Hacker News: przemelek

New comment by przemelek in "Googlebook"

przemelek — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:21:16 +0000

Would prefer a 'Google Linux'—a native desktop OS with a unified UI philosophy, similar to a macOS experience but built on a standard Linux foundation. Instead of ChromeOS or Android as the base, treat them as subsystems for compatibility.

The real 'next big thing' would be integrating an engine like Gemini with OS-level hooks (similar to the OpenClaw approach) so agents can manipulate app windows and state directly. Resurrecting Web Intents as 2-way App Intents would be the key to making this work.

Also, keeping prompts as local .md files with an Obsidian-like system editor would be a huge win for power users. Simply gating Gemini behind 'premium' Chromebooks feels like the old 'licking the cake' strategy from the Google+ days—trying to force a new product's success by coopting existing hardware rather than building a superior platform.

I can imagine having Gemini + local Gemma working with Agents, which have access to my e-mail (ideally on GMAIL, but also supporting outlook), keeping local history of my visited sites and messages... and using RAG or something even better, ideally with looking also on repos I have checkouted to my file system, and maybe even whole file system....

Work related e-mail about "sending invoice to customer"... it may suggest proper content for e-mail. Having "dashboard" with summary of todays communication to you, your tickets (at work) and so on....

Can Google build such thing? If somebody can - it will be them. Will they build it? Probably not, they would prefer to build 3rd version of Google Pay.

New comment by przemelek in "Rendezvous with Rama"

przemelek — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:24:04 +0000

To be honest I had always a lot of thoughts about this how Rama would be filled with air.... I mean it spins, but how Ramas filled it with air? Central Sea was one of sources, but water wasn't possible there before whole Rama being filled with air. So my thinking was always, air enters in the center, goes in all directions, hits surface which is 750 km/h... so ~40% of speed of molecules... how much it "slows down" Rama? Would there be needed some additional force to spin it? How long it would take to "calm down", and build gradient of oxygen/air in Rama...

Always was thinking about writting some simulation for it, but it was always "someday" ;-)

New comment by przemelek in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

przemelek — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:53:00 +0000

Still why especially for Pro there is still version with 24 GB of RAM? It is scary....

New comment by przemelek in "TikTok goes dark in the US"

przemelek — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 10:38:32 +0000

You know that there is no Facebook in China? The same for Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Even Google Search is not available in China. And not because those companies didn't want to work in China, simply China forbade them to do it. Funny thing, even TikTok in China is blocked... Chinese audience have Douyin from ByteDance. So it isn't like this that "bad US is doing something to poor Chinese company"

New comment by przemelek in "macOS Sonoma 14.4 might break Java on your machine"

przemelek — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 09:54:29 +0000

I was thinking more about -Xint, or in Docker, or x86 JVM, but my guess is that somebody already tested it ;-) Other thing is that one of developers in my team who is on M1 and 14.4 is able to run Java app, so...

New comment by przemelek in "Amazon employees are fighting on Slack about returning to the office"

przemelek — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 15:32:11 +0000

As long as you have some days in office for everybody it may work, but it should not be done in this way that some people are working from home, and some are working from office. Long before COVID (~8 years before ;-)) we had situation where one our colleague was in office only on Mondays, and big part of team was WFH on Friday and sometimes even Thursday & Friday, so best collaboration was on Monday, little worse on Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday almost nothing was happening

New comment by przemelek in "Amazon employees are fighting on Slack about returning to the office"

przemelek — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 15:28:43 +0000

Yeah, but ask for developers to do better documentation and you will get angry answers ;-) Remote work requires higher seniority, more independence and more decision making on worker side, but a lot of people don't want to make decisions, so there is a lot of meetings, calls and similar stuff which is replacing normal in office interaction. Things which were solvable in office by going to someones desk are now in need of coordinating some meetings, finding time which fits both sides and so on. Stuff which was done by talking during walk for lunch is now meeting. Meeting in person which took 30 minutes are taking 60-90 minutes because people are not build to use simplex channel where only voice is transferred. Stupid things like drawing something on whiteboard is impossible. Working from home you don't have all this stuff which is happening next to watercooler. IMHO WFH is making people also less happy, it is more comfortable, but makes people more miserable.

New comment by przemelek in "Amazon employees are fighting on Slack about returning to the office"

przemelek — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 15:21:40 +0000

In office yes, remotely not. Simply they are having a lot of problems, they can describe why this is a problem, they may miss Daily so there may not be an occasion to ask. It is also much easier to be busy working from home. Much easier to say that someone spend last 2 hours answering on questions on Slack or similar, or on e-mails, or was waiting for answer from somebody else (very often they will ask question before lunch break). In office team is doing self monitoring, remote it doesn't work so well. Especially in case where most of companies pretend to work from office working from home.

New comment by przemelek in "Amazon employees are fighting on Slack about returning to the office"

przemelek — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 15:17:11 +0000

If something goes from higher ups it is constrain, team can try to squeeze into constrains, some people will be unhappy but this is something over theirs heads so they will be able to live with it (especially people who joined company before COVID). If this will be left to teams in many cases there will be peer pressure, some kind of blackmail and similar, latter this will result in a lot of passive aggressive comments and behaviors.

New comment by przemelek in "Google to reduce workforce by 12k"

przemelek — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 13:25:36 +0000

Public company is accountable to shareholders, in case if share prices will go down shareholders will want to know why, and some activist investor may go to the court complaining that company was able to have better financial results it should not work on some stuff and should fire people.

New comment by przemelek in "Google to reduce workforce by 12k"

przemelek — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 12:08:25 +0000

But it sounds better than "Sorry for terminating your positions but we need to keep our finances in check not to loose share values, and we are accountable for shareholders" (edited from "Sorry for terminating your positions but we need to keep our finances in check not to loose share values, and according to law it is only thing we are force to do")

New comment by przemelek in "Stop Interviewing with Leet Code"

przemelek — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 10:51:25 +0000

yeah, but in real world when this kind of problem will need to be solved people will most probably sort O(NlogN), or use priority queue O(NlogK), or even will go with something like O(N*K), almost no one will go with O(N) algo and because usually N and K are rather small and this code will not be called too often time complexity may be ignored. Still any solution shorter than O(N) will be called inefficient. And in real world they will know N and K from this what kind of problem they are solving, and this will not be hidden in mist of abstraction with assumption that "candidate should ask".

New comment by przemelek in "Stop Interviewing with Leet Code"

przemelek — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 10:27:01 +0000

I'm not sure. Yep, I tanked several interviews because even when I got info at the beginning that "we will look for your way of thinking and this how you handle problems" finally I heard "Yeah, it was OK, but there exist better algo to do it". But still for sure those interview questions are close to checking raw IQ/algos, and if somebody shines in those probably will be OK employee. And now it is question of candidates pool size, if you are one of wanted employers like Google, Amazon you may use this filter, you will loose a lot of good candidates who aren't good in algos, but those who will pass your interviews are still good, and you have good amount of those. Smaller, less sexy companies may have problem finding people with this approach, but bigger and better know probably don't have problems here.

New comment by przemelek in "Faker.js is now a community controlled project"

przemelek — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 01:52:54 +0000

To be honest I'm commenting only part with "f.. it I'm not longer working on it", I have ambivalent feelings to "lets change code in such way that builds will go into infinite loop or fail", ambivalent because as it is not nice, but somebody who was a victim of such situation should learn not to add dependencies to newest version, because here was only some small "joke", but it might be something much worse like poisoning whole code with some malicious thing.

Problem is in this that default behavior is "we are not paying for tools", people are looking for free tools to avoid fighting with procurement and everyone seems happy. Only really big companies are giving something back, most is simply leeching from OpenSource community. You are mentioning several ways how this guy was able to collect money, yep, but again changing license would mean that somebody else will fork previous version and thats all.

I'm not saying that this action was super, but for me it is result of problem deep in whole idea of "free libraries" and "free tools", often this all base on some poor guy or gal spending weekends on some project, which at the start was cool and funny, but later becomes burden.

New comment by przemelek in "Faker.js is now a community controlled project"

przemelek — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 23:59:46 +0000

Hmm, but as I understand original developer was rather pissed off by situation when devs are working on projects in theirs own time, and those projects sometimes become important tools to lower costs of creating software for big companies, and authors are not getting a dime and are forced to use some kinds of sponsorship and so on.... In such case making one of tools "community" owned smells like some kind of dick move, even if original wasn't doing too many commits.

Working for companies we are taking big bucks for writing some glorified invoicing systems (let be honest 90% or 99% of business logic is "move from screen to DB, move from DB to screen"), but code which is often important part of whole process is created for free by some folks. Strange.

New comment by przemelek in "No code reviews by default"

przemelek — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 22:32:53 +0000

I used to love code reviews when I worked for Motorola in 2004, it was doing wonders, we observed showing up "phantom developer" where mix of inputs from different people was causing new look on code. Those were Fagan-like code inspections. A lot of paperwork (we were doing formal reviews on paper, with one person in role of reader), but it was working. This whole paperwork was forcing people to follow rules and it seemed to work (but was sometimes very painful). Latter in other companies I found out that code reviews are in most cases bullshit placeholders, and in many cases are only for making some developers feeling more important, or other devs not loosing contact with code. I saw most stupid things in code moved to position of examples how to write code only because of code reviews... Good code reviews are doing wonders, but as I can see without very strong culture in dev teams and whole company those code reviews don't add anything useful. And this strong culture is difficult. From observations it seems that this is easier to build in team culture to work with "master/main only" without branches and code reviews, than to build culture of code reviews which are working. From my observations most of comments in code reviews are variations on "I would code it in different way", or "why you are doing it in this way/I don't like your variable name" of course usually written in less direct way. Last year problems with Log4J2 showed that even in OpenSource peer reviews don't help. Good developers let to introduce to one of most used libraries something what never should be introduced there. For sure variable names were nice, but somehow whole "why we are adding this" was lost, because devs were looking only for some easy to spot things. So.... yep, good code reviews are important, but my guess is that most of code reviews are only to make some devs happier that they still know what happens in code, and that variables are named in acceptable by them ways....

New comment by przemelek in "Log4j RCE Found"

przemelek — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 18:51:04 +0000

Maybe, but still this seems as vanity feature added because "It would be really convenient"... this wasn't something what was needed, but something what was added to make life of maybe 0.1% of users little bit easier. My guess is that most of users of Log4J2 don't even know that it is able to do such magic, and would be horrified knowing it. IMHO Log library should log, not do some magic stuff.

New comment by przemelek in "MacBookPro vs. Surface Book"

przemelek — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 14:52:29 +0000

When I'm using IntelliJ Idea on Macbook I use function keys very often. Having those on touch bar would mean need to look to ensure that I'm hitting F7 instead of F8 or F9 when Debugging. I'm able to change those shortcuts but I like to use the same shortcuts on OS X and on Ubuntu.

New comment by przemelek in "Common charger for all mobile phones on the way in Europe"

przemelek — Sun, 29 Dec 2013 23:52:19 +0000

Yeah, so maybe governments should stop setting rules about right- and left-hand traffic? Private sector will be so much better on establishing non government standards... For example Trucks (for British people Lorries) will user right-handed traffic rules, and normal cars will user left-hand traffic rules. Market will decide what is better....

As we can see market standard for charges was "every company has its own standards, and charge customers more", after UE and China decided ruled at created regulations for charges it was short time and every (except one) producers started to support microUSB/minuUSB as standard. Strange, don't you think? ;-)

New comment by przemelek in "Google Checkout Closing Down on Nov. 20th"

przemelek — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 16:29:04 +0000

Yeah, but how many business was using Google Checkout as only method of payment? This decision will hurt only those businesses. Rest of businesses using Google Checkout will remove one of payments method. Not a big deal, and we may guess that this method was probably not so popular already.