Hacker News: mkobit

New comment by mkobit in "Triple-A Minesweeper"

mkobit — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:29:23 +0000

I really enjoy this trope. The "Zelda Ocarina of Time if it were a modern game" series has the MGS style discussion, and the whole series is incredible.

Here is the forest temple video which is a short sample of what to expect: https://youtu.be/KC656o7_zVk

New comment by mkobit in "PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out"

mkobit — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:25:46 +0000

I have started to adapt https://testinfra.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, which looks similar in style to this from the verification side. Having previously used Salt, Ansible, and Chef at other companies, this looks great from a UX perspective compared to those other tools.

New comment by mkobit in "Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript"

mkobit — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:00:15 +0000

At least in java.time (which I believe an inspiration for Temporal) Duration (https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api/java.base...) is a time-based measure of time. For example, 5 hours, 59 minutes, and 15 seconds.

Period (https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api/java.base...) is a date-based measure of time. 2 years, 3 months, and 4 days.

Interval (https://www.threeten.org/threeten-extra/apidocs/org.threeten...) isn't built into java.time, however, it is in the popular threeten-extra library. The docs say "An interval represents the time on the time-line between two Instants." The main difference being that Interval is anchored to the timeline while Duration and Period are not.

New comment by mkobit in "You need to rewrite your CLI for AI agents"

mkobit — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:26:34 +0000

You could be thinking of the Claude tool search tool [0][1], which lets it do that on-demand loading. Skills (like another comment mentioned) have a progressive disclosure mechanism built-in. Agent Skills [2] appear to be the common format across most of the tools, but I have no idea if this actually has tool provider buy-in.

[0]: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use

[2]: : https://agentskills.io/home

New comment by mkobit in "Show HN: A website that tailors your resume for each job you apply for"

mkobit — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 22:48:58 +0000

I had the same experience with JobScan. I felt that it helped me on my resume overhaul with some good clear suggestions, but didn't work well with editing and replacement, especially with my resume hosted in Google docs. I cancelled my subscription during the free trial.

Thankfully, this is another tool in the current arms war of job searchers versus corporate recruiting.

New comment by mkobit in "Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas"

mkobit — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 21:36:19 +0000

I've been watching a YouTube channel named Climate Town that recently did a video talking about natural gas, and leakage was a focus point in the video. It's like a documentary-style comedy channel, and I quite enjoy both the content and the format. It reminds me a bit of Jon Stewart and John Oliver.

Video link: https://youtu.be/K2oL4SFwkkw

New comment by mkobit in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2024)"

mkobit — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 23:58:15 +0000

Heads up, the https://nightwatch.io/jobs/backend-developer link 404s.

New comment by mkobit in "Being laid off in 2023-2024 as an early-career developer"

mkobit — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 23:56:57 +0000

One aspect that I find discouraging is the significant opportunity cost associated with the time and effort required during the job search process. Instead of using this time for skills development, exploring new technologies, or excelling in a current role, it's consumed by:

- Tailoring resumes to suit ATS systems (now with AI/other automation) - Leetcode and study for live interviews - Identifying suitable positions on job boards for cold applications - Probing your network - Responding to unsolicited contacts - Chasing ghost recruiters

It's disheartening and frustrating to remain unemployed for an extended period, especially when I possess relevant experience and expertise, yet continually face rejections due to the challenges of navigating the recruitment pipeline.

New comment by mkobit in "Spotube: Open-source Spotify-Youtube client"

mkobit — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:23:42 +0000

They wrote an interesting blog some time back about how "random shuffle" isn't necessarily what people want, and how their algorithm works (https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son... ). That was a decade ago, so maybe their approach has changed or that it does not perform well under certain conditions (like the one you mention). It works well for me on most playlists on the order of 10s.

New comment by mkobit in "Why Continuations Are Coming to Java"

mkobit — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 14:28:35 +0000

It is indeed Project Loom - https://openjdk.java.net/projects/loom/

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

mkobit — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 05:14:25 +0000

I agree that the usability has been declining.

The threads feature is pretty close to useful, but it still buries information and it isn't clear to other users in a channel when a thread becomes "live" again unless they explicitly follow the thread or make a comment. Both of those actions require excessive clicking on the desktop client (at least for Ubuntu).

The most frustrating part for me is that keyboard navigation for threads is nonexistent, and it forces you to weave in and out with your mouse.

New comment by mkobit in "Rust Koans (2015)"

mkobit — Mon, 20 May 2019 23:04:36 +0000

I thought this was going to be similar to https://play.kotlinlang.org/koans/overview . I used that as a quick way when doing other things to slowly learn parts of the language before diving in, was hoping this would be similar.

New comment by mkobit in "Kustomize – Templating in Kubernetes"

mkobit — Sat, 20 Apr 2019 17:13:48 +0000

YAML templating is something I've come to truly hate. It seems that tools and services want the configuration to be "simple" by using a format that is fairly easy for humans to parse while not trying to force a language specific tool onto the users. However, when they move into the inevitable phase of wanting to be more configurable, they can move into confusing, unintuitive, and surprising territory. It also doesn't help that everybody keeps inventing their own way to do it. A few examples of YAML bastardization that give me headaches trying to understand:

* saltstack Jinja templating [1]

* GitLab CI `include` directive for including and merging external CI files together [2]

A few tools that I have seen take a decently pragmatic approach:

* Kubernetes resources that use ConfigMap and `envFrom` that declaratively say where to resolve a value from [3]

* Circle CI commands which offer some reusability with its "commands" and "executors" type features [4]. To me, Circle CI has both good and bad aspects with some templating and some clever patterns

On the other side of things, there is essentially fully programmable type configurations like Jenkins Pipeline Groovy `Jenkinsfile`, which can be a nightmare, too.

I think it is tough to find a sweet spot between making it configurable and expressive for users while retaining a low barrier of entry and not turning the configuration into a complete program itself. Tools like Terraform are trying to find that sweet spot as they slowly introduce more programmatic ways of configuration while still being declarative, like the fairly recent introduction of if statements and soon (I think) to be released for loops. As soon as users of a tool and service have more complex use cases, there needs to be some way to solve that. The most common way (it seems) is taking the easy and familiar of introducing templating.

[1]: https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/jinja/index.html

[2]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#include

[3]: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/generated/kubernetes-ap...

[4]: https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/configuration-reference/#comma...

New comment by mkobit in "Kustomize – Templating in Kubernetes"

mkobit — Sat, 20 Apr 2019 04:22:09 +0000

`kustomize` is an interesting and useful tool, and it is cool to see it available directly in `kubectl` in 1.14. A lower barrier to entry is nice to have for tools like this. It is useful on its own, but I'm also looking forward to additional features like being able to reuse a single patch on multiple targets (https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kustomize/issues/720). I'd also like to see a clear schema for what the YAML needs to look like and what the keys do. I wish it folowwed a similar pattern as `kubernetes` resources where each resource had an `apiVersion`, and the `kustomization` itself had an `apiVersion`.

Some newer documentation can be found at https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/ which is still a little bit barren, but I expect it to improve. Some of the older documentation can be found at https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kustomize/tree/a5bb5479fb... (before the tool was integrated directly as a subcommand)

New comment by mkobit in "JSON as configuration files: please don’t (2016)"

mkobit — Sat, 13 Apr 2019 16:45:46 +0000

I've had good experiences on the JVM using HOCON [1].

[1]: https://github.com/lightbend/config/blob/b782a2d701fc2b04579...

New comment by mkobit in "Asciidoctor – A fast, open-source text processor and publishing toolchain"

mkobit — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 20:53:57 +0000

This is one of my favorite features, too. I've found it works amazing when you generate the documentation or render it locally. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in "safe" mode sites like GitHub or GitLab where having a lightweight include feature for samples or tests would be useful.

For macros in AsciiDoc, I've made do with the little bit of support mentioned at https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#pass-macros . Everything I found for Markdown always required an additional tool or "something else". I like that AsciiDoctor, for the most parts, has nearly everything I want built-in.

New comment by mkobit in "Designing an Engineering Performance Management System from Scratch"

mkobit — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 00:20:41 +0000

I read about the culture of Valve a few years ago and it seemed interesting. What have you seen come out that changed your opinion?

New comment by mkobit in "Startups I Want to Fund"

mkobit — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 22:21:56 +0000

I think of this article (https://medium.com/@sdboyer/so-you-want-to-write-a-package-m...) when it comes to package management.

New comment by mkobit in "Using FOIA Data and Unix to halve major source of parking tickets"

mkobit — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:56:00 +0000

This is awesome and inspiring. Any thoughts on how to approach something similar for red light camera violations and accident/police data in Illinois?

New comment by mkobit in "Problem Solving and Clojure 1.9 with Rich Hickey"

mkobit — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 14:15:14 +0000

It sounds like the philosophy is "don't break your consumers", which I agree with. Somebody else already linked his Spec-ulation talk, but I think somewhere in there he compares the 10 minutes a library author spends on deprecating or removing some piece of code versus the 10 minutes each and every one of your consumers spends trying to determine why a dependency they put trust in broke their application.

I do think it can be very difficult to know if you, as a producer, are breaking any consumers. I'd love to see some sort of OSS build tool and CI system that automatically rebuilds and tests all consumers of your library to give you, the library author, more information about the changes you make before releasing.