Hacker News: travisd

New comment by travisd in "Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)"

travisd — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:47:53 +0000

I found two separate bugs in GCP products. One with gVisor where it would sometimes null-truncate large network packets (this was very hard to diagnose – why is my JSON full of null bytes?) and one where Cloud Run broke sudo sporadically (sudo in a FaaS is definitely niche, I had essentially containerized a very old application written by undergraduates).

Both times they were serious production bugs that took at least a week to resolve, though I only had the lowest tier of support package.

New comment by travisd in "Show HN: Figma-use – CLI to control Figma for AI agents"

travisd — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:57:33 +0000

At $DAYJOBSTARTUP, we do hackathons twice a year. At the most recent one, an engineer sat down with a designer and set him up with Cursor. The designer looked like a kind in a candy shop, he was so excited to be able to rapidly prototype with natural language and not be clicking in Figma for hours.

A month later, he comes back to the engineering team with a 10k line "index.html" file asking "How do I hand this off?" (he was definitely smart enough to know that just passing that file to us was not gonna fly). We decided to copy the designs into Figma for the handoff, both because that was the existing way we did design/engineering handoffs and also because creating high fidelity designs (e.g., "this color from our design system" and "this standard spacing value") isn't in Cursor's wheelhouse.

We're probably going to spend more time working on a better setup for him. At the very least he should be working against our codebase and components and colors and design tokens. But I'm very curious to see where it goes from here.

New comment by travisd in "I'd tell you a UDP joke…"

travisd — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:52:57 +0000

packets udp bar walk a into

New comment by travisd in "Can Bundler be as fast as uv?"

travisd — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 22:23:07 +0000

Many of these package managers get invoked countless times per day (e.g., in CI to prepare an environment and run tests, while spinning up new dev/AI agent environments, etc).

New comment by travisd in "Starbucks: Location closures and elimination of roles"

travisd — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 18:30:06 +0000

Starbucks is airport drink/food for me. Being able to order as I enter the TSA line and pick it up on the way to the gate is unmatched convenience, and the coffee options at airports generally aren't great.

New comment by travisd in "The Seven-Year Rule"

travisd — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 20:53:09 +0000

Of course! It helped your friend realize what kind of person you are and hopefully spurred them to find better friends who possess actual human empathy.

New comment by travisd in "Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail"

travisd — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 22:52:39 +0000

Making an HTTP request and dealing with JSON data is a weed-out question at best. Not sure if you are interpreting the grandparent comment as actually having them write a JSON parser, but I don't think that's what they meant.

New comment by travisd in "Simple CLI Tool for Optimizing Your CSS Files"

travisd — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 18:49:14 +0000

I don’t want to disparage your work, OP, but micro-optimizing text files is often not very effective, especially after gzip. I’m curious to see if there’s any noticeable difference for a representative gzipped CSS file (since these assets are almost always served from a CDN with compression).

New comment by travisd in "C++ left arrow operator (2016)"

travisd — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 01:47:39 +0000

Thanks! I hate it!

New comment by travisd in "Why did we wait so long for the bicycle? (2019)"

travisd — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 05:12:19 +0000

I highly highly highly recommend the book “Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle.” It explores the origin, the various social implications across various cultures (it often became a symbol of perversion due to its association with women’s liberation), and even the modern day e-bike movement. 12/10 book, very well written too.

New comment by travisd in "Bypassing Safari 17's advanced audio fingerprinting protection"

travisd — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 20:46:44 +0000

Based on the article, it sounds like this doesn't activate a device's microphone at all. If it did, most (all?) browsers would give a pop-up requesting permission for that.

New comment by travisd in "Ask HN: Embeddings as "Semantic Hashes""

travisd — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 16:02:07 +0000

Pardon the pedantry, but this reflects the casual/conversational uses of “hash function” not the more general definition. To be a hash function, it just has to map a set to another set of fix sized values (usually some finite set of the natural numbers).

Returning unrelated (distant) hashes for similar inputs is a possible property of a hash function, and oftentimes a desirable one (especially for cryptography), but there are in fact use cases where one wants similar inputs to map to similar (or the same) hash. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing

New comment by travisd in "Fixing for loops in Go 1.22"

travisd — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 22:23:40 +0000

It's worth noting that it's much less of a problem in Python due to the lack of ergonomic closures/lambdas. You have to construct rather esoteric looking code for it to be a problem.

    add_n = []
    for n in range(10):
        add_n.append(lambda x: x + n)
    add_n[9](10)  # 19
    add_n[0](10)  # 19

This isn't to say it's *not* a footgun (and it has bit me in Python before), but it's much worse in Go due to the idiomatic use of goroutines in a loop:

    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        go func() { fmt.Printf("num: %d\n", i) }()
    }

New comment by travisd in "Ink: React for interactive command-line apps"

travisd — Mon, 08 May 2023 17:42:43 +0000

Curious to know -- how do these kinds of things affect accessibility for visually impaired people? If you're using a screenreader, do these kinds of things work?

New comment by travisd in "Defining interfaces in C++ with ‘concepts’ (C++20)"

travisd — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 07:20:01 +0000

Yep, I think those things are all related.

New comment by travisd in "Defining interfaces in C++ with ‘concepts’ (C++20)"

travisd — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 07:14:53 +0000

Go generally is pretty conservative about that kind of thing (namely, compiler optimizations). Go generally abides by a “what you write is what you get” kind of thing, especially when it comes to “non-local” optimizations. It’s generally opposed to anything that’s “clever.” (Just my feeling as someone who uses Go pretty often and who respects the choice they’ve made on that spectrum).

New comment by travisd in "NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as 'state-affiliated media'"

travisd — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 17:12:12 +0000

I suspect this is a bad-faith argument, but just to be clear, NPR get's a tiny fraction of its funding from the government *and* maintains editorial independence.

> The news organization says that is inaccurate and misleading, given that NPR is a private, nonprofit company with editorial independence. It receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

New comment by travisd in "Maps show how parking lots “eat” U.S. cities"

travisd — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 07:45:29 +0000

We’re not talking about why Seattle is far from Miami. American city sprawl is largely a recent phenomenon (post WWII) and was enabled by the rise of the personal automobile. Even the sprawl-iest of cities (Houston, TX) used to be respectably dense and walkable. The need for a car to achieve basic needs (groceries, school, work) is a phenomenon well less than 100 years old. America has this problem in part because it’s much younger than a lot of European cities, but it’s certainly not purely a function of topography.

New comment by travisd in "We updated our RSA SSH host key"

travisd — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 16:48:18 +0000

Parent comment is concerned with privacy, not authenticity. They're not worried that someone modified their code, they're worried that someone saw it.

New comment by travisd in "Python is two languages now"

travisd — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 16:48:38 +0000

The author just spends the final paragraphs… guessing?

> TypeScript… JavaScript… Going to guess it's similar.

> I haven't touched Java for almost a decade

> I don't really know enough Rust to be able to comment with any confidence