Hacker News: mekazu

New comment by mekazu in "Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats"

mekazu — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 23:19:43 +0000

It’s probably a delimiter. Or an escape indicator.

New comment by mekazu in "I still love PHP and JavaScript (2022)"

mekazu — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 21:07:21 +0000

Agree that it’s good to get the certainty of zero memory leaks (assuming there’s no associated bugs in apache) but it’s not that hard to write code that doesn’t cause memory leaks for stateful apps as long as you are able to follow certain simple principles and avoid bugs in the third party libs you use.

New comment by mekazu in "Displaying My Washing Machine's Remaining Time with Curl, Jq, and Pizauth"

mekazu — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 12:59:08 +0000

I wonder if the author knows about `watch`. It seems like it might’ve saved some effort with a better outcome.

New comment by mekazu in "Andromeda Invaders: A retro-style game written in HTML5, Canvas, and Web Audio"

mekazu — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 09:20:20 +0000

This is an great example of how you don’t need fancy graphics for good, playable and engaging games. The music combined with the sound effects works really well too and is very simple.

New comment by mekazu in "I don’t believe in sprints"

mekazu — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 13:01:08 +0000

But they wouldn’t announce it until it’s pretty much ready.

New comment by mekazu in "I don’t believe in sprints"

mekazu — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 12:55:11 +0000

Most good software that I can think of has the luxury of being delivered whenever it’s ready. It’s not estimation that improves the quality of the product but good cost/benefit analysis, although you can get one from the other.

New comment by mekazu in "Renaming files with mv without typing the name two times"

mekazu — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 12:00:31 +0000

Could use mv -iv for interactive and verbose if you want a rollback or commit alternative.

The real question is: why move files at all?

New comment by mekazu in "Why Learn Awk? (2016)"

mekazu — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 00:36:58 +0000

I use Perl similarly to awk if I need to use regex rather than white space delimited fields.

I think if you know Perl really well and can remember the command line arguments - particularly -E, -n, -I and -p - then it’s a good swap in substitute for grep, sed, awk, cut, bash, etc when whatever 5 min task you’re working on gets a tiny bit more complex.

Similarly a decent version perl 5 seems to be installed everywhere by default.

I’m curious to know if anyone would say the same about python or any other programs? I’m not particularly strong in short python scripting.

New comment by mekazu in "C, what the fuck??!"

mekazu — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 12:32:39 +0000

> Therefore, this line actually says:

    !didIMakeAMistake() || CIsWrongHere();

> If you understand how short-circuit evaluation works, you can understand that this will result in the following:

   if (!didIMakeAMistake()) 
      CIsWrongHere();

Can someone explain this? I’d have thought that was right without the !

New comment by mekazu in "Learning at work is work, and we must make space for it"

mekazu — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 10:39:04 +0000

Employees are valued by businesses more for their expertise than for their work. I’d rather have one dev who knows how to solve difficult problems than a hundred who don’t. Roughly.

New comment by mekazu in "The Lesson to Unlearn"

mekazu — Sat, 07 Dec 2019 12:41:26 +0000

I wonder why pg didn’t launch this article on a Tuesday.

New comment by mekazu in "Australia’s surprising disregard for free speech"

mekazu — Sun, 16 Jun 2019 11:11:07 +0000

Yeah if the last election result wasn’t a perfect demonstration of voter apathy and disengagement I don’t know what would be. Having said that, that’s just the majority - the rest of us are very engaged I promise! Just uselessly, impotently quiet.

New comment by mekazu in "Australia’s surprising disregard for free speech"

mekazu — Sun, 16 Jun 2019 11:01:01 +0000

National security is important, but so is whistleblowing, and the ability for journalists to protect their sources. There’s a trade off here between, and it’s worth looking at this from all angles to ensure that the AFP have the right intentions.

New comment by mekazu in "The clever cryptography behind Apple’s “Find My” feature"

mekazu — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 21:38:42 +0000

Sounds similar to P2PE.

New comment by mekazu in "I got tired of PHP and Perl, so I tried bash"

mekazu — Sat, 13 Apr 2019 13:03:30 +0000

I agree, and I like having those ‘oh wow, I can do that in bash? That’s dangerous, but awesome’ moments just by researching how to get stuff done. Really people don’t know what they’re getting themselves into when they start down the shell scripting path.

New comment by mekazu in "A New Discovery Upends What We Know About Viruses"

mekazu — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 11:40:45 +0000

Yeah? I’m off to read some Jane Austen. Seeya!

New comment by mekazu in "Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar"

mekazu — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 11:39:54 +0000

Unit tests that don’t read or write to disk and don’t try thousands of repetitions of things should be bleeding fast, but the most useful integration tests that actually help find faults (usually with your assumptions about the associated APIs) often need interaction with your disk or database or external service and tend to take a bit more than a few seconds. I find you need both.

New comment by mekazu in "What's the Deepest Hole Ever Dug?"

mekazu — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 11:46:18 +0000

I kinda like the idea that Americans could be gradually migrated from Imperial to metric by osmosis over the course of a few thousand measurement based scientific articles.

New comment by mekazu in "Mumbai bans plastic bags, bottles, and single-use plastic containers"

mekazu — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 12:22:22 +0000

Plastic is sometimes useful to preserve fresh food to some degree. Without plastic many goods wouldn’t be viable. Would be nice though if at least the necessary plastic was highly recycleable, as well as cost efficient etc.

New comment by mekazu in "MacOS monitoring the open source way"

mekazu — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 00:34:03 +0000

Was anybody else thinking these tools would be great for general development and debugging purposes? Anything that uses the network or file system anyway. The fact that they can detect malware reads as just an aside to me.