Hacker News: uzername

New comment by uzername in "GitHub Actions is slowly killing engineering teams"

uzername — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 21:05:20 +0000

I use a CICD tool called Vela.(No relationship to the k8s tool also called Vela.) It's mostly docker all the way down. Reminds me of bit bucket pipelines. Maybe worth checking out if GHA is just too opaque.

New comment by uzername in "Self-hosting my photos with Immich"

uzername — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 13:38:33 +0000

I had immich running great for a while, maybe for months. It would seamlessly sync photos from phone to local home server. I was going to setup nightly outbound sync too (1 is none, 2 is some).

I updated the container for usual appliance maintenance. Entire thing is toast. Metadata files can't be read, mounted, permission issues and more. It's been four months since.

New comment by uzername in "Invisible details of interaction design (2023)"

uzername — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 18:07:44 +0000

On some previous version of Samsung's UI, they followed the Apple trend of splitting the swipe down interaction, one side for notifications and one side for setting. It was extremely confusing. Luckily Samsung included a toggle to revert that change.

New comment by uzername in "Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving"

uzername — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 21:16:33 +0000

Lurking, occasionally commenting, rarely posting. I've read HN everyday since I started working in the industry since March 2016. I appreciate what HN is and the shared culture.

Thanks all, and have a great day.

New comment by uzername in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

uzername — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 02:51:34 +0000

The loss of Google Reader really does feel like the beginning of the end in retrospect.

New comment by uzername in "Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature"

uzername — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 16:52:24 +0000

Missing search and weird ssh control character issues are my blockers. It's great otherwise!

New comment by uzername in "The Deletion of Docker.io/Bitnami"

uzername — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 12:10:06 +0000

My team is worried about that too. We've been a java and spring shop for years. We're looking at micronaut, it's similar enough.

When I had someone from another team take a look at broadcom and what they could do to spring, they said the licenses are permissive, it will be fine. Likely not that simple.

New comment by uzername in "Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls"

uzername — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 10:58:29 +0000

I've been paying for NYT for five years. I remember the NYT paywall before that. I've been interested in local news so after my 5th hit in recent memory hitting my local newspaper's paywall, I finally bought a year subscription.

On the other hand, my mom used to read the physical newspaper. She would buy it at the gas station. She refuses to buy any type of news online. So it's unfortunately all Facebook and YouTube news shorts slop for her now.

New comment by uzername in "Four Lectures on Standard ML (1989) [pdf]"

uzername — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 14:02:59 +0000

We used SML in my undergrad compilers course. I really loved the language and I started exploring other languages outside of class after that.

New comment by uzername in "Why blog if nobody reads it?"

uzername — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 03:30:19 +0000

I've used mine as a personal knowledge base that happens to be public. It's silly how many times I've come up in search results months or years later after I'd forgotten having solved this problem before.

A semi-related story: Freshmen year in college, I was about a week ahead in the sci curriculum and I blogged regularly about novel errors I encountered and how I fixed them. During lab late in the semester, I happen to look up into the next row. I found the duo there reading my blog post.

New comment by uzername in "Google starts tracking all your devices in 8 weeks"

uzername — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 14:59:43 +0000

It's unfortunate that the pbtest.org tool links out to a service with an expired cert.

New comment by uzername in "Students Paid Thousands for a Caltech Boot Camp. Caltech Didn't Teach It"

uzername — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 16:18:39 +0000

That's probably the same bootcamp that my friend took. I was really excited for them, but unfortunately the bootcamp was of poor quality. No enforced gates, no meaningful feedback on code quality, too little explicit mentoring on tech skills and soft skills, no support finding work at "graduation". That was in 2019, before the markets churned. Those courses were branded as UMN but we're reskinned Trilogy bootcamp materials, and there was ultimately no UMN staff involved except maybe an admin somewhere.

Good riddance indeed.

New comment by uzername in "Ask HN: How to roll out an internal UI component library"

uzername — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 14:32:21 +0000

Our design team has been charged with making a refreshed, design system. That's all in Figma so far. Nothing has touched a real browser or a real device (tablet, phone). I've coached them to _try_ their design system in code sooner than later, to see if it even makes sense in real scenarios. I've coached them that they'll need multiple implementations.

At a technical level, there have been previous attempts for these shared design libraries with reusable components. We're mostly using react. The first generation the design system ended up putting all of these complex components like "Product Display" or "Order Builder" and so on, all driven by props. That resulted in prop explosion and increasingly unreasonable maintenance burdens. It also became effectively locked to the versions of React that were available when it was made - teams could not afford to upgrade either their own apps which caused the library to freeze. A second generation of repeated many of those same mistakes, not composable enough, too tied to a definite version of react, too tied to a definite version of mui, and so on. The tech piece, in addition to the people-problems, is just as hard and important too.

Adoption will be driven by funding, value and time.

New comment by uzername in "Ask HN: When do you block out time to learn new things?"

uzername — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 22:55:02 +0000

Similarly to how someone else shared, I've added a Hacking Time to Friday afternoons on calendar. I've been using this time for over a year. Try a new tool, try a different approach, try cloning another team's repo, experimenting with XYZ, and so on. A lot of that has allowed me to have "just in time" knowledge of topics which helped unblock a team member or provide early recommendations for a new task.

All that said, I also read HN regularly and I know I don't touch beyond the very tip of the iceberg and that's fine.

New comment by uzername in "I will f(l)ail at your tech interviews, here's why you should care"

uzername — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 21:52:37 +0000

This year my employer started using Hacker Rank as a "step in the interview process". During the first dozen or so of interviews, most candidates ended up running out of time and "failing". Well it turns out, if you look at the data for that particular question from HR most candidates also failed. It was a terrible prompt with too much code to write. In our subsequent rounds, we told the recruiters to change those questions out, and regardless of someone passes let us review with them. We told our recruiting team if someone refuses to do let code/HR, that's okay if they have some code they're willing to share and discuss instead.

New comment by uzername in "Capacitive controls could be the cause of a spate of VW ID.4 crashes"

uzername — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 16:20:13 +0000

I have the same desk from Costco. I'm so glad there's a lockout button on the side of mine. My cat would trigger it constantly otherwise.

New comment by uzername in "Ask HN: How do you read and follow the discussions on big threads?"

uzername — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 13:13:53 +0000

I use the HACK app, a hacker news reader app, for android. It has collapsing sections and jump to next top level comment. Between these two functions reading long threads even with deeply nested comments isn't too bad.

New comment by uzername in "Ask HN: Where do you keep your 401k investments?"

uzername — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 19:08:08 +0000

I have my 401k managed through Vanguard currently. Previously Principal with a former employer. I have other savings and investment in other providers, managed by a financial advisor.

New comment by uzername in "Is it right to blame Google/Yahoo for deprecating an email forwarding service?"

uzername — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 06:31:43 +0000

The University of Minnesota Twin Cities offered Gmail to students when I attended '11-'15. They allowed alumni to keep the account and I respectfully used it, though infrequently, and kept my account active with reminders to log into it every 90 days. Late last year they claimed that Google was beginning to charge much more for accounts, and those alumni accounts were going to close.

This isn't the same as the forwarding service, but maybe the overhead wasn't worth it anymore.

New comment by uzername in "JDK 21 Release Notes"

uzername — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 14:39:58 +0000

I haven't tried it yet but I'm guessing this will fold into a different visual representation in IntelliJ when the cursor isn't nearby. It's not pretty but if it's consistent I guess it's fine.