Hacker News: tl

New comment by tl in "Zig: Build System Reworked"

tl — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:09:05 +0000

The OG of these is probably C and Assembly. C and (Emacs) Lisp is well known. Arguably, it's the entire reason we have Python. But if you want to pair Zig against something, I would look at Lua.

New comment by tl in "Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times"

tl — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:11:26 +0000

This is America. We gerrymander the vote and blame the victim. Sorry you got downvoted.

New comment by tl in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

tl — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:14:52 +0000

https://antonz.org/sqlite-is-not-a-toy-database/ — 240K inserts per second on a single machine in 2021. The problem you describe is real, but the TPS ceiling is wrong by three orders of magnitude on modern hardware.

New comment by tl in "Gemini 3 Deep Think"

tl — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:27:33 +0000

Per BalatroBench, gemini-3-pro-preview makes it to round (not ante) 19.3 ± 6.8 on the lowest difficulty on the deck aimed at new players. Round 24 is ante 8's final round. Per BalatroBench, this includes giving the LLM a strategy guide, which first-time players do not have. Gemini isn't even emitting legal moves 100% of the time.

New comment by tl in "Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT"

tl — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:07:00 +0000

I have Claude whiplash right now. Anthropic bumped limits over the holidays to drive more usage. Which combined with Opus's higher token usage and weird oddities in usage reporting / capping (see sibling comments), makes me suspect they want to drive people from Pro -> Max without admitting it.

New comment by tl in "Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager"

tl — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:13:46 +0000

Most of the job is noticing friction and clearing paths — which requires context and trust more than technical superiority.

In practice: Start a note for each engineer you manage. Fred Brooks called this a "career file". Start by writing down things that frustrate them enough to complain about publicly. Add hurdles that come up in their one-on-one. Identify problems you can solve, problems you understand but cannot solve right now and problems you do not understand.

Then put on your PM hat; sort by priority and execute.

New comment by tl in "ChatGPT Health is a marketplace, guess who is the product?"

tl — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 03:33:47 +0000

On the contrary, they hire the trendiest: https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

New comment by tl in "Inside CECOT – 60 Minutes [video]"

tl — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 13:27:03 +0000

I recommend everyone bookmark the archive.org link or download via the magnet link since HN is disappearing these.

Also, any recommendations for a news site that doesn't suppress news? Asking for a friend.

New comment by tl in "How we built the v0 iOS app"

tl — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 19:33:47 +0000

Balatro and a number of other games have. But react-native? I can't think of an example and the framework wouldn't be my choice for "award winning" design.

Watch Duty won with a Cordova app in the "Social Impact" category, so it's not impossible.

New comment by tl in "I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel"

tl — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 13:47:48 +0000

> If you have a good audit process then errors get detected even if AI helped introduce them. If you aren't doing a good audit then I suspect nobody cares whether your financial statement is correct (anyone who did would insist on an audit).

Volume matters. The single largest problem I run into: AI can generate slop faster than anyone can evaluate it.

New comment by tl in "Molluscs of the Multiverse: molluscan diversity in Magic: The Gathering"

tl — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 13:08:11 +0000

Foundations just reprinted Savannah Lions (the 2/1 for W). It's still a good card in Limited (one of two actual good, popular formats in MtG). The interaction soup people of thousands of cards? Actually good in commander (the other actually liked format, a causal game for four people).

MtG's primary problems are: Wizards trying to make formats happen, often making them worse in the process, and price creep on their printed cardboard from: UB price hikes and MH price hikes, rarelands, chase mythics, questionable rotation changes, Secret Lair fails, pro-scalper behavior, etc...

New comment by tl in "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors (2003) [pdf]"

tl — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 12:41:04 +0000

> The sad fact is that the software industry as a whole relies heavily on mainstream languages, and not on educating your engineers to leverage the strengths of your specialty language.

Except when the language is the workhorse of a proprietary product sold to your employer. SQL is the example that escaped into the open world, but see also MATLAB and Excel formulae/VBA.

New comment by tl in "Writing is thinking"

tl — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 13:59:40 +0000

As a similar but distinct theory, you might find Larry McEnerney‘s work interesting. Writing has two classes: a writing for thought and a writing for communication. Larry uses horizontal and vertical spatial metaphors here. Writing for thought still pre-dates cheap paper (and Socrates), but is mostly a private act. Writing for communication is a broad enough brush to span fiction and journalism. For his part, Larry teaches classes aimed at thesis writers who struggle to bridge the divide of using writing to think about a problem to conveying their answer in a paper.

New comment by tl in "Why Elixir? Common misconceptions"

tl — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 16:41:03 +0000

While Elixir is my current favorite language to hack in, it is very alien and downright hostile to integrating with existing systems. For example, relational database support was postgres focused for a long time (to the exclusion even of SQLite and continued inability to talk to Oracle). Then you have articles like https://dashbit.co/blog/you-may-not-need-redis-with-elixir pushing ETS over Redis. While it's a valid argument, it's not adoption-friendly.

Clojure brings about half the novelty of Elixir, runs on the JVM and still struggles to replace Java.

New comment by tl in "My Mac contacted 63 different Apple owned domains in an hour, while not is use"

tl — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 12:51:25 +0000

Apple has been the new Microsoft long enough, I've begun to suspect the current environment cannot support a new Apple. Joel Spoksky's 2004 "How Microsoft Lost the API War" [1] applies to Apple's 2019 introduction of SwiftUI. Some of the AI companies are trying, but the more favorably I think of a competitor in that market, the less likely they are to build consumer hardware.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

New comment by tl in "Apple introduces a universal design across platforms"

tl — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:12:14 +0000

Maybe for "Apple", but there's one team that takes performance seriously. The WebKit team has a zero tolerance policy for performance regressions (https://webkit.org/performance/) dating back to the implementation of the Page Load Test in 2002 (Creative Selection, p. 93).

WebKit sounds like the kind of scrappy startup Apple might want to acquire and gain some hard-earned engineering knowledge.

New comment by tl in "IRS Direct File on GitHub"

tl — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 12:25:56 +0000

Which means your cries for privacy only apply for rich people and you're okay with that because you have some money.

New comment by tl in "Problems with Go channels (2016)"

tl — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 15:10:50 +0000

This is optics versus reality. Its goal was to address shortcomings in C++ and Java. It has replaced neither at Google and its own creators were surprised it competed with python, mostly on the value of having an easier build and deploy process.

New comment by tl in "Doge Claimed It Saved $8B in One Contract. It Was $8M"

tl — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 13:43:30 +0000

I just refreshed HN. This story is #10 when I'm logged in and gone when viewing from a private window.

New comment by tl in "SQLook – A free online SQLite database manager with a Windows 2000 interface"

tl — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 13:36:54 +0000

It's a biased viewpoint, but it's not nostalgia. The following all happened to me:

- 486 Packard Bell that I upgraded ram from 4MB -> 12MB as a kid? Win 3.1 went from being slow period to Windows 95 being fast any time I didn't touch disk or CD-ROM.

- ZSNES on Pentium MMX? Zero lag gameplay with time-travel debugging and full memory view.

- DOS running on a Pentium 4 to support legacy software? Nearly instant everything, especially power on -> usable machine.

You'll notice a common thread. It was possible to outrun the demons of sluggishness back then.