Hacker News: sennalen

New comment by sennalen in "GitLost: We Tricked GitHub's AI Agent into Leaking Private Repos"

sennalen — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:47:43 +0000

RFC 3514 was just ahead of its time

New comment by sennalen in "Hunting a 16-year-old SQLite WAL bug with TLA+"

sennalen — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:26:41 +0000

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

New comment by sennalen in "Conventional Commits encourages focus on the wrong things"

sennalen — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:52:48 +0000

The best commit message: is what is meaningful to a future you 1 week from now, no further otherwise takes up the least time to think about right now

New comment by sennalen in "Bugs Rust won't catch"

sennalen — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:25:59 +0000

Reversing max and min. That's one I've done a lot, and I don't think any compiler could save me from.

New comment by sennalen in "The seven programming ur-languages (2022)"

sennalen — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 15:05:08 +0000

C++ has Algol roots, but I think the C++ template metaprogramming style is an ur-language of its own. You could draw some parallels with ML maybe, but they came at it from a different direction.

New comment by sennalen in "I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs"

sennalen — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:11:09 +0000

You could solve the original problem statement using just the part of the script that lists unmerged branches

New comment by sennalen in "I was right about ATProto key management"

sennalen — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 01:55:56 +0000

"Because I use NixOS, this was very easy."

First time I've heard someone say that

New comment by sennalen in "Alarm overload is undermining safety at sea as crews face thousands of alerts"

sennalen — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:23:31 +0000

I heard an anecdote years ago about some medical device where people were clicking through confirmations without reading, so they made the user type IRREVERSIBLE on the keyboard to proceed.

New comment by sennalen in "Targeted Bets: An alternative approach to the job hunt"

sennalen — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:24:53 +0000

"Get in contact with current employees at the company"

and draw the rest of the owl?

This blog is really missing the core question of what contact would be more effective than applying to the company's explicit job postings

New comment by sennalen in "Software engineers can no longer neglect their soft skills"

sennalen — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 21:28:43 +0000

Watch them

New comment by sennalen in "After 25 years, Wikipedia has proved that news doesn't need to look like news"

sennalen — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 20:36:01 +0000

Wikipedia is not a newspaper. Please stop trying to update it with information less than a week old.

New comment by sennalen in "Going immutable on macOS, using Nix-Darwin"

sennalen — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 20:43:01 +0000

Looking in from outside, people going immutable with Nix sure seem to struggle a lot more than people going immutable with disposable containers and Terraform/OpenTofu

New comment by sennalen in "How to Attend Meetings"

sennalen — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:44:22 +0000

Some of the most valuable meetings I've ever had were optional meetings without agendas. The crucial feature was it was only people who code. When technical people who didn't often interact with each other were given the floor, they turned out to have lots of important things to say.

New comment by sennalen in "Peter Thiel's Apocalyptic Worldview Is a Dangerous Fantasy"

sennalen — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:55:49 +0000

It would be nice to be able to ignore Peter Thiel's opinions, but that's not a luxury we can afford while he's buying federal law enforcement politicians up to and including the vice president to help implement his crazy.

New comment by sennalen in "You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say"

sennalen — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 16:29:21 +0000

It's humans. This is like TSA's fake bomb detectors with nothing inside the plastic shell

New comment by sennalen in "Scientists say X has lost its professional edge and Bluesky is taking its place"

sennalen — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 16:56:22 +0000

Nate Silver is an ideologue who deeply wants BlueSky to be failing.

New comment by sennalen in "Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock"

sennalen — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 12:08:47 +0000

This isn't a bailout, though. It's strong-arming.

New comment by sennalen in "Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock"

sennalen — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 12:08:18 +0000

SDI was real and led to the missile defense systems that the US has fielded today.

New comment by sennalen in "XSLT removal will break multiple government and regulatory sites"

sennalen — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 22:25:21 +0000

keeping data orthogonal to presentation

New comment by sennalen in "NASA Is Worth Saving"

sennalen — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 21:32:22 +0000

All the contractors and pork districts could still be engaged in doing something more useful.