Hacker News: squirrellous

New comment by squirrellous in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

squirrellous — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 04:58:21 +0000

To me it’s more like being a super micro-managing TL that would annoy the hell out of their human reports. It comes with all the pros and cons of micro-management.

New comment by squirrellous in "Box to save memory in Rust"

squirrellous — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:57:10 +0000

I wonder from time to time whether you can decide the best “schema shape” beforehand, ie before you can run real workloads that stress the memory implications of such things. This can be very useful if you are trying to decide the boundary of some public facing API, but for whatever reason can’t run benchmarks (lack of impl, data, time, etc).

Without that, if you try to suggest a transformation like this when the schema is first conceived, it will likely be considered premature optimization.

New comment by squirrellous in "DeepSeek v4"

squirrellous — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 06:29:11 +0000

This tells me a real developer wrote the docs, instead of someone with good English writing skills but is less technical.

> they could have even used their own LLM to edit their documentation to fix grammar issues

In my experience companies who do this rarely stop at using LLMs to fix grammar issues. It becomes full on LLM speak quite fast, especially if there isn’t a native English speaker in the room who can discern what’s good and bad writing.

New comment by squirrellous in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

squirrellous — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 01:19:21 +0000

Ha, probably nobody at Google even knows the exact cost of each of those business lines.

New comment by squirrellous in "Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner"

squirrellous — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 01:33:27 +0000

I’d even argue that most things operated by tech doesn’t need 24x7x365 availability. If it’s about life-and-death, then yes make it super reliable and available. Otherwise, bring back scheduled downtime please.

New comment by squirrellous in "A sufficiently comprehensive spec is not (necessarily) code"

squirrellous — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:25:57 +0000

I’ve always thought about this as more of a meme than a serious point. Trivially, aren’t most of the network protocol RFCs “sufficiently comprehensive spec that isn’t code”?

New comment by squirrellous in "Sam Altman's Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Concepts"

squirrellous — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:19:42 +0000

This is probably the least important bad thing you could say about Altman.

Also why is a low effort commentary piece of the NYT article on the HN front page?

New comment by squirrellous in "Process Manager for Autonomous AI Agents"

squirrellous — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:58:52 +0000

It’s what the cool kids are doing these days. It’ll pass. Also it’s quite fun to build things around agents and watch them go off to work.

New comment by squirrellous in "OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation"

squirrellous — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:48:22 +0000

ARK was all the rage around early pandemic time when wallstreetbets was in the news a lot. Most people probably know it from then.

New comment by squirrellous in "Stop picking my Go version for me"

squirrellous — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 03:11:24 +0000

Weird that this needs to be said. I’m not familiar with the Go ecosystem, but there is usually a natural incentive for library developers to reach more people, which means you’d want to support the oldest feasible version. If you don’t do that then someone will develop a better library which does support an older version. Is that not happening here?

New comment by squirrellous in "Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?"

squirrellous — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:06:18 +0000

The problem is scale. Beyond a certain scale it’s all a net negative: social networks, bitcoin, ads, machine learning, automated trading, big this big that, etc.

Unfortunately for fellow developers, software enables massive scale.

New comment by squirrellous in "“Collaboration” is bullshit"

squirrellous — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:06:02 +0000

A lot of process and management is about dealing with low performers - by which I don’t mean incompetent people but people lacking motivation, or with the wrong intuitions, etc. Our hiring process can’t reliably filter out low performers, and when they get in it’s difficult to fire them, so we invent ways to raise the bottom line through processes.

And FWIW I don’t think you can solve this by always hiring the “best” either, at least not beyond a certain team size.

New comment by squirrellous in "RX – a new random-access JSON alternative"

squirrellous — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:45:35 +0000

I agree in principle. However JSON tooling has also got so good that other formats, when not optimized and held correctly, can be worse than JSON. For example IME stock protocol buffers can be worse than a well optimized JSON library (as much as it pains me to say this).

New comment by squirrellous in "A tale about fixing eBPF spinlock issues in the Linux kernel"

squirrellous — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:57:07 +0000

Great post!

The minimized repro seems like something many other eBPF programs will do. This makes me wonder why such kernel issues weren’t found earlier. Is this code utilizing some new eBPF capabilities in recent kernels?

New comment by squirrellous in "Have a fucking website"

squirrellous — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 05:14:38 +0000

Sounds like what we need is Facebook pages, except as a free service from the government or non-profit.

New comment by squirrellous in "Every layer of review makes you 10x slower"

squirrellous — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:53:12 +0000

One pattern I've seen is that a team with a decently complex codebase will have 2-3 senior people who have all of the necessary context and expertise to review PRs in that codebase. They also assign projects to other team members. All other team members submit PRs to them for review. Their review queue builds up easily and average review time tanks.

Not saying this is a good situation, but it's quite easy to run into it.

New comment by squirrellous in "Tony Hoare has died"

squirrellous — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 05:05:21 +0000

Can’t argue with the quote. However my current boss has been pushing this to the extreme without much respect for real-world complexities (or perhaps I’m too obtuse to think of a simple solution for all our problems), which regrettably gives me a bit of pause when hearing this quote.

New comment by squirrellous in "Anthropic, please make a new Slack"

squirrellous — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 03:52:54 +0000

I know the world has moved on but like, use emails, man.

New comment by squirrellous in "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence"

squirrellous — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:35:17 +0000

C++ dev here. It’s helping me just fine. Not as much as frontend folks but not far behind either.

It’s not quite at the place where LLMs can take over 100% coding, but give it a few more months.

New comment by squirrellous in "Rust is just a tool"

squirrellous — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 04:12:50 +0000

This is why I get turned off hearing about Rust (and I use it from time to time). You can say Rust is good without saying other languages are bad.