Hacker News: wbkang

New comment by wbkang in "How I estimate work"

wbkang — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:42:21 +0000

This resonated with me a lot, thank you. It more or less matches what I have experienced, and it’s good to see someone write this down in a fairly balanced point of view.

My favourite parts:

> My job is to figure out the set of software approaches that match that estimate. […]

> Many engineers find this approach distasteful. […]

> If you refuse to estimate, you’re forcing someone less technical to estimate for you.

Even after many years, I still find it distasteful sometimes but I have to remind myself what everyone gets paid for at the end of the day.

New comment by wbkang in "The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source"

wbkang — Wed, 21 May 2025 01:04:26 +0000

I read your issue, and it's not so different from `sudo rm -rf /` as opposed to an actual design flaw.

New comment by wbkang in "Jeju Air Jet Crashes in South Korea With Over 170 Dead or Missing"

wbkang — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 17:25:40 +0000

This is from more than 25 years ago, there has been big changes since then.

New comment by wbkang in "I'm daily driving Jujutsu, and maybe you should too"

wbkang — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 14:34:19 +0000

It sounds like Stockholm to me ;) I don't think you _need_ the index to make partial commit work. I've used Mercurial first so I know "hg commit -i" exists.

Even if the staging concept is clear to someone, git cli terminology _is_ objectively very confusing and there are many articles written about it already (e.g., do I "add" to index? Is the index also referred as cached/Staged? Mixing different verbs and nouns everywhere). Are they all the same?)

I just wrote this to say it is not a necessary part of making a tool as powerful as git - Mercurial shows an example of a similar tool with a less confusing CLI.

Of course, git won so I just live with it. I enjoy teaching git new devs because once you explain the confusing terminology up front, they understand it faster.

New comment by wbkang in "Is there ever a good reason to disable swap?"

wbkang — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 15:09:27 +0000

Disabling swap on windows means all of your applications virtual memory has to fit in your physical memory. In Windows any unused virtual memory still needs space in RAM or, it has to have space in the page files.

Right now if I look at my Firefox processes, they take more (10-20%, sometimes a lot more) more commit size (virtual memory) than their private working set. With page files the unused virtual memory portion is simply reserved on the page file with minimal overhead. Without any page files, you will be just wasting memory.

RE: unnecessary writes, it might be windows proactively dumping the contents of the memory (I think this happens but I cannot confirm right now). But in general that's very low priority and it should affect your performance.

New comment by wbkang in "Is there ever a good reason to disable swap?"

wbkang — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 14:52:57 +0000

This is the correct answer that needs to be at the top. No swap doesn't mean OOM killer magically kicks in earlier. It just means the anonymous memory has no where to go and your executable pages get evicted and then you are really hosed.

New comment by wbkang in "Google shuts down GPay app and P2P payments in the US"

wbkang — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 18:08:09 +0000

I feel like the typical Google answer to this would just be to shut down your account D: fingers-crossed that it doesn't happen

New comment by wbkang in "Fairbuds: In-ear with replaceable batteries"

wbkang — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 20:46:52 +0000

Sony WF-1000XM3,4 had fairly easily replaceable batteries, but they regressed with the latest XM5. iFixedIt covered it here https://www.ifixit.com/News/79140/sony-just-nerfed-their-mos...

I am still using the XM3 - both the earbud and case batteries are repleacable.

New comment by wbkang in "HP Tries Desperately to Make 'Printer as a Subscription' a Thing"

wbkang — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 17:56:25 +0000

Are there any open source printers? I know that 3d printers have many open source designs and they perform ok.

New comment by wbkang in "Why do we need for an Undefined Behavior Annex to C++"

wbkang — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 00:43:51 +0000

I don't have solid data but for "core" mature software written in c/c++ like browsers and Linux, I feel like I see far more high profile security bugs from the lack of memory safety rather than something like "Linux failed to enforce the existing permissions".

New comment by wbkang in "Auth0 OSS alternative Ory Kratos now with passwordless and SMS support"

wbkang — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 18:01:50 +0000

SMS OTP sucks but this isn't it. Receiving text abroad is free with almost all carriers including Rogers.

New comment by wbkang in "The day I canceled my Spotify subscription"

wbkang — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 20:22:07 +0000

It's an unreliable and jarring experience, I had to give up on it. The app gives no indication when the synchronization would happen, and doesn't explain why when it does not work.

New comment by wbkang in "Don't pass structs bigger than 16 bytes on AMD64"

wbkang — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 16:12:54 +0000

The vanilla interface often allows what's right depending on the context (e.g., if an unnamed return value is passed in, it can be move constructed, otherwise it can be copied). I saw some code bases provide an override for a const ref and a normal type.

New comment by wbkang in "Apple Rejects the Hey Calendar from Their App Store"

wbkang — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 22:33:37 +0000

It's still a valid point. Is it ok to take 15% more if you make more money? Does the marginal cost of supporting an app _increase_ as opposed to stay the same or decrease?

New comment by wbkang in "Researchers uncover on/off switch for breast cancer metastasis in mice"

wbkang — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 02:45:21 +0000

This is not an informed comment. New immunotherapies for cancers are real. It's just that they are very expensive. But it's not right to claim they are very far or imaginative.

New comment by wbkang in "Rust std fs slower than Python? No, it's hardware"

wbkang — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 15:50:41 +0000

I don't think so, but it's difficult to find an actual reference. For sure it does overcommit like crazy. Here's an output from my mac:

% ps aux | sort -k5 -rh | head -1

xxxxxxxx 88273 1.2 0.9 1597482768 316064 ?? S 4:07PM 35:09.71 /Applications/Slack.app/Contents/Frameworks/Slack Helper (Renderer).app/...

Since ps displays vsz column in KiB, 1597482768 corresponds to 1TB+.

New comment by wbkang in "Solar eclipse of August 12, 2026"

wbkang — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 13:48:38 +0000

I saw the same eclipse when I was on a plane from Rome to Seoul. I don't remember it too well anymore but really cool experience.

New comment by wbkang in "Windows Copilot's is showing third-party Ads to Windows users"

wbkang — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 21:59:59 +0000

This is the first time I hear Linux has better fractional scaling than Windows. Is this because of Wayland or something? Windows always had reasonably good fractional scaling story. Wanted to hear why you think Windoes fractional scaling is broken.

New comment by wbkang in "Bypassing Bitlocker using a cheap logic analyzer on a Lenovo laptop"

wbkang — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 17:25:25 +0000

It's called "device encryption" which seems to do the same thing and they allow it for Windows 10 home. It's confusing.

New comment by wbkang in "Show HN: Axilla – Open-source TypeScript framework for LLM apps"

wbkang — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 15:16:55 +0000

Axillary in English also means "of armpit"