Hacker News: thehappyfellow

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Simulacrum of Knowledge Work"

thehappyfellow — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:27:59 +0000

That's what I had in mind! The whole post is a claim that evaluating knowledge work got more expensive because cheaper measures stopped correlating well with quality.

If someone was already evaluating the work output using a metric closer to the underlying quality then it might not have been a big shift for them (other than having much more work to evaluate).

Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

thehappyfellow — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 17:20:34 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.happyfellow.dev/simulacrum-of-knowledge-work/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902987

Points: 174

# Comments: 67

The Subprime Technical Debt Crisis

thehappyfellow — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:49:46 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.happyfellow.dev/the-subprime-technical-debt-crisis/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587382

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

thehappyfellow — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:51:51 +0000

Which means you can't select all on text which isn't editable - insane!

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

thehappyfellow — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:51:48 +0000

My blog is at https://blog.happyfellow.dev if you'd like to read it.

I'm also the Head of The Institute for Type-Safe Memetic Research which website is https://typememetics.institute/

FFmpeg-Rs Fundraising Initiative

thehappyfellow — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 13:00:37 +0000

Article URL: https://typememetics.institute/fundraiser/ffmpeg-rs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46014456

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Computational Tyranny"

thehappyfellow — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 17:17:51 +0000

Author here.

I wonder about that as well!

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Programming Language Theory has a public relations problem"

thehappyfellow — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 07:57:00 +0000

Of course practitioners shouldn't expect to understand the bleeding edge without investing a lot in learning the subject.

However providing people with software engineering background an easier on ramp for understanding PLT would be nice, wouldn't it?

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage"

thehappyfellow — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 23:28:05 +0000

It's closely related to another truth:

Unconstrained curiosity is a vice, not virtue.

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Jane Street Boss Says He Was Duped into Funding AK-47s for Coup"

thehappyfellow — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 14:10:57 +0000

Thank you, this makes much more sense and it's a classic issue Matt Levine's readers will be familiar with.

Allegedly being investigated is also quite far from "been manipulating markets", I appreciate the clarification.

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Jane Street Boss Says He Was Duped into Funding AK-47s for Coup"

thehappyfellow — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 11:58:07 +0000

source?

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Migrating to Postgres"

thehappyfellow — Fri, 16 May 2025 08:07:45 +0000

You’re right, there are downsides like turbine you mention! We mitigate it by running a hot backup we can switch to in seconds and a box in which we test restoring backups every 24h, that’s necessary! But it requires 3x the number of big expensive boxes.

I still think it’s the right tradeoff for us, operating a distributed system is also very expensive in terms of dev and ops time, costs are more unpredictable etc.

It’s all tradeoffs, isn’t it?

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Migrating to Postgres"

thehappyfellow — Thu, 15 May 2025 09:56:30 +0000

It’s incredible how much Postgres can handle.

At $WORK, we write ~100M rows per day and keep years of history, all in a single database. Sure, the box is big, but I have beautiful transactional workloads and no distributed systems to worry about!

New comment by thehappyfellow in "I can't pay rent because devs just don't care"

thehappyfellow — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:49:51 +0000

It really makes me happy to know that my writing struck a chord for at least one person - thank you!

New comment by thehappyfellow in "I can't pay rent because devs just don't care"

thehappyfellow — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:09:40 +0000

Yeah, I was angry when I was writing it, not denying it.

New comment by thehappyfellow in "I can't pay rent because devs just don't care"

thehappyfellow — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:07:28 +0000

Author here. I did not expect to see my post on HN!

It was a rant, I was venting, it’s not supposed to be an objective statement about the state of tech. It’s shouting into the void about the things I find unfair and unbearable, I don’t think it’s a great HN material.

I made up parts of the story because it didn’t happen to me and I didn’t want to share details of somebody else’s situation.

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)"

thehappyfellow — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:54:43 +0000

Hah, thanks!

I really wanted an optimisation rabbit hole and seems like this projective going to deliver on that :)

I also tweet about the progress on @onehappyfellow if you’re interested

New comment by thehappyfellow in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)"

thehappyfellow — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 13:29:52 +0000

Learning Rust by building a simple database using it.

I’ve done my share of programming languages (PHP, C++, Python, Ruby, Haskell) and for the last 10 years I’ve been working in OCaml (which I love so much) but Rust would be a nice addition IMO.

And I never implemented LSM style database before! So that’s fun.

I only just started and the pace will be slow (I have 3h/week to spend on it on a good week), if you are curious: https://github.com/happyfellow-one/crab-bucket

Test Your Musical IQ

thehappyfellow — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 18:55:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/miq

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43603951

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Truth Verification Service

thehappyfellow — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 15:23:34 +0000

Article URL: https://happyfellow.bearblog.dev/truth-verification-service-will-it-stop-ai-fakes/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43524886

Points: 1

# Comments: 0