<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: shaftway</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shaftway</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 21:44:32 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=shaftway" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "Google I/O"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is the result of systemic problems at Google:<p>- Launching is rewarded, keeping the lights on is not<p>- The hot new teams get far more resources than tried and true ones<p>You could sum this up in three words as "new is better".<p>This is why Google Home is getting worse. It worked well enough, but nobody gets promoted for keeping it like that. People get promoted for launching something new on that platform and cherry-picking statistics to show that they had "impact".<p>This is why everything at the keynote was AI. AI is the new hot dumpster fire that every resource is being poured into. And including AI in every product gives so many people the opportunity to launch new stuff, and demonstrate "impact".<p>And while I/O is for developers, you'd be foolish if you thought that Wall St. wasn't paying attention. Stock was down $10 for the day before I/O started, but during that keynote it gained $5. It didn't hold it, but clearly the keynote affected the stock price. Sundar knows this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 00:22:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201471</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201471</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201471</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "A History of IDEs at Google"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was at Block and there was an interesting problem around this.<p>A number of Google engineers had come over, and they pushed for a way to structure the codebase where you had a ton of tiny build targets. I think a "jumbo" build target would have more than 10 files in it. Under Blaze / Bazel this would have been absolutely fine, but they were still using Gradle for their Android builds, and Gradle does not like that. Doing a build of anything meant Gradle had to initialize tens of thousands of projects. A naive engineer trying to build a single project would have to wait for about an hour for everything to be structured.<p>There was a big push to move everything to Bazel, and the backend and iOS teams moved over just fine, but there was someone on the Android build team who had come from Gradle, and knew a lot of techniques to cut the build time down. I remember there was a tool you would run that would examine the project structure and set up an ignorelist of projects so that Gradle wouldn't have to load projects you didn't care about.<p>All of the tricks were a bandaid technique at best, and eventually that engineer left the team, but the damage had been done, and migrating to Bazel was a non-starter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 15 May 2026 20:08:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153197</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153197</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153197</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "A History of IDEs at Google"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I jumped from Google to Meta in 2022 (Worst. Timing. Ever.) and by that time Google's IDE had pretty much caught up. Android app development at Meta was super painful because of the repo size. My good morning routine was to kick off a 40 minute sync, and then get coffee and wander the building while I waited.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 15 May 2026 19:59:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153097</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153097</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153097</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "I want to live like Costco people"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, I switched to a bike too. Way better quality of life, and lane splitting is a godsend. In my area not allowing a bike to pass is actually a ticketable offense (though I've never actually heard of anyone getting a ticket for it). Either way, the cars know what to expect and the cars in the left-most lane hug the left side of the lane to give you room.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 15:39:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109895</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109895</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109895</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "I want to live like Costco people"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That fancy Lamborghini is going to be sitting in the same traffic as my Honda.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 18:00:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052615</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052615</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052615</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Oh yeah, not a barrier, but for the volume they'd want to enable it's not a complete loss.<p>Remember who uses GameStop. It's certainly not me, and it's probably not you. I'd guess that their core demographic is 14-25 year olds that are cash-strapped. You don't go to a GameStop for the experience, and their prices aren't any better than any other retailer. You go there because you don't have options or for their secondary market. And at that point, $5 in shipping fees matters.<p>Why would it be edge --> edge and not edge --> central --> edge? For common stuff keep half of it at the edge for local sales. For uncommon stuff or the other half ship it back to central so they can re-ship it quickly and easily. Including something in a shipment is orders of magnitude cheaper than shipping a single item, just in packaging costs and time alone.<p>They must have items going both directions (to handle overstock, returns, defectives, etc.). I assume those all go in a large box and are shipped together. At that point I'd need to see some actual numbers to agree that it's not pennies.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 16:44:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48024997</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48024997</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48024997</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Ebay commissions are not that high, 13.25% for most items.<p>13.25% isn't zero.<p>> The barrier to listing [is] the amount of labor it takes to list and price everything<p>GameStop has a surprising amount of technology around their pawnshop activities. My son traded in his laptop last month and they had him wipe it, enable developer mode, and plug it in to do automated tests and make sure they knew what they were getting. They're already doing the labor to price everything. They're not going to have people type up listings, they'll just automate posting off of their inventory system.<p>> when you add in shipping costs it approaches the value of buying something new.<p>They get to skip the shipping costs. You could choose to have them ship the item to a GameStop near you which would cost them pennies. This is an advantage of having stores in every city with a population over 50,000 in the US.<p>And a huge amount of the stuff that GameStop buys and sells is out of print. Buying new is simply not an option when you're talking about a game that was released 6 years ago only on physical media.<p>> The way inventory is offloaded in bulk is in bulk pallets sold at auction, where people bid on them and then do all of the grunt work involved in photographing and listing and packing and shipping.<p>There must be money in the margins here. Otherwise people wouldn't do it. GameStop has all the technological ability to cut out this grunt work.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 22:52:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48016015</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48016015</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48016015</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're right that there's no real advantage to eBay buying a pawnshop conglomerate, but a pawnshop conglomerate buying eBay gets a massive advantage. They're already sitting on a mountain of used inventory, and at some point a lot of it will be thrown away because there are no local buyers for it. Having a commission-free way to offload that inventory would be huge for them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 21:53:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015511</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015511</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015511</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "Let's Buy Spirit Air"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Most of modern life in America is an elaborate series of choices to maximize the distance between yourself and Spirit airlines passengers<p>So much this. I regret that I have but one upvote to give.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 21:48:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015470</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015470</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48015470</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "Why Not Venus?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What are you going to do 12 hours later when it's daytime again?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2026 20:32:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47895389</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47895389</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47895389</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "Musicians are manufacturing sold-out shows"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The best concert experience I ever had was in the mid-90's. I went to a medium level band (frequent radio play at the time, but you probably wouldn't recognize the name now) at a smaller venue. But I guess nobody really promoted the show at all. Only 8 people showed up for the audience. The band didn't seem to care and rocked it anyway. During their most popular song the singer got down off the stage and passed the mic around, we all sang karaoke style.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:34:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47882378</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47882378</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47882378</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "I don't chain everything in JavaScript anymore"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is the difference between a command (which is discarded after it's executed), and production code (which you probably want to keep around for a little bit).<p>But I'm in the same boat. I love the expressiveness of chaining a whole thing into a single call, but I have to break it apart for my own sanity.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:12:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841701</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841701</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47841701</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In German that's called Wortbildungsfähigkeit, or in English, WordStructureCapability</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:48:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47525784</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47525784</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47525784</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "The future of version control"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The conflict is no longer an ephemeral part of the merge that only ever lives as markup in the source files and is stomped by the resolution that's picked, but instead a part of history.<p>How is this different than having a merge commit?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Mar 2026 03:06:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512746</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512746</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512746</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "The future of version control"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Delayed conflict resolution in jj is valuable when you're rebasing a long chain of commits. If I rebase a chain of 10 commits and each of the commits has a conflict, I'm stuck in conflict resolution mode until I fix all 10 conflicts. Maybe something else came up, or maybe I got tired of doing conflict resolution and want to do something else. Git's answer is to finish or abandon.<p>Also, in jj it's pretty easy to rebase a lot of stuff all at once, giving you even more opportunities to create conflicts. Being able to delay resolution can be easier.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Mar 2026 03:04:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512731</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512731</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512731</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "The future of version control"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is kind of how jj handles the situation. git won't let you move on from a rebase if there are conflicts. By comparison, jj will just put a marker in the log pointing out that there are conflicts in a branch. You resolve them whenever you feel like it, but all resolving them does is effectively remove the "conflict" marker and rebase all of the descendent commits (which may clean up merge conflicts, or make them worse).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Mar 2026 02:59:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512707</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512707</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512707</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Right, but if you clog up their pipeline with enough fake applicants, then they won't get any real ones. Same outcome.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:28:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342217</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342217</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342217</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The solution to this seems pretty clear. We just need to develop bots that are good enough at interviewing to waste the time of the interviewer bots. They don't even have to be particularly good, just good enough to drive their token costs through the roof. Make it too expensive to use.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:58:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340500</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340500</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340500</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14347" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14347</a><p>> Among U.S. federal agencies, the order authorized the official use of the secondary title "Department of War" for the United States Department of Defense. The department now refers to itself as the "Department of War" for non-statutory purposes, but is still technically named the Department of Defense, as only an act of Congress can formally change the name of a federal department.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:34:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223664</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223664</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223664</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by shaftway in "Layoffs at Block"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It should be good. It's the third time he's written this exact same announcement, including "taking the blame" and "making the difficult choice to cut a large group instead of smaller cuts over time" and "thanking the expendables that got the company where it is."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 02:18:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47175531</link><dc:creator>shaftway</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47175531</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47175531</guid></item></channel></rss>