds. Never been so wow'd by a space exploration game.

New comment by kaiby in "Json-Base – Database built as JSON files"

kaiby — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 21:27:57 +0000

As others have mentioned, there are a ton of off-the-shelf solutions that would have been more than adequate for this.

My question is, why didn't he go for any of the existing solutions when setting them up would've still been faster than rolling his own DB-in-a-JSON-file solution?

New comment by kaiby in "Apple, ARM, and Intel"

kaiby — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 17:20:07 +0000

I'm not a business guy, but if Apple's going all-in on ARM processors, and then they expand into the server market (which the article speculates on), could we potentially see Apple opening a new product branch devoted to competing in the Cloud space with AWS, Azure, and GCP?

Imagine developing apps on an ARM-powered macbook, deploying onto ARM-powered servers owned by Apple, specifically for applications to be used on MacOS & iOS devices.

New comment by kaiby in "Working remotely: I want my shared whiteboard"

kaiby — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 18:31:41 +0000

I've been using Invision's Freehand tool [0] for whiteboarding in online meetings (also it's free). It's mostly worked about as well as a virtual whiteboard could be. It also allows for collaboration so everyone can draw on the same whiteboard at the same time.

[0] https://www.invisionapp.com/feature/freehand

New comment by kaiby in "Notes on Technical Writing"

kaiby — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 02:28:07 +0000

The issue with that though is that if someone could read/write code, they would probably choose to be a SWE instead of a tech writer.

I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect that it's an combination of higher pay and an interest in writing code over writing documentation.

In my experience I would say that a good SWE will attempt to write good documentation, as having to answer questions in the future about how stuff works over and over takes more time than just documenting things properly the first time.

New comment by kaiby in "Show HN: Version Control for Databases"

kaiby — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 15:34:22 +0000

Which databases can this be used for? Based on the usage of phpmyadmin and WordPress in the examples, I take it only works for MySQL?

New comment by kaiby in "Now Bigger Than eBay, Shopify Sets Its Sights on Amazon"

kaiby — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 20:58:41 +0000

This interview with Shopify's CEO about how the company grew / his mindset was interesting [1]. He said a lot of things that sounds similar to the author’s quotes in the article.

[1] https://fs.blog/tobi-lutke/

New comment by kaiby in "How to build a plugin system on the web and also sleep well at night"

kaiby — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 18:57:22 +0000

I really like Figma's engineering blog. I find that they do a great job introducing the concepts that need to be understood with the level of detail in their implementation of those concepts. I'm always learning something new when I read an entry.

This is the first time I've heard of Realms API or QuickJS, will need to keep those in mind if I ever need to write a plugin system.

New comment by kaiby in "Show HN: A little web app for playing around with colors"

kaiby — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 17:21:39 +0000

Fun, but I couldn't figure out how to select a color (left-most bottom-menu icon) and have it transfer over to the play area (middle icon).

New comment by kaiby in "Fast Software, the Best Software"

kaiby — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 20:51:54 +0000

This article really speaks to me. It’s well written, and written like a rock collector talking about each one of his rocks in his rock collection, only the rocks are apps of different speeds.

There was a related thing that I heard from a previous CTO that changed my outlook on how to write web apps: "Users shouldn’t be able to tell that they’re using a web application. A web application should feel native. That is, it should load instantly."

New comment by kaiby in "Abscissa: Security-oriented Rust application framework"

kaiby — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 04:35:48 +0000

I chuckled at their README:

> Q2: "Abscissa" is a hard name to remember! Got any tips?

> A2: Imagine you're A-B testing a couple of scissors... with attitude.

New comment by kaiby in "Slack Is Going Public at a $16B Valuation"

kaiby — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 02:11:46 +0000

FWIW, The ReasonML, Rust, and Elixir language all have active communities on Discord. It really is pretty good for the use case.

New comment by kaiby in "Actix-web 1.0 – A small, pragmatic, and fast web framework for Rust"

kaiby — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 16:14:08 +0000

Coming from mostly a web programming background, it certainly feels more low-level than PHP/JavaScript, but not by much, at least for web/backend work. You can still code without having to delve into low-level/unsafe coding, but that stuff is available to you if you need to squeeze more performance out of your app.

The biggest hurdles for me (I'm still learning) compared to JS is the borrow checker, lifetimes, and strings (they are handled very precisely in Rust).

The benefits are huge though. My time coding in JS feels like 50% coding & writing tests, 40% debugging my app, 10% reading documentation. The "debugging" portion can sometimes be painful when fixing race conditions. Rust on the other hand, feels like 30% reading documentation, 30% coding, 30% getting my code to compile, and the other 10% debugging/testing my app. For the most part, if your code compiles and your logic is correct, your app is guaranteed to run the way you expect it to.

New comment by kaiby in "Rust: Beyond the Typechecker"

kaiby — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 04:15:40 +0000

There's actually already a library that does what the author is talking about: https://github.com/nrc/libhoare

They call it "design by contract" rather than "deductive verification" though.

Wish there wouldn't be so many terms for the same thing.

edit: There's also an existing RFC for this: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/1077

New comment by kaiby in "The Archetypal Resonance of Classic JRPGs"

kaiby — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 06:22:40 +0000

FFIV, VI, VII, Chrono Trigger, and Zelda (not JRPG I know) music routinely gets stuck in my head. EVERY DAY.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsj5xjoLXtE

New comment by kaiby in "We Need Chrome No More"

kaiby — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 18:24:02 +0000

Firebug was awesome, then 2011 happened and Firebug’s lead dev joined the Google Chrome team to work on their dev tools [1].

[1] https://news.softpedia.com/news/Lead-Firebug-Developer-Joins...