<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: zzzeek</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zzzeek</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:59:57 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=zzzeek" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>of course, the vast, vast majority of PostgreSQL users outside of managed cloud hosting are not using pgbouncer.   pgbouncer introduces complexities into the database conversation (transaction-level pooling interacting with the prepared statement cache is a long recurring nightmare for us at sqlalchemy) that often not worth the complexity for small local installations.<p>this article seems to be talking about commercial cloud managed PG services, which yes, those absolutely need to support connection pooling and of course they're going to use pgbouncer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:14:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320295</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320295</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320295</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Wyden proposes new taxes on data centers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If we want to put pressure on new datacenters to mitigate their externalities I'd prefer they would somehow be investing in the local communities they impact, in areas like electricity generation and water infrastructure.   Having them pay a federal tax that's just going to go to more missiles for Hegseth to shoot into Iran seems like a big missed opportunity.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:16:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49199542</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49199542</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49199542</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I would never undertake a big performance optimization without first measuring that area's total impact.  The LLM would then be great to work out the refactoring and you can give it your bench suite (which it probably wrote) to work against.<p>I guess just another area where the LLM is useful only as long as you remain in charge using your own programming experience as a guide.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:39:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123017</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123017</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123017</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "A Trampoline"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They care because trampolines have a very high rate of injury.  If you throw a birthday party at your house and one of your neighbors kids breaks their arm or worse, neighbor might decide to sue you.  That then puts your insurance company on the hook.  Even if your policy forbids trampolines you can often plausibly argue you weren't aware, and they end up having to pay out.   Insurance companies refuse to cover things all the time and trampolines are apparently a big problem for them (just talked to our insurance broker a few weeks ago about this as my family is pushing to get one and I'm having to push back.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:08:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113544</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113544</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49113544</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "A Trampoline"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Insurance does not cover them and if they find out you have one they are likely to cancel your coverage.<p>I'm not sure why "you can lose your home insurance for having one of these" isn't being brought up more.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:10:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104679</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104679</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104679</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Some more things about Django I've been enjoying"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hi, don't mind me, but<p>You don't need to return a boolean.  You need to return an object that implements __bool__.<p>Get it ?<p>And even then, when you're dealing with objects that are special to expressions, you don't actually even need __bool__ that much</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:24:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49066151</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49066151</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49066151</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>this is annoying, it makes a big deal about "Back when we announced pay-per-crawl"...<p>I want pay-per-crawl. I clicked the link for it a year ago, got presented with a "request access" button, I "requested access" and obviously since I'm nobody I heard absolutely nothing.   Now they're touting the link again, I checked, still that same "request access" button.   I have no idea if anyone even has access to this feature.<p>I don't care about all this other stuff, I want the AI crawlers to pay me cash.  Because boy do those fuckers want to crawl me.   I'll gladly double the size of my gerrit/jenkins servers to keep up with the load if these stupid bots want to pay to crawl every jenkins build artifact and every changeset source file on the server, as they really seem to want to do.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Jul 2026 02:01:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49053883</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49053883</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49053883</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Trump administration admits clean energy grants were canceled based on politics]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/politics/2026/07/25/trump-administration-admits-grants-for-clean-energy-were-canceled-based-on-politics/">https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/politics/2026/07/25/trump-administration-admits-grants-for-clean-energy-were-canceled-based-on-politics/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047463">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047463</a></p>
<p>Points: 8</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Jul 2026 13:34:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/politics/2026/07/25/trump-administration-admits-grants-for-clean-energy-were-canceled-based-on-politics/</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047463</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047463</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Show HN: I simulated closing the Strait of Hormuz on real oil trade data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well that's also election time so the timing could not be better</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Jul 2026 01:43:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49043716</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49043716</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49043716</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's to give unfair advantage to Anthropic and OpenAI who would then be expected to shower Donald Trump personally with hundreds of billions of dollars in cash, airplanes and tacky golden things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 01:43:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030346</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030346</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030346</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>there's persuasion, and then there's inspiring people already on your side.   the upvotes/downvotes will give you a clue who the audience turns out to be.    it was an upvote from me.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:43:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49022458</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49022458</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49022458</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>reading through this I eventually realized a situation similar to my experience of it is what my dog sees if I attempt to explain Python programming to him.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 23:20:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48999699</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48999699</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48999699</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Israeli spyware vans infiltrate American streets and your phones"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>wow that is a really misleading headline.   I thought this was the Israeli government spying on US soil.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:55:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993120</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993120</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993120</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Who's afraid of Chinese models?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>the leader of China praised Open Source in a speech.    Crazy times</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 02:12:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987265</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987265</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987265</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Perfection Is Not Over-Engineering"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>great post but also the real thing they are talking about here is YAGNI</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:55:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983267</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983267</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48983267</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>this whole AI era has put the topic of "do we believe actual reality, or what we hoped/assumed/continue to insist would be reality" front and center.    Every discussion is like this these days.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 13:57:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968283</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968283</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968283</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>the issue with articles that try to analyze the state of open source and its sustainability and all that is that nothing about open source makes any sense if you just talk about it.  Imagine you're transported to 1977 and you work at IBM and you try to tell them, oh hey I have an idea, how about the OS everyone uses for literally all commerce, communication, military, etc., you name it, will be written by one guy in his spare time and later maintained by tens of thousands of mostly unpaid volunteers.  "Don't other companies try to copy it and sell it as their own?"   "Well sure, but mostly it's better to use the free one everyone knows".  Try selling your manager at IBM in 1977 that idea for new software.   It would be impossible.  It would be impossible <i>today</i>.<p>Trying to explain how the global economy and welfare of most of humanity is hugely dependent on free software production labor, without the advent of actually seeing a world where this actually happens, is just like when we try to explain something like consciousness.   There is no explanation that makes sense.  So predictions about new avenues of doom (like "MIT licensing was a huge mistake!  we should have all been GPL!") similarly dont carry a lot of weight, because of course these predictions make perfect sense in the abstract, yet real world results don't line up at all.<p>Basically open source software is an emergent phenomenon, like consciousness or evolution, or perhaps even how very large language models suddenly seemed like real people.  It's something that would never be predictable in its own absence, which means it will remain largely unpredictable how it will respond to ongoing changes such as "the open source authors and contributors now use programs themselves to produce more code".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:20:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911741</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911741</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911741</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Floating Robot Companion Designed for Safe, Friendly Human Interaction]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.cnet.com/tech/floating-robots-safe-friendly-human-interaction/">https://www.cnet.com/tech/floating-robots-safe-friendly-human-interaction/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48881091">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48881091</a></p>
<p>Points: 3</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Jul 2026 13:31:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.cnet.com/tech/floating-robots-safe-friendly-human-interaction/</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48881091</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48881091</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>before COVID everyone on my team travelled once or twice a year to conferences as well as to the home office for get-togethers, on the company dime.  Those conferences have been turned into online only and my company hasn't flown me or hardly anyone on my team or any of our related teams anywhere in years.   All of that would be considered vastly extravagant and expensive today.     So some kind of belt tightening went on that was never un-tightened.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Jul 2026 23:57:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876987</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876987</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876987</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zzzeek in "Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>OK here is the thing.   Everyone get your downmods ready since my rants on here are always a disaster.<p>People are <i>really really</i> tired.<p>Because of not just Claude, but also "the recession" "the strait of hormuz closed" "we've never recovered our economy from COVID" "everyone works from home now / the company is forcing us to all come back in" "FAANG had 10000 layoffs" "the global warming" "the <panic about XYZ>", our employers are making us work much harder, with a subtle but palpable panic in their emails, with WAY less promises of any kind of job security, companies that never had layoffs for decades are now doing them regularly, our githubs are flooded with people pointing robots at our issues to generate tepid pull requests, and at our pull requests to generate tepid reviews, and look shit is just crazy now.<p>So I think the whole "how would you approach this interesting problem..." thing is, for now, at least for me it <i>feels</i> a little bit on hold.  Like oh that problem.  How to scale?  how to horizontally shard PostgreSQL?  sure, real problems.  But geez whatever we're building, it will be replaced in three months anyway.  That's a hard problem you have there!  I remember when I used to have problems like that, and my solutions sucked anyway and it was replaced with a node.js app two years later.   Whatever advice I have, Claude is going to have 98% of it plus another 10% that I didn't even have.<p>This is all bad.   So I think your post is possibly extremely useful.  Maybe we should, for people we know and trust as humans in the real world, actually take the time and approach an issue as though we didn't have the Matrix to approximate it for us.   I'm going to think about this and consider it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Jul 2026 23:32:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876845</link><dc:creator>zzzeek</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876845</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48876845</guid></item></channel></rss>