Hacker News: mechanicker

New comment by mechanicker in "Why Oxide Chose Illumos"

mechanicker — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 16:16:29 +0000

Wonder if this is more due to Bhyve being developed on FreeBSD and Illumos derives from a common ancestor BSD?

I know NetApp (stack based on FreeBSD) contributed significantly to Bhyve when they were exploring options to virtualize Data ONTAP (C mode)

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/bhyve-the-freebsd-hypervi...

New comment by mechanicker in "A reawakening of systems programming meetups"

mechanicker — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 14:38:38 +0000

Would love UC Berkeley to revive innovation and collaboration as seen during the BSD days.

New comment by mechanicker in "Code search is hard"

mechanicker — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 14:44:44 +0000

I hope this and SCIP becomes a standard and we have more programming languages emitting symbols in SCIP format.

New comment by mechanicker in "Monodraw"

mechanicker — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 17:31:20 +0000

Awesome tool I purchased when I stumbled upon it.

I draw flowcharts for complex implementations in ASCII using Monodraw and embed them in source code.

New comment by mechanicker in "Why is stdout faster than stderr?"

mechanicker — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 15:09:31 +0000

This is my exact concern when new corp of developers try and learn operating systems using languages further away from the building blocks.

Unpopular opinion: It is still good to learn enough C + system programming & their gotchas before starting with a more fancy higher level language.

New comment by mechanicker in "27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process"

mechanicker — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 14:28:59 +0000

What happens when rest of the team does not rise to the occasion? You now have a happy but very mediocre team for the task on hand. Decision making is very democratic but seldom happens in time.

I feel you need pace setters but not excessively reward individual heroics.

New comment by mechanicker in "I cancelled my Replit subscription"

mechanicker — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 17:27:35 +0000

Well, those OS differences taught us to write (or strive to) portable code. It also taught me to better appreciate strengths in different operating systems over the years.

New comment by mechanicker in "OpenVMS Account at DECUServe"

mechanicker — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 18:28:36 +0000

Samba for file sharing? I led development efforts for the first Samba release on VMS (IA64) working at HP. It was not performant enough compared to ASV but we were on the right path.

New comment by mechanicker in "Google to invest up to $2B in Anthropic"

mechanicker — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 14:57:45 +0000

Could it be more to prevent monopoly by their competitor Amazon becoming the biggest investor?

OpenAI gave Microsoft a competitive edge and this could just be a hedge to prevent Amazon from getting even further ahead.

New comment by mechanicker in "Unified versus Split Diff"

mechanicker — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 14:08:18 +0000

I feel it is best to leave git out of this - separation of concerns Let external tools evolve independently instead.

New comment by mechanicker in "Dave Cutler on Windows [video]"

mechanicker — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 23:55:47 +0000

Was the BSOD screensaver from sysinternals by Mark Russinovich?

I had installed the same and couple of my colleagues sitting around me had done the same.

Our CTO (Robotics simulation software) was visiting and had an early morning meeting. He saw this on all screens and had a minor panic attack fearing a virus outbreak or software bug.

New comment by mechanicker in "Using extra Firefox profiles to make my life better"

mechanicker — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 14:00:44 +0000

I have a similar requirement where I want all my work related links to open in a particular browser/profile.

I use Mac and ended up implementing something that I can tweak easily, not polished but works.

https://github.com/mechanicker/chromer

New comment by mechanicker in "Use multiple Git SSH identities on a single computer"

mechanicker — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 13:16:54 +0000

This is the approach that finally worked for me and have been using this for past 4 years.

I create a top level directory for collection of related repositories. It lets me configure git for different collection of repositories.

New comment by mechanicker in "Sourcegraph is no longer open source"

mechanicker — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 14:16:37 +0000

> I remember having used a Red Hat (?) SourceNav (Source Navigator) by any chance?

I used it quite a lot before completely moving to Emacs.

New comment by mechanicker in "macOS command-line tools you might not know about"

mechanicker — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 13:48:39 +0000

Use ‘ditto’ for copying directories. It is fast!

https://osxdaily.com/2014/06/11/use-ditto-copy-files-directo...

New comment by mechanicker in "Go 1.21 will (probably) download newer toolchains on demand by default"

mechanicker — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 13:48:51 +0000

We have a service that uses Go http proxy for implementing a reverse proxy.

Upgrading to Go 1.16 introduced an unexplained performance drop. We suspect it is due to how it flushes when the content length is not known (typical for streaming). In earlier versions of Go, the call to flush was less frequent and in other versions, flush was called on every write. As a team, we sunk a lot of time trying to debug this and finally changed some of the application architecture/logic to circumvent these overheads.

New comment by mechanicker in "Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)"

mechanicker — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 01:52:13 +0000

Reminds me of my early days as a rookie people manager. I was asked to estimate a project for a team that I had no idea about their abilities. I was very hesitant to estimate since I had no data to begin with. My manager asked me to throw a number and see if there is a push back!!!

I soon made a decision not to be a manager responsible for guess work based estimation and moved back to an IC role where I estimate effort for work assigned to me.

New comment by mechanicker in "Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple"

mechanicker — Mon, 22 May 2023 17:09:17 +0000

I am on my 26th year as a programmer. I love the fact that I can imagine and also make it happen.

However, I see a constant push from people around me to focus on creating a pipeline of ideas and let others implement them. Unfortunately, I do not see the same level of enthusiasm I have in implementing some of those ideas - could be due to lack of recognition since it is not their original idea.

Once I retire, I will just go back to where it all started. Come up with an idea followed by implementation. The sheer pleasure of seeing your idea working in a reasonable timeframe is exhilarating!