Hacker News: lkirkwood

New comment by lkirkwood in "Some software bloat is OK"

lkirkwood — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 04:24:07 +0000

... why? What does it offer that literally any other IDE does not? Genuinely asking.

New comment by lkirkwood in "Rust 1.91.0"

lkirkwood — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 06:55:06 +0000

Are there that many people running Windows on ARM machines? I don't think I've ever met someone who was.

New comment by lkirkwood in "Why every Rust crate feels like a research paper on abstraction"

lkirkwood — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 03:55:42 +0000

Tokio is fast, but it's huge! Check the size of any library or binary that includes tokio with even minimal features, let alone their recommended default feature set which comes with a complimentary kitchen sink.

New comment by lkirkwood in "An illustrated introduction to linear algebra"

lkirkwood — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 04:07:29 +0000

I wish there was more of this in the world. Educational math content is very hard to do well. Great stuff!

New comment by lkirkwood in "Vibe engineering"

lkirkwood — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 03:09:19 +0000

If you're using LLMs for a large number of arithmetic calculations, you're exactly the problem GP is talking about. If you absolutely must use AI get it to generate code that will perform the calculations instead, so that you can actually verify the result.

New comment by lkirkwood in "Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account"

lkirkwood — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 09:02:24 +0000

What is so superior about Visual Studios debugging experience that you're sure it can't be replicated anywhere else? I've never used it.

New comment by lkirkwood in "Ask HN: Went to prison for 18 months, lost access to my GitHub. What can I do?"

lkirkwood — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 12:10:26 +0000

I find this infuriating. I get absolutely no sense that this is AI, and this bizarre attitude towards em dashes is nonsense. Loads of people use them, especially in less formal writing. Get over it.

New comment by lkirkwood in "JavaScript Trademark Update"

lkirkwood — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 01:51:35 +0000

Wow that is not encouraging

New comment by lkirkwood in "JavaScript Trademark Update"

lkirkwood — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 13:34:08 +0000

This is a funny thought, but do you think this would really happen? Surely anyone hiring a programmer would be aware of this.

New comment by lkirkwood in "A leap year check in three instructions"

lkirkwood — Fri, 16 May 2025 04:53:41 +0000

Just nitpick but all odd numbers end in an odd number, not 1, and all even numbers end in an even number i.e. a multiple of 2.

New comment by lkirkwood in "Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room"

lkirkwood — Thu, 15 May 2025 14:04:43 +0000

Well that's the claim, isn't it. People tend to see an hour tick over and think "well, better wrap up". The impulse is much less strong at ten minutes to the hour. It's a bit like pricing things just below a round number because it doesn't feel quite so expensive. GP's comment makes sense to me.

New comment by lkirkwood in "Notes on rolling out Cursor and Claude Code"

lkirkwood — Fri, 09 May 2025 14:46:39 +0000

Yes, but once I'm at the checkout or it starts raining, I reach for it...

New comment by lkirkwood in "Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?"

lkirkwood — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 15:21:17 +0000

In my opinion it's unhelpful to pathologize behaviour like being blunt or speaking your mind. It's just another expression of the impulse to split the world into an in-group and an out-group. I especially agree with the last paragraph of the GP. Doing this may be fun to do when you're making statements like "autistic people are inherently superior in some ways", but it's obviously an issue when some other misguided person makes a statement that I think most rational people would disagree with, such as "autistic people are inherently inferior in some ways". We are all just people.

New comment by lkirkwood in "Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang (2022)"

lkirkwood — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 08:35:47 +0000

I felt the same but after switching to anyhow and thiserror in pretty much every Rust project I work on I find it quite painless. It's not ideal to rely on crates for a core language feature but I never find myself fighting error types anymore. Have you tried those crates? Do you still hold that opinion?

New comment by lkirkwood in "10B Integers Walk into an Array"

lkirkwood — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 06:58:42 +0000

I think they probably do agree, GP says one per person wouldn't be enough.

New comment by lkirkwood in "Oracle, it's time to free JavaScript"

lkirkwood — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 06:10:45 +0000

... do you think people don't use Java anymore?

New comment by lkirkwood in "How a scientist is pushing to supersize research into ultra-processed foods"

lkirkwood — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 03:00:08 +0000

Sorry but that comparison is nonsense. Potato chips are just fried slices of potato. How would you squeeze 6-8 medium potatoes (each weighing 5-10oz according to top Google result for "average medium sized potato weight") into a 7.5oz bag.

New comment by lkirkwood in "Microsoft formally deprecates the Windows Control Panel"

lkirkwood — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 08:41:30 +0000

I used to feel this way but having installed Ubuntu on a friend's old laptop for him, it's crazy the amount of stuff you forget you do because it's second nature. I certainly think it's too far to say "absurd".

New comment by lkirkwood in "A hash table by any other name"

lkirkwood — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:53:25 +0000

It's true that in the case of a sorting algorithm it's not immediately obvious how to analyse the time complexity with Big O. However, I feel that you may be getting bogged down in semantics.

Perhaps it is accurate to say that when Big O is used to describe the time complexity of a function in computer science the variable n in O(f(n)) usually describes the size of the input, which may not be common knowledge. But if the question is:

> Have programmers redefined O to specifically mean worst case?

Then in general I would say no. I suppose to answer more concretely I would have to ask: "Which programmers?"

New comment by lkirkwood in "Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead"

lkirkwood — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 21:39:42 +0000

> It's anyone's guess if the code you wrote a year ago would work today

Is that true? In what sense? I was under the impression the editions took care of that.