Hacker News: ryandrake

New comment by ryandrake in "Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0"

ryandrake — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:31:01 +0000

I've moved over to MacPorts due to Homebrew's aggressive support phase-out schedule[1]. My daily driver iMac is now in the Tier-3 "go away" bucket. Absolutely loved Homebrew for the short period of time I could use it, but I'm not going to get on the hardware update treadmill just to keep using it.

1: https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers

New comment by ryandrake in "Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails"

ryandrake — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:00:56 +0000

It's a very generalized observation. I sometimes think of the HN comment section as the Billionaire's Defense League.

New comment by ryandrake in "Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails"

ryandrake — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:58:41 +0000

Making excuses for billion+ dollar companies' behavior is one of the most common HN comment section pastimes.

New comment by ryandrake in "Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails"

ryandrake — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:56:52 +0000

I wonder who gets to decide which companies make important and critical software and which ones get the scraps later.

New comment by ryandrake in "Lines of code got a better publicist"

ryandrake — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:02:09 +0000

It's like we've all forgotten what technical debt means. We just say the phrase, but we have forgotten that it is analogous to actual debt. Every line of code produced should be treated as a liability to the company, like a bond they issued that they have to pay interest on in the future. You only take on the liability if it produces more business value than it costs to maintain. The goal is not to issue as many bonds as you possibly can.

New comment by ryandrake in "Providers, not insurers, are responsible for excess U.S. health care cost (2024)"

ryandrake — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:00:25 +0000

At least elected governments are in theory accountable to the public through voting. Insurance companies and healthcare providers are not in any way accountable to the public, and the public has zero power (outside of regulation) to affect their actions. Just because public [X] is currently a bad choice doesn't make private, corporate [X] always a better choice.

New comment by ryandrake in "Providers, not insurers, are responsible for excess U.S. health care cost (2024)"

ryandrake — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:35:31 +0000

The fact that a single person is "in charge" of the government, with the other two branches largely deferring all power to that one person, is a recent aberration from the norm in the USA. I'm for a single-payer health system that is administered by a well-checked regulatory apparatus and institutions that are not subject to wild policy swings at the whim of a single king-like leader.

New comment by ryandrake in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

ryandrake — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:21:22 +0000

The most shocking thing about entering Software as a career was the enormous number of "Brillant Paula Beans"[1] that are out there silently working, doing meetings, participating in all the software rituals, but producing useless and ultimately scrapped work product.

1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean

New comment by ryandrake in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

ryandrake — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:30:35 +0000

Maybe "mission-chauffeured." Revenue/business model is in the driver's seat and the mission just comes along for the ride and adapts to wherever the car is going.

New comment by ryandrake in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

ryandrake — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:33:16 +0000

Of course not. I'm translating for HN

New comment by ryandrake in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

ryandrake — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:47:43 +0000

I learned in my 30s that most of the software profession works on boring projects. Uninteresting, low value code, for a barely-working product, used by customers who don't really care, in a low-stakes market that doesn't reward excellence, rigor, or quality. If you can find the rare company where this isn't the case, go for it!

New comment by ryandrake in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

ryandrake — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:38:36 +0000

One of the things I try to teach my kid is: You are going to have to deal with the fact that there are deeply stupid people all around you, without it affecting your mental health. Those stupid people might be in a position of power over you, they might be other kids in school (or coworkers, later), they might be the president of the country, they might be your neighbor, or they might just be obstacles on the road on your way to work every day. You need to learn how to cope and accept this, gracefully deal with them, and how to protect yourself from their stupidity when it might affect you. It's emotional regulation that smart people need to learn or they go crazy.

New comment by ryandrake in "The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++"

ryandrake — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:11:45 +0000

Yes, in this case, void* is kind of smelly. If the intent of your function is to receive a const struct MyCustomData*, then that should be the type of the argument. If you later need to handle a const struct MyOtherCustomData*, you can add an overload that takes that argument. Or use a template as others pointed out. Use the type system to help you, so you're warned if you try to pass the method const struct BadCustomData* by accident.

If you truly don't know what the underlying structure of the "blob" of data is, sure, go ahead and use void* and explicitly convert the pointer type when you know what it is, but at least add a comment that you're entering the danger zone.

New comment by ryandrake in "Thunderbird Littering My Home"

ryandrake — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:56:08 +0000

Unfortunately, many applications now treat your filesystem as a dumping ground for their dependencies and caches and config files and temporary data and all kinds of other non-userdata trash they create. This ship has long since sailed :(

New comment by ryandrake in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

ryandrake — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:39:42 +0000

What happens, specifically? Not that I'm a fan of "population increase forever" but what's wrong with Canada?

New comment by ryandrake in "xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab"

ryandrake — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:24:02 +0000

I can't wait until these datacenters go bust and bulk DDR5 RAM and GPUs are sold on pallets by the kilogram rather than by the gigabyte.

New comment by ryandrake in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

ryandrake — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:21:44 +0000

Trusts have always seemed to me to be pretty vulnerable. You have to trust the entire line of future trustees to actually implement what's written down in the agreement. Say I donate my property to a trust set up to keep that property a public park for 1000 years. I choose someone I trust to implement it when I'm dead. But, then that person has to choose someone they trust, and so on, and at some point in the future, inevitably it's going to fall into the hands of someone who would rather sell the land and spend the proceeds on hookers and blow.

New comment by ryandrake in "Stop the Apple Music app from launching"

ryandrake — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:48:12 +0000

No other key on my keyboard opens an application. I don't see why there should be one special key that operates that way.

New comment by ryandrake in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

ryandrake — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:33:37 +0000

Reddit is a pretty extreme example, though, where mods are basically subreddit dictators. For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods, to the point where a handful of like-minded mods can enforce in great detail what is allowed to be discussed and what isn't.

Pretty sure if you unmasked the subreddit mods, the reason for the "circling around a particular brand recommendation" observation would become clear.

New comment by ryandrake in "Dopamine Fracking"

ryandrake — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:27:08 +0000

I think all "fruity" candies are pretty much the same sugar, and our brain merely looks at the color and packaging and fills in a "flavor" for it. Maybe my taste buds are just not working, but I don't think I could do a blind taste test and identify a candy's claimed flavor.