Hacker News: willseth

New comment by willseth in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

willseth — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:10:01 +0000

New comment by willseth in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

willseth — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 21:09:32 +0000

It literally doesn’t matter unless it impacts users. I don’t know why you would waste time on non problems.

New comment by willseth in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

willseth — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 20:32:33 +0000

You gauge with metrics and profiles, if necessary, and address as needed. You don’t scrutinize every line of code over whether it’s “reasonable” in advance instead of doing things that actually move the needle.

New comment by willseth in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

willseth — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 19:19:47 +0000

Sorry, you’re not allowed to discourage premature optimization or defend Python here.

New comment by willseth in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

willseth — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 19:05:37 +0000

Then you should have written that. Instead you have given more fodder for the premature optimization crowd.

New comment by willseth in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

willseth — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 19:02:14 +0000

Good callout on the paper reference, but this author gives gives every indication that he’s dead serious in the first paragraph. I don’t think commenters are confused.

New comment by willseth in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

willseth — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:51:04 +0000

Knowing that an empty string is 41 bytes or how many ns it takes to do arithmetic operations is not general knowledge.

New comment by willseth in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

willseth — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:35:37 +0000

Sometimes it’s as simple as finding the hotspot with a profiler and making a simple change to an algorithm or data structure, just like you would do in any language. The amount of handwringing people do about building systems with Python is silly.

New comment by willseth in "Python numbers every programmer should know"

willseth — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:10:47 +0000

Every Python programmer should be thinking about far more important things than low level performance minutiae. Great reference but practically irrelevant except in rare cases where optimization is warranted. If your workload grows to the point where this stuff actually matters, great! Until then it’s a distraction.

New comment by willseth in "Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)"

willseth — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:34:45 +0000

It doesn’t. You’re welcome to do your own research to confirm

New comment by willseth in "We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)"

willseth — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:47:47 +0000

“We didn’t have the expertise to build the thing we were building, got in way over our heads, and built a basic POC using legacy technology, which is fine.”

New comment by willseth in "Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)"

willseth — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:43:34 +0000

On a trumpet? A clarinet? No, the motions don't simultaneously overlap. The fingering mechanics are slightly different at speed, but you would still start slow while using the higher speed mechanics and tonguing technique, not jump into high speed practice first.

New comment by willseth in "Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)"

willseth — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 14:01:50 +0000

Depends on the instrument. For wind instruments, the motions basically don’t change, and your focus is on synchronizing your mouth with your hands. Tonguing technique is different at high speed but you would typically practice with the same technique at low speed when learning a fast piece.

New comment by willseth in "The Connectivity Standards Alliance Announces Zigbee 4.0 and Suzi"

willseth — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 15:18:32 +0000

What’s wrong with Matter?

New comment by willseth in "Removing XSLT for a more secure browser"

willseth — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 21:03:01 +0000

"[Y]ou're welcome to fork Chromium or Firefox" is the software developer equivalent of saying "you're welcome to go fuck yourself."

New comment by willseth in "Removing XSLT for a more secure browser"

willseth — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 21:00:23 +0000

It's true that there are security issues, but it's also true that they don't want to put any resources into making their XSLT implementation secure. There is strong unstated subtext that a huge motivation is that they simply want to rip this out of Chrome so they don't have to maintain it at all.

New comment by willseth in "Removing XSLT for a more secure browser"

willseth — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 20:53:26 +0000

The lead dev driving the Chrome deprecation built a wasm polyfill https://github.com/mfreed7/xslt_polyfill. Multiple people proposed in the Github discussions leading up to this that Google simply make the polyfill ship with Chrome as an on-by-default extension that could be disabled in settings, but he wouldn't consider it.

New comment by willseth in "Why I code as a CTO"

willseth — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 18:05:53 +0000

This is staff, principal, or even EM scope at many orgs. I have never seen anyone with a senior dev title directly managing juniors.

New comment by willseth in "Advice for new principal tech ICs (i.e., notes to myself)"

willseth — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 14:49:18 +0000

Maybe you were just bad at management and didn’t know it.

New comment by willseth in "Python on the Edge: Fast, sandboxed, and powered by WebAssembly"

willseth — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 18:24:57 +0000

You were supporting the tail end of an era that is universally agreed upon as an ecosystem failure. The internet didn't provide a consistent user experience for developers or for users, it generated mountains of legacy baggage, and it was frustrating for everyone.