<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: smilliken</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=smilliken</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:29:30 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=smilliken" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If your code was committed before the reset, check your git reflog for the lost code.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:42:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664273</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664273</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664273</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you're price conscious, buy the self-assembled framework kit. It's fun and takes half an hour to assemble.<p>I got a framework 16 with a handful of upgrades for $1400. I added 96GB of RAM purchased separately for $300 (before the shortage). I also got a 4TB NVMe for $300. What do those upgrades cost cost in a macbook?<p>I think most people care more about their OS than their hardware specs, so they defend their purchase like it's part of their identity and it's hard to have a rational discussion.<p>Edit: If you're talking about the Intel model, I agree with you. The Ryzens are fantastic.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:12:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577734</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577734</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577734</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "The mathematics of compression in database systems"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Compress then encrypt is not an option because your encryption is broken if it can be compressed at all. Mathematically it's a near certainty that the compression would increase the file size when given an encrypted input.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Feb 2026 16:09:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015591</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015591</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015591</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Statement by Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That strategy may be cathartic, but it will have the opposite of the desired effect. If there's any hope of changing someone's mind, it has to start by respecting their opinion no matter how wrong you think it is. If you start a fight you'll get a fight.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 19:21:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671198</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671198</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671198</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "I'm just having fun"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're going to look silly in 8000 years!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:58:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355164</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355164</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355164</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "210 IQ Is Not Enough"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Practically speaking, it's impossible to roll 6 one hundred times in a row on fair dice. Not technically impossible, but we each get to calibrate our skepticism based on how far out the probabilities are.<p>In this case we can be sure the dice aren't fair because there's significant motivation for them not to be, or at least it's easy to imagine a manufacturing defect in the dice.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 16:11:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994184</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994184</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994184</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Why we migrated from Python to Node.js"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can have this today or 15+ years ago using the excellent gevent library for Python. Python 3 should have just endorsed gevent as the blessed solution instead of adding function coloring and new syntax, but you can blissfully ignore all of that if you use gevent.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Nov 2025 02:47:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806960</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806960</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806960</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Python developers are embracing type hints"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The best kind of documentation is the kind you can trust is accurate. Type defs wouldn't be close to as useful if you didn't really trust them. Similarly, doctests are some of the most useful documentation because you can be sure they are accurate.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 27 Sep 2025 23:36:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45400282</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45400282</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45400282</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Chrome's New AI Features"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://histre.com" rel="nofollow">https://histre.com</a> does full text search on browser history</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Sep 2025 04:08:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45297850</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45297850</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45297850</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Dietary omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids as a protective factor of myopia"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The best way is to open a capsule for each batch you receive to test it by taste, then store in the fridge.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Sep 2025 18:51:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45172248</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45172248</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45172248</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "996"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Second: there is no CEO in tech taking a smaller salary than their employees.<p>That's not just false but very often false.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Sep 2025 23:42:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45153914</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45153914</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45153914</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Left to Right Programming"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's the exceptional codebase that's nice to work with when it gets large and has many contributors. Most won't succeed no matter the language. Language is a factor, but I believe a more important factor is caring a lot.<p>I'm working on a python codebase for 15 years in a row that's nearing 1 million lines of code. Each year with it is better than the last, to the extent that it's painful to write code in a fresh project without all the libraries and dev tools.<p>Your experience with Python is valid and I've heard it echoed enough times, and I'd believe it in any language, but my experience encourages me to recommend it. The advice I'd give is to care a lot, review code, and keep investing in improvements and dev tools. Git pre commit hooks (just on changed modules) with ruff, pylint, pyright, isort, unit test execution help a lot for keeping quality up and saving time in code review.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2025 19:18:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44955229</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44955229</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44955229</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They aren't talking about C and its descendants in particular, but more generally. For example in Haskell and Scheme there is only an if function and no if statement. And you're welcome to create an if function in any language you like and use it instead of the native syntax. I like to use an if function in PostgreSQL because it's less cumbersome than a case expression.<p>So in the abstract, if is a ternary function. I think the original comment was reflecting on how "if (true) ... " looks like a function call of one argument but that's obviously wrong.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:02:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510881</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510881</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510881</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Fair enough. I'm sensitive about the em dash being used as a tell, which I've seen mentioned once or twice, because I don't want people to dumb down punctuation to avoid being confused for an LLM. I'd guess it's a temporary issue until the LLMs get so good at blending in that we can't tell anymore.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Jun 2025 16:10:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44259373</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44259373</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44259373</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The em dash was in popular use long before chatgpt. It's a useful grammatical symbol and a short dash is not a good substitute. Consider whether you'd use it if it was a dedicated key on your keyboard, if so then it's worth the small inconvenience to learn how to type it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:56:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44238364</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44238364</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44238364</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Why We're Moving on from Nix"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The reason someone changes a dependency at all is because they expect a difference in behavior. No one would feel the motivation to go update a dependency if they aren't getting something out of it, that's a waste of effort and an unnecessary  risk.<p>Each person doesn't have to perform the build on their own. A build server will evaluate it and others will pull it from the cache.<p>The greater waste that nix eliminates is the waste of human time spent troubleshooting something that broke in production because of what should have been an innocent change, and the lost business value from the decreased production. When you trust your dependencies are what you asked for, it frees the mind of doubt and lets you focus on troubleshooting more efficiently towards a problem.<p>Aside, I spent over a decade on Debian derived distros. I never once had one of these distros complete an upgrade successfully between major versions, despite about 10 attempts spread over those years, though thankfully always on the first sacrificial server attempted. They always failed with interesting issues, sometimes before they really got started, sometimes borking the system and needing a fresh install. With NixOS, the upgrades are so reliable they can be done casually during the workday in production without bothering to check that they were successful. I think that wouldn't be possible if we wanted the false efficiency of substituting similar but different packages to save the build server from building the exact specification. Anything short of this doesn't get us away from the "works on my machine" problem.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Jun 2025 16:58:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44210877</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44210877</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44210877</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "EasyTier – P2P mesh VPN written in Rust using Tokio"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Like other products in this category, this is for private networks, internal to your company or self. I don't think it's an intended use case to connect to computers not in your control.<p>It's useful when you have computers that talk to each other over the internet, likely without public interfaces, and using protocols that may or may not be secure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Jun 2025 18:15:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161535</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161535</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161535</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>MixRank (YC S11) | Software Engineers | 100% REMOTE (Global) | Full-Time<p>MixRank processes petabytes of data every month from web crawling. We have hundreds of customers using our data products including Google, Amazon, Facebook, Intel, and Adobe, across industries including Finance, Recruiting, Sales, Marketing, and Security.<p>We’re a fully-remote company with a global footprint in over 20 countries. We're growing, profitable, employee-owned, no dependence on outside funding. Applicants from all geographies and backgrounds are welcome.<p>We are looking for passionate individuals for whom programming is not just a job but it’s something they love to do. We're obsessed with computers, programming, big data, databases, compilers, hardware, math, data science, and the internet. Does this sound like you? Please apply to join our team.<p>Our code base is very friendly to new contributors. You'll have a fully-functional development environment within hours (fully automated) and be pushing commits on your first day. Deployments to production happen multiple times per day and finish in less than 2 minutes. Effectively all of our codebase is written in Python, Rust, SQL, Javascript/TypeScript, and Nix. The core technologies you'll need familiarity with to be productive are Python, PostgreSQL, Linux, and Git.<p>We operate at a larger scale than typical startups. We operate two datacenters with high performance servers we've built that are capable of dealing with the volumes of data we process. We've implemented our own distributed file system. We do full-scale web crawls. We download and perform static analysis on the entire universe of Android APKs and iOS IPAs that are published. Unlike a typical startup where you'll spend half of your time in meetings, and the other half fixing bugs from Jira tickets— at MixRank you'll get to challenge yourself with difficult technical problems that will help you to grow as an individual.<p>We're hiring continuously for the positions below— they aren't singular positions that will close once filled. Our philosophy on hiring is that the candidate is more important than the position. For each new member of the team, we design a custom role and responsibilities that are specialized to their interests. Other companies will come up with a long list of specific requirements for a position with the expectation that you'll exactly replace someone from the team, or that you'll be the perfect tetris piece that satisfies the job requirements decided by a committee. MixRank is more pragmatic: we'll first get excited about having a unique individual on the team, then we'll figure out the best way to accommodate their specific talents.<p>--<p>Junior Software Engineer - Remote (Global), Full-Time<p>We're looking for remote junior engineers that have 0-3 years of professional experience in software, and 5+ years of curiosity exploring computers, programming, and technical hobby projects. This is an open-ended entry role with mentorship and diverse opportunities to work on all areas of our product: databases, distributed systems, infrastructure and tooling, data analysis, machine learning, frontend/backend web development, APIs, data mining, data modeling, and more. To stand out, please highlight what makes you unique: passion for computing, curiosity and side projects, work ethic, niche research, etc.<p>Ideally you've already graduated, but if you still have one or more years left of school, please feel free to apply anyway, and if you're the right fit for the team we'll figure out a way to accommodate your schedule.<p><a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mixrank/jobs/Fnwsojk-junior-software-engineer-global-remote">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mixrank/jobs/Fnwsojk-j...</a><p>--<p>Software Engineer - Remote (Global), Full-Time<p>We're hiring generalist software engineers to work on web applications, data mining, machine learning/data science, data transformation/ETL, data modeling, database scaling, infrastructure, devops, and more. We'll cater the role to whatever subset of these areas match your interests.<p>Beneficial experience includes PostgreSQL, Python, Rust, Linux, TypeScript, Nix, frontend/backend web development, and data mining.<p><a href="https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mixrank/jobs/RXQspen-software-engineer-global-remote">https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mixrank/jobs/RXQspen-s...</a><p>--<p>I'm Scott, Founder/CEO/CTO. We're based in US but applicants from Central America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa are encouraged!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Jun 2025 17:30:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161141</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161141</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161141</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "Coding without a laptop: Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>At risk of the obvious, because it saves $39 and reduces landfill waste.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 May 2025 17:03:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022737</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022737</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022737</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by smilliken in "“Streaming vs. Batch” Is a Wrong Dichotomy, and I Think It's Confusing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The operating system provides abstractions for blocking and asynchronous IO, which are the higher abstraction version of the same concept.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 May 2025 15:30:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022095</link><dc:creator>smilliken</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022095</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022095</guid></item></channel></rss>