Hacker News: patsplat

New comment by patsplat in "Industrial design files for Keychron keyboards and mice"

patsplat — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 03:13:32 +0000

There’s the NYC Mechanical Keyboard Meetup if you would like to see and try different builds. Most people will let you try their builds.

https://nyckeyboardmeetup.com/

New comment by patsplat in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

patsplat — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:44:51 +0000

Physical objects should be rounded, virtual windows should be square. I will die on this hill.

New comment by patsplat in "AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected"

patsplat — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:57:11 +0000

I recommend dialing in a mill before claiming there’s no craft in CNC.

New comment by patsplat in "Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"

patsplat — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 10:19:45 +0000

When LLMs transition from predatory pricing to rent seeking, the enthusiasm will evaporate.

New comment by patsplat in "CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022)"

patsplat — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:28:01 +0000

CSS does suck because of the globals. Class names, ids, z index values are all areas where one commonly bumps into other developers in sometimes confusing ways.

But to the point of the article, it’s a technology one has to learn. There are name spacing solutions in css (layers) and around css (css modules, panda, tailwind, etc).

I think another challenge folks may have with CSS is thinking visually. It’s not automatic. In art school one learns both how to see and how to render, and generally learning how to see clearly is a bigger challenge than learning how to render.

Practice your craft.

New comment by patsplat in "FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor"

patsplat — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:31:46 +0000

You are correct, I think he was talking about a different device:

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-clea...

New comment by patsplat in "FDA clears first over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor"

patsplat — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:24:31 +0000

I just heard about a related device from a family member who is an endocrinologist.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-clea...

First off, he had discomfort with the study methodology. Didn't go into details, but was surprised that the FDA was less conservative than himself in this case.

Secondly, it has been common in his practice for someone to have an unusual event. Someone does something out of the ordinary, they have an unusual circumstances, they don't adjust their treatment, and something goes wrong.

His question was -- does the device have a reset button? Is there a way to restart the management and learning? The answer is no -- the device will learn! But there's no way for the patient or the physician to adjust the treatment. So his answer is -- he would never recommend this device, not the way it's currently setup. It's opaque and there's no means for a person to influence the device's learning.

New comment by patsplat in "Why Segment Went Back to a Monolith"

patsplat — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 19:54:39 +0000

Note that one big database can decimate productivity as well.

New comment by patsplat in "Why Segment Went Back to a Monolith"

patsplat — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 19:53:32 +0000

Is it about process space and programming languages? Or is it about source control and CI architecture?

How is a monolith different from a monorepo?

New comment by patsplat in "Event-Driven Architecture"

patsplat — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 03:42:54 +0000

It works extremely well for ux development ;-)

New comment by patsplat in "Experience report on a large Python-to-Go translation"

patsplat — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 03:28:39 +0000

He's been slightly famous for technical writing for a long time

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

New comment by patsplat in "ROCA: Resource-oriented Client Architecture – an alternative to SPAs"

patsplat — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 02:55:52 +0000

This seems a very nostalgic take.

So long as websites pretend they are documents, they will remain bloated poorly performing synchronous applications.

Accept that websites are distributed applications and deliver great experiences.

New comment by patsplat in "Monoliths Are the Future"

patsplat — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 02:41:09 +0000

Don't debate coding standards beyond the 2 pizza rule. No more than 8 engineers per service.

New comment by patsplat in "Found hidden safe, should we crack?"

patsplat — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 12:10:54 +0000

Once I lived in an apartment with a safe that had been locked open. It was a giant, heavy thing too large to move. The owners simply renovated the apartment around it.

Eventually I got bored and started playing with it. Since it was locked open, it was possible to start taking apart the door from the inside. Once the tumblers were exposed, I figured out the combination.

It was tremendous fun!

If anyone here is in a similar situation, I recommend cracking the safe. Building the robot seems like a nice bit of mechanical engineering:

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/building-a-safe-crackin...

New comment by patsplat in "When XML Beats JSON: UI Layouts"

patsplat — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 12:01:44 +0000

Or rather, was. At the time one could either:

- write a sax event based parser that scaled but was low level

- use a DOM parser with a fairly convoluted API. The combination of attributes and children makes for wordy accessors.

Both YAML and JSON provide formats that more readily deserialize into native map / list / string / number types which at the time was quite convenient.

New comment by patsplat in "When XML Beats JSON: UI Layouts"

patsplat — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 05:47:10 +0000

The XML bloat is on the processing side.

New comment by patsplat in "We do not use foreign keys (2016)"

patsplat — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 00:23:01 +0000

Who needs foreign keys... or relations?

Documents do well for a wide variety of applications ;-)

New comment by patsplat in "When XML Beats JSON: UI Layouts"

patsplat — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 21:10:57 +0000

YAML predated / was concurrent with JSON. Both were in reaction to the bloat of XML.

New comment by patsplat in "The Founding of Google Maps (2015)"

patsplat — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 21:33:34 +0000

Also css, early on.

Anybody remember LAYER tags?

New comment by patsplat in "AgileFall – When Waterfall Sneaks Back into Agile"

patsplat — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 13:43:25 +0000

Waterfall isn't an engineering methodology, it's an investment methodology. Engineering will mirror the interests of the capital. And sometimes capital wants to build the same thing again for a "safe" return, rather than building something new for a transformative return.

IMHO it's not actually a safe investment strategy, but I understand where it comes from.