Hacker News: stratigos

New comment by stratigos in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

stratigos — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:03:35 +0000

All of this and more entered my mind the very moment I learned that Microsoft had acquired GitHub.

New comment by stratigos in "Dark Software"

stratigos — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 19:40:16 +0000

I was just thinking it sounds like a very ambitious, engaged, and intelligent 24 year old (a kid).

New comment by stratigos in "Dark Software"

stratigos — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 19:37:56 +0000

Ive been working in AI for about a year, and Ive been working as a web developer for about 20 years. It appears to me that everyone that thinks AI is going to handle development for companies (in the reasonably near future) are also folks who have never had high level engineering responsibilities for a single project for a multi-year period. That is, theyve never been exposed to the realities of how nuanced managing a software product is at a technical level. The bots can barely write code-bootcamp level scripts. Im not confident that we will see AI solving the kinds of (coding) problems that engineering leaders are handling over multi-quarter projects.

New comment by stratigos in "Microsoft Chose Profit over Security, Whistleblower Says"

stratigos — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 16:40:30 +0000

This comes off like a study being published that shows tobacco is harmful to the lungs.

New comment by stratigos in "Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity"

stratigos — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 15:21:52 +0000

As someone who has worked in startup environments for 20 years, its rather offensive that anyone in 2024 would claim that employees arent taking risks.

In todays salary brackets, one could be comfortably making 220k as a staff dev some huge healthcare/pharma tech firm. One may also feel the job is boring, soulless, and mostly uncomfortable. Then one may choose to work at an exciting AI startup for ~160k, and suddenly find themselves way happier, growing more, and engaged. One just took ~60k worth of risk right there, not to mention that it could be come $0 tomorrow, and one likely now has crap healthcare benefits, given the startup status.

That 60k could be a million dollars in ~15 years if invested wisely.

New comment by stratigos in "After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL"

stratigos — Thu, 30 May 2024 15:20:08 +0000

The hype train strikes yet again! In fellow consultancy circles, we were giving talks on exactly this back in '17 and '18, but the hype train was too strong then. It was even harder to convince this same crowd that SPAs are usually a bad idea, and emerging technology like Hotwire or LiveView would soon eclipse the SPA-obsessed culture. GraphQL is immensely powerful and useful for its exact use case, and extremely burdensome and expensive for any other use case. If you dont already know that use case, YAGNI. The same can be said for any hype train. The problem with any kind of hype train in tech is everyone looks for reasons to use whatever the new hyped thing is, rarely does anyone determine if the new hyped thing actually fits their use case(s). This will continue so long as there is a dichotomy of culture between youths and those with lengthy experience. We old people will continue to point out exactly why this or that is pure hype, and will continue to be drowned out by the emotions that come along with participating in hype.

New comment by stratigos in "Unit Tests Considered Harmful"

stratigos — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 13:48:08 +0000

This reads like a junior developer's first foray into the concept of the test pyramid. Congrats, author has learned that there is a forest beyond the trees.

New comment by stratigos in "Why are there so many methane satellites?"

stratigos — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 17:17:29 +0000

I would guess for the same reason the government consistently buys $1000 hammers and $5000 toilet seats - to mask some military operation theyd rather not publicly report on.

New comment by stratigos in "Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power"

stratigos — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 16:38:41 +0000

Were pro-right-tool-for-the-job. The US Stock market is already a free-money generating machine. We need more money in the US Stock Market, not in B.S. toys for contrarian criminals.

New comment by stratigos in "Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power"

stratigos — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 16:37:30 +0000

contrarianism is a very powerful and often understated force within human culture

New comment by stratigos in "Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced"

stratigos — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 16:25:42 +0000

Well, we all know a Gemini cant be trusted ;-)

New comment by stratigos in "It was almost impossible to make the blue LED [video]"

stratigos — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 16:20:46 +0000

Blue LEDs are the bane of my light-sensitive eyes' existence, and it pains me so to know they almost never existed at all. I keep a PC repair kit with me, even though I dont have a desktop computer, because I need to take all of my electronics apart and take these stupid blue LEDs out of them.

New comment by stratigos in "Claim: the ideal PR is 50 lines long"

stratigos — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 15:58:28 +0000

The response to seeing 10k lines of code in a PR is not to skim it, that is harming one's company. The response is to request the author to justify its size, and/or reject the PR and request that it be delivered in smaller sizes. If the author cannot, then the author needs their responsibilities reduced and to receive additional mentorship.

Skimming a PR is pure cognitive dissonance, dont do this and complain when your app turns into a dumpster fire.

New comment by stratigos in "Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences"

stratigos — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 15:45:27 +0000

China makes war through deception and gaslighting, not through tanks and bombs. They declared war on the entire world more than two decades ago.

New comment by stratigos in "RustPython"

stratigos — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 15:40:10 +0000

please, just stop with Python already

New comment by stratigos in "Nassim Taleb: U.S. is in a 'death spiral' over government debt"

stratigos — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 20:50:46 +0000

Anytime people talk about failing western economies, I find it easy to make a "you should see the other guy!" argument. We dont have > 500 million people at risk of starving to death in the next 10-15 years, and were not at risk for total energy collapse. Were not trying to gaslight the world that we are not looting all of the fish in their seas due to impending food source collapse. Were in horrible shape but compared to most of the major economies of the world, were relatively o.k.

This does not mean things are o.k. in the USA, or that we dont need to fix things. Its just that were not the ones that truly need to panic, "collapse" in the West is different than in the old world, just like "poverty" in the USA is radically different than what it means on most of the world.

New comment by stratigos in "Effective Altruism Has a Sam Problem"

stratigos — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 19:05:34 +0000

To accept any tenants of EA, one must first accept the cultural mythology of altruism in the first place. Can it be proven that altruism exists?

New comment by stratigos in "Ideal monitor rotation for programmers (2021)"

stratigos — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 19:00:01 +0000

Is this article satire? Do people actually make naive assumptions that line-length limits in code relate to screen sizes?

New comment by stratigos in "Who will lead the charge to a four-day work week?"

stratigos — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 17:33:46 +0000

thoughtbot, inc had been "leading this charge" for over a decade

New comment by stratigos in "The feds' vehicle 'kill switch' mandate is a gross violation of privacy"

stratigos — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 14:54:25 +0000

> The ability for the state to remotely kill your means of transportation, thus remotely controlling our freedom of movement, is a new dystopian level of government control.

Indeed, this is the reason they are forcing EVs onto us.