Hacker News: nlunbeck

New comment by nlunbeck in "Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory"

nlunbeck — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 22:40:30 +0000

(Disclaimer: I work for shipyard.build so i am biased here..)

Dev-owned testing (or even dev-involved testing) is much more realistic when devs have shorter feedback loops between their code and its deployment. So often i've seen momentum get lost when devs have a wait period before they can run tests/do basic manual testing. Then the test aspect becomes the thing that "slows down" devs before they ship a feature, so they might tend towards shortcuts

New comment by nlunbeck in "Dev-owned testing: Why it fails in practice and succeeds in theory"

nlunbeck — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:03:53 +0000

Frustrating to see.

Dev-led testing is too fundamentally different from a QA function, just as any amount of E2E tests can't replace manual testing. Each tries to solve for a different type of problem. Is it possible to do effective dev peer "QA" without essentially duplicating the QA role? And forget about testing one's own work..

New comment by nlunbeck in "State of AI-assisted software development"

nlunbeck — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 22:33:34 +0000

DORA, recently, has been moving towards its own sphere outside of DevOps, hence why the acronym isn't usually expanded. So many of the core principles of DevOps (communication, collaboration, working across teams, etc) have impact beyond the DevOps discipline. DORA has been venturing into platform, DevEx, AI, etc.

From last year's DORA report:

"We are committed to the fundamental principles that have always been a part of the DevOps movement: culture, collaboration, automation, learning, and using technology to achieve business goals. Our community and research benefit from the perspectives of diverse roles, including people who might not associate with the "DevOps" label. You should expect to see the term "DevOps" moving out of the spotlight."

New comment by nlunbeck in "Automating Git Bisect with Ephemeral Environments"

nlunbeck — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 18:43:20 +0000

> Because ephemeral environments are reproducible on demand (via Docker images, Kubernetes pods, or a cloud VM), you can guarantee that each bisect step sees the same conditions. This drastically reduces "works on my machine" fiascos.

Agree on this pattern for all code changes. Hard to understate the amount of time we've saved by testing against the full prod-like environment right away. An ephemeral env implementation makes this easy and low stakes, so diving right into E2E testing a copy of your real infra isn't wildly unreasonable. However, I work for Shipyard (https://shipyard.build) so I'm a bit biased on these processes.

New comment by nlunbeck in "Uh-Oh: A story of SpaghettiOs and forgotten history"

nlunbeck — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 23:56:18 +0000

I'd be curious to know how the market is for frozen dinners designed to be microwaved on/in a separate plate/bowl. I usually do that anyway for things that come in plastic microwavable containers

New comment by nlunbeck in "Round Rects Are Everywhere"

nlunbeck — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 23:29:38 +0000

Round rect technique aside (fascinating stuff!), the storytelling here is really charming. Reads like a clever short story

> Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast, almost at the speed of plain rectangles.

New comment by nlunbeck in "A journey into Kindle AI slop hell"

nlunbeck — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 23:05:11 +0000

I remember there being some buzz a few months back around something similar happening with Spotify. Lots of random tracks that looked/sounded suspiciously AI-generated strewn into Spotify-generated playlists.

New comment by nlunbeck in "Harvard applications drop 5% after year of turmoil on the Ivy League campus"

nlunbeck — Wed, 01 May 2024 19:27:11 +0000

My college's yield increased every year I was there, we got "the largest freshman class historically" four years in a row, even with their efforts to account for the new higher yield.

It's hard to accept the right number of applicants when yield isn't exactly linear year to year

New comment by nlunbeck in "BASIC turns 60"

nlunbeck — Wed, 01 May 2024 19:00:13 +0000

AFAIK, my highschool still is offering BASIC in their intro CS curriculum. It's just so accessible and many of us preferred it over Python for intro classes

New comment by nlunbeck in "The drinking fountain button"

nlunbeck — Wed, 01 May 2024 18:24:16 +0000

I always prefer the bottle filling stations over drinking fountains, for the 20% of the time that I actually have a bottle with me.

In gyms/libraries/airports it always feels like refilling stations get 5x more use than drinking fountains, but when you're anywhere else, what are the odds you're carrying a bottle?

New comment by nlunbeck in "Anonymous public voicemail inbox"

nlunbeck — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 20:50:22 +0000

The talking Minesweeper smiley is really the icing on the cake, love it!

New comment by nlunbeck in "People hate the idea of car-free cities until they live in one"

nlunbeck — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 18:47:59 +0000

When I lived in Boston, the thing that kept most of my friends from driving during weekdays was how profoundly aggressive the drivers tended to be. There are very few cities where I've seen that level of road rage

New comment by nlunbeck in "Show HN: Zebrapuzzles.com – Daily Logic Puzzles"

nlunbeck — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 17:38:28 +0000

I've always loved these types of puzzles, glad to know what they're called and have a place to find them!

Very well-designed site, definitely will be returning often

New comment by nlunbeck in "Firefox can add text/drawings to PDFs"

nlunbeck — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 17:17:27 +0000

Exactly! You would think a free tool for such a simple purpose would be easier to find online. Glad to see Firefox raising the bar

New comment by nlunbeck in "Google paid $10M in bug bounty rewards last year"

nlunbeck — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 23:23:34 +0000

Exactly. Bug bounty seems like one of the smartest financial decisions a company can make. As for devs, it seems like a good deal if they're going to be finding these vulnerabilities anyway

New comment by nlunbeck in "Show HN: Astro App"

nlunbeck — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 15:51:36 +0000

Looks incredible! Shows the value of a good onboarding -- really had me excited to see everything the app had to offer

New comment by nlunbeck in "Why I use Firefox"

nlunbeck — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 14:06:01 +0000

> Still, I like the idea of using a browser from a company that does not want to access my data on their own servers.

Mozilla's motives alone for creating a web browser are why I trust FF. I don't like the idea of Chrome subsisting (to the point it's their actual business model) on my personal info

New comment by nlunbeck in "My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs"

nlunbeck — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 16:05:43 +0000

This. And in many cases, it was not just a supplement to their streaming catalogue. A family friend lives in Alaska and has a very low data cap and relied on Netflix's DVD service, and obviously can't be use Netflix anymore. I get cases like this are a very very low percentage of their userbase, but still unfortunate for so many to lose access to an easy media solution that never cost Netflix much to begin with

New comment by nlunbeck in "DOOM rendered via console.log() in a web browser (2021)"

nlunbeck — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 15:27:34 +0000

TIL you can console log images. Cool project

New comment by nlunbeck in "Eclipse viewing at 30k feet: Delta to offer path-of-totality flight"

nlunbeck — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 16:12:47 +0000

Doesn't seem like a stupid question to me. Would love to know their terms on this, eg. partial refunds? Voucher for next eclipse in a few years?