Hacker News: wainstead

New comment by wainstead in "A Modern Web App in C"

wainstead — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 21:47:53 +0000

Same!

New comment by wainstead in "The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale"

wainstead — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:52:02 +0000

> you have enough interactivity to warrant a single-page-application as your frontend. however, you also want people without javascript enabled to be able to read the bits that don’t require interaction.

I think at this point it's not a hobby, it's a burden.

New comment by wainstead in "Accelerando (2005)"

wainstead — Sat, 16 May 2026 12:48:52 +0000

Read this over a decade ago and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Very timely.

The notion of the inner solar system being converted into computronium sounds less and less far-fetched with each passing month.

New comment by wainstead in "AI coding assistants are getting worse?"

wainstead — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:39:28 +0000

Is it just me or is this a giant red flag?

> My team has a sandbox where we create, deploy, and run AI-generated code without a human in the loop.

New comment by wainstead in "On Bloat"

wainstead — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:38:28 +0000

> Banks are a good example. I don't think they are losing much money with their software experience. > Corporate websites (also mentioned in the article) is another thing that just doesn't matter that much.

The opening point is that these sites are stupid slow. And I agree with the author: there is no reason this far into the 21st century a bank's web page should take several seconds to load. It should load in under a second or two.

New comment by wainstead in "Wreck of Shackleton's 'Endurance' discovered in Antarctic depths (2022)"

wainstead — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 17:40:05 +0000

And, it's a great picture book as well.

https://www.davidspilmanfinebooks.com/pages/books/13948/caro...

New comment by wainstead in "Ask HN: How do I move forward after being laid off?"

wainstead — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 21:59:24 +0000

Now’s a good time to post your resume here since you’re getting this attention!

Edit: doing it for ya…

https://www.ryanmercer.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanmercer317

https://issuu.com/ryanmercer/docs/ryan_mercer_resume_2023

New comment by wainstead in "2023 State of Software Engineers [pdf]"

wainstead — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 15:40:57 +0000

"For the purpose of this report, Hired examined software engineering candidate interview requests (IVR) and salary data from January 2021 through December 2022 inclusive. The data included reflects over 68,500 candidates and 494,000 interview requests between companies and software engineers on Hired during this time period."

Then, I think, the numbers reflect only candidates and companies that use Hired, as opposed to the industry as a whole. I wonder how many folks land jobs through Hired?

New comment by wainstead in "Childhoods of Exceptional People"

wainstead — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 11:38:31 +0000

Had to look up “motivated reasoning”… https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-97...

New comment by wainstead in "Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)"

wainstead — Sat, 28 Jan 2023 01:05:37 +0000

I will add that sites like Roll20.net solve the problem of online gaming for D&D (and many other TTRPGs), but your points still stand.

New comment by wainstead in "As last module docks, China completes its space station"

wainstead — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 19:00:45 +0000

I think this company is highly optimistic, but this might fit the bill:

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/space-hotel-orbital-assem...

New comment by wainstead in "Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere"

wainstead — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 11:05:46 +0000

This. I recall most predictions saying 2024 would be the tipping point, but even then I doubt regulations at the local and national level will change that fast.

New comment by wainstead in "My Favourite Computer, an Old Mac"

wainstead — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 02:09:31 +0000

Or even more extreme, perhaps, TAILS on a stick and you just yank the stick when you're done. As long as you don't connect via Tor you're all alone.

New comment by wainstead in "My Favourite Computer, an Old Mac"

wainstead — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 20:57:44 +0000

Ah memories. My first machine was a Classic ii. I think it might be in a friend's garage in Ohio, will have to check with him. Thanks for the great post!

New comment by wainstead in "Senior engineers are living in the future"

wainstead — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 18:56:34 +0000

"The goal is not to be better than someone else; the goal is to be better than you were yesterday." (to paraphrase the Dalai Lama)

New comment by wainstead in "Not Your Grandfather’s Perl"

wainstead — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 17:08:31 +0000

I recall seeing my first PHP/FI page in the middle 90s. PHP was a godsend after you'd suffered with Apache's "server side includes" [0], which is largely what it was used to replace.

Python's origin was as a teaching language (originally ABC I think?), and thus the simplicity of the syntax. It was kinda cool that Python was around for so long before it took off... I had the O'Reilly Python book way back in the 90s.

Perl's influences were awk, sed, bash, C, Fortran, and Lisp.

[0] https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/linux/apache/ch10_01.htm

New comment by wainstead in "Evolving my note-taking processes"

wainstead — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 17:18:04 +0000

I guess you could describe it that way, but it reads more like a journal.

New comment by wainstead in "Evolving my note-taking processes"

wainstead — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 11:15:46 +0000

> I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables

I started keeping a “log” back in 1999 just for work (I too am a software engineer). I note what I worked on and/or what problems I was trying to solve and/or what solutions I found. And some personal stuff too.

My inspiration is the idea of the scientist’s lab book where “if you didn’t write it down it didn’t happen.”

Countless times — even this past week - it has proven invaluable when I wanted to look up how I solved something before (“how do we generate those CSP headers on the fly?” “How did I mount that Docker container?”) or when no one knows why something was built a certain way (and I noted the date and time a manager made that decision).

After a few years I wind up with a few novels worth of entries (by volume) so it’s amazing how writing a little each day adds up.

As to format, it started as a .txt file in Emacs but has evolved into a moderately simple org-mode file.

New comment by wainstead in "Not Your Grandfather’s Perl"

wainstead — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 02:18:26 +0000

A few years ago I pulled out Higher Order Perl and started playing with some of the advanced features/techniques available in the language. And it was really fun! I think Perl was the first popular multi-paradigm language.

New comment by wainstead in "Not Your Grandfather’s Perl"

wainstead — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 02:14:55 +0000

For me it’s any kind of text processing; especially code generation for some one-off task, like churning out SQL or bash scripts/shell commands. Faster than doing it by hand. __END__ is one of my best friends because I can dump the input data right into the script. On the rare occasion I am irked whatever language I’m working in does not have format/write, which comes from the Fortran tradition iirc.