Hacker News: lknuth

New comment by lknuth in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"

lknuth — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:16:00 +0000

Making it solely about the extraction of dollars is a great recipe to make something mediocre. See Hollywood or Microslop.

Its like min-maxing a Diablo build where you want the quality of the product to be _just_ above the "acceptable" threshold but no higher because that's wasting money. Then, you're free to use all remaining points to spec into revenue.

New comment by lknuth in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

lknuth — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 23:19:11 +0000

It looks interesting but no source availability is a red flag for me.

New comment by lknuth in "Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale"

lknuth — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 23:00:20 +0000

Best performing by what metric? There aren't meaningful ways to measure engineer "performance" that makes them comparable as far as I know.

New comment by lknuth in "Show HN: I built a fast RSS reader in Zig"

lknuth — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 07:52:57 +0000

I think its cool that more people are building what I call "calm tech". More technology should try to serve a purpose quickly and then get out of the way instead of trying to artificially stay on your screen as long as possible.

Incidentally, I built my own calm RSS reader some time ago that has many similar ideas to yours: https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly

New comment by lknuth in "Quill OS: An open-source OS for Kobo's eReaders"

lknuth — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 06:53:28 +0000

I habe a "Pocketbook Verse Pro" that runs Linux. No need to root, you can copy ARM executables to the SD card and run them (that's how I use Syncthing on it). KOReader also works on it.

New comment by lknuth in "Passkeys: They're not perfect but they're getting better"

lknuth — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 18:57:17 +0000

Speaking of passkeys, could they be used to authenticate to a local application - say for unlocking a password vault (perhaps through a Yubikey)?

New comment by lknuth in "In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information"

lknuth — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 08:26:48 +0000

I built my own reader because I didn't want unread items to accumulate. It just shows what was published the last X days.

The result is that there is no need for persistent storage, so its real easy to host. If you're interested, its here: https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly

New comment by lknuth in "A small web July"

lknuth — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 06:06:48 +0000

I appreciate that you document how the ranking works below the list. Thank you.

New comment by lknuth in "Why Elixir? Common misconceptions"

lknuth — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 05:59:23 +0000

Elixir has OpenTelemetry bindings which integrate into most of these platforms. At work, we use DataDog.

New comment by lknuth in "Why Elixir? Common misconceptions"

lknuth — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 21:24:37 +0000

True. There is inter-op with both Elixir and Erlang, but thsts like early TypeScript.

If you're at all interested, I'd suggest doing the basic and OTP tutorials on the Elixir Website. Takes about two hours. Seeing what's included and how it works is probably the strongest sails pitch.

New comment by lknuth in "Building better AI tools"

lknuth — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 21:20:56 +0000

I wonder why though. Aren't both of these things facts? I think you can justify using them anyways - which is what I'd be interested to talk about.

New comment by lknuth in "Why Elixir? A Rebuttal to Common Misconceptions"

lknuth — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 16:48:38 +0000

We look at K8s more like "the Cloud Operating System". Many of its capabilities are more valuable for other runtimes, but that doesn't mean that Elixir is a bad fit with it.

For example, the Erlang VM clustering can make use of K8s for Service Discovery. You can do ephemeral containers and use readiness probes to create a " hand over" period where new instances can sync their data from old, about-to-be-replaced instances.

New comment by lknuth in "Why Elixir? Common misconceptions"

lknuth — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 16:42:41 +0000

It is alleviated quite a bit bz its pattern matching capabilities combined with the "let it crash" ethos.

They have a success typing system (which isn't very good) and are working on a fuller system (which isn't very mature).

If typing is the only thing keeping you out, have a look at Gleam.

Having worked with Elixir professionally for the last six years now, it is a very mature platform, very performant and offers many things that are hard in other languages right out of the box.

New comment by lknuth in "Building better AI tools"

lknuth — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 16:33:03 +0000

Do you disagree with the statement?

New comment by lknuth in "Starship: The minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell"

lknuth — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 17:31:15 +0000

I found the config a lot nicer. It was very easy to custimze to my (very minimal) liking. The config is easily readable. And its portable to any supported shell.

Most shells can probably do everything this can as well and if you're already familiar with the archaic syntax there is probably limited use for you.

For an idea, here is my current config https://github.com/LukasKnuth/dotfiles/blob/main/zsh/.config...

New comment by lknuth in "Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell"

lknuth — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 17:27:16 +0000

Agreed, you can replace them easily: https://github.com/LukasKnuth/dotfiles/blob/main/zsh/.config...

Persistent storage is for cowards

lknuth — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:27:54 +0000

Article URL: https://lknuth.dev/writings/persistent_storage_cowards/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44178793

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by lknuth in "How to post when no one is reading"

lknuth — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 12:33:10 +0000

I see where you're coming from with that take and I don't necessarily disagree - if these models where owned by "the people".

With the situation as it is right now, you're only contributing to some tech oligarchs ability to sell tokens to people.

I chose to put work into my writing and make it freely available on the internet. This isn't the same.

New comment by lknuth in "Learn touch typing – it's worth it"

lknuth — Sat, 31 May 2025 07:01:41 +0000

I habe a virtual layer on my keyboard that contains all symbols I need regularly. Holding down a specific key (that is simple to reach) toggles the layer - like the normal Shift key.

New comment by lknuth in "When a team is too big"

lknuth — Thu, 22 May 2025 10:33:19 +0000

If you have or can make the time, some side projects can go a long way. Mainly to find out what you are actually interested in. I usually give myself some guard rails as to not spend too much time one one thing (perhaps say a month) and then see where that takes me.

Then, I write about the project for two reasons: I get an article out of it that I can share _and_ I get to digest the project as a whole.

Just pick anything that seems interesting and build something. Later, you can even build on top of earlier projects.