Hacker News: xn

New comment by xn in "Gitas – A tool for Git account switching"

xn — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 11:51:47 +0000

Are there any good reasons to use multiple GitHub user accounts? GitHub organization membership and permissions are well designed in my experience, negating the need for multiple user accounts.

New comment by xn in "AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going"

xn — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:25:53 +0000

I don't understand how vouch solves the problem.

From https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2020628046009831542:

> There's no reason for getting vouched to be difficult. The primary thing Vouch prevents is low-effort drive-by contributions. For my projects (even this one), you can get vouched by simply introducing yourself in an issue and describing how you'd like to contribute.

This just requires one more prompt for your prose/code generator:

"Computer, introduce yourself like a normal human in an issue and wait to be vouched before opening pull request."

New comment by xn in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

xn — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:02:39 +0000

If you don't think code generators are useful, that's fine.

I think code generators are useful, but that one of the trade-offs of using them is that it encourages people to anthropomorphize the software because they are also prose generators. I'm arguing that these two functions don't necessarily need to be bundled.

New comment by xn in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

xn — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:51:12 +0000

Your agency lets you choose the words you use.

New comment by xn in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

xn — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:40:17 +0000

Consider not anthropomorphizing software.

How about we stop calling things without agency agents?

Code generators are useful software. Perhaps we should unbundle them from prose generators.

New comment by xn in "Show HN: Stripe-no-webhooks – Sync your Stripe data to your Postgres DB"

xn — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:01:34 +0000

A related, generalized idea: https://github.com/webhookdb/webhookdb

New comment by xn in "Oregon gave homeless youth $1k/month with no strings"

xn — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 21:11:21 +0000

It could be. How did the control group do?

New comment by xn in "How I estimate work"

xn — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 15:11:53 +0000

Then you know that it's going to take at least, say two weeks, one week for the first implementation and a week to finish it if it works.

On the high end, could it take more than 2 years? 1 year? 6 months? Stop when you are 80% confident that it won't take longer than some period.

So your estimate might be between two weeks and six months. Is that an acceptable estimate for the "buyer"? If not, is it worth expending effort to narrow the estimate?

New comment by xn in "How I estimate work"

xn — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 15:07:09 +0000

This why you should use confidence intervals for estimates. Use a 80% confidence interval, for example. 10% of the time, you should come in under the best case estimate. 10% of the time, it should take longer than the worst case estimate.

How do you know if your estimate is good? Would you rather bet on your estimate or on hitting one of 8 numbers on a 10-number roulette wheel? If you prefer one of the bets, adjust your estimates. If you're indifferent between the bets, the estimates accurately reflect your beliefs.

(The roulette wheel is from the book, How to Measure Anything by Hubbard. Confidence interval estimates are from LiquidPlanner, https://web.archive.org/web/20120508001704/http://www.liquid...)

New comment by xn in "How I estimate work"

xn — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:07:40 +0000

Is it going to take more than two hours?

Is it going to take more than two days?

Is it going to take more than two weeks?

Is it going to take more than two months?

Is it going to take more than two years?

If you can answer these questions, you can estimate using a confidence interval.

If the estimate is too wide, break it down into smaller chunks, and re-estimate.

If you can't break it down further, decide whether it's worth spending time to gather information needed to narrow the estimate or break it down. If not, scrap the project.

New comment by xn in "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"

xn — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 01:41:27 +0000

It's like having Michael Jordan with dementia on your team. You start out mesmerized by how many points he can score, and then you get incredibly frustrated that he forgets he has to dribble and shoot into the correct hoop.

New comment by xn in "Delivery robots take over Chicago sidewalks"

xn — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 01:14:04 +0000

If you bill hourly, $15 for an extra billable hour is a good deal.

New comment by xn in "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?"

xn — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:02:26 +0000

There seems to be an obvious solution.

When I went to the DMV and couldn't pass the vision test without my glasses, they put on my driver's license an indication that I only passed with the accommodation of corrective lenses.

New comment by xn in "Python is not a great language for data science"

xn — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 22:24:28 +0000

redo[1] with shell scripts has become my goto method of dealing with multi-step data problems. It makes it easy to review each step of data retrieval, clean-up, transformation, etc.

I use mlr, sqlite, rye, souffle, and goawk in the shell scripts, and visidata to interactively review the intermediate files.

1. https://redo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

New comment by xn in "Reminder to passengers ahead of move to 100% digital boarding passes"

xn — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 18:52:57 +0000

The airline that inspired at least one passenger to write a song about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1SKldiiWm4

New comment by xn in "AI was supposed to help juniors shine. Why does it mostly make seniors stronger?"

xn — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 20:38:24 +0000

Junior developers don't yet have the intuition to tell the computer, "NO, NOT LIKE THAT!"

New comment by xn in "Christie's Deletes Digital Art Department"

xn — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 22:18:19 +0000

Hope they backed up the seed phrase for the Art Department before deleting it.

New comment by xn in "We regret but have to temporary suspend the shipments to USA"

xn — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 18:19:57 +0000

My mother-in-law shipped us homemade jam from Slovakia. It's been stuck in customs for 3 weeks. The agents must be working diligently to assay the canning jar lids.

New comment by xn in "Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)"

xn — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 17:23:16 +0000

presumably it's status quo bias

New comment by xn in "Show HN: Git-Add–Interactive with Enhancements"

xn — Fri, 30 May 2025 20:29:55 +0000

huh. I guess this is a prototype for features that will have be submitted to the upstream version. There was a feature in development for something like `git add -G `, maybe a decade ago, that never got completed.

As for licensing, I'm happy to change the license. I have no strong feelings on the subject, and don't know what restrictions GPLv2 imposes on a port to another language.