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alecthomas

Re:Protobuf has LSP support. You're welcome on Sunday August 16, 2026 @07:03PM (#49324681)
What an oddly arrogant post, there's been a Protobuf LSP available for years: https://github.com/lasorda/protobuf-language-server
That doesn't seem likely, given that there's a reference from February 2025 documenting the pattern.
Re:What was your "Oh Shit" moment with GenAI? on Friday June 12, 2026 @06:18PM (#48510083)
What was wrong with it?
> There is a vast, hugely funded, and incredibly adept propaganda machine aimed at about half the country.

There are propaganda machines directed at everyone.

> And no, I don’t think “my side” would be immune to a similar machine speaking the language we like to hear, but I just think that hasn’t happened (yet)

It seems incredibly naive to believe that propaganda in this age isn't utilised by all "sides". My base assumption for any information, particularly from mainstream media, is that it's biased one way or the other.

Re:Prolog Coding Horror on Monday May 18, 2026 @03:45AM (#48176595)
I found it very amusing :)
Re:Prolog Coding Horror on Monday May 18, 2026 @03:36AM (#48176541)
I've never seen Prolog used at all in the wild, but OPA (and its ancestor, Datalog) are fairly common.
Unfortunate! I have a bunch of keyboards and a FILCO is my favourite, my daily driver. It just feels ... solid.
Re:Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps on Saturday April 11, 2026 @04:18PM (#47733654)
From skimming the linked PR it looks like it's all been open source, but has been tightly coupled to their deployed instance. The PR appears to be decoupling things completely by making all hard coded values configurable.
Re:Google releases Gemma 4 open models on Friday April 03, 2026 @03:42AM (#47624145)
Oh this page is great! I just released AIM [1] which is a tool that generates verified SQL migrations using LLMs, and I tested a bunch of models manually. I think I'll just link to your page too!

[1] https://github.com/alecthomas/aim

Show HN: Aim – AI-assisted verifiable SQL migration generator

https://github.com/alecthomas/aim

This is pretty fresh and definitely not battle tested, but seems to work pretty well in my local testing. Do NOT just blindly apply the output of this to a production database :)From the README:AIM creates two ephemeral databases: one by loading schema.sql (the desired state), and one by replaying all existing migrations (the current state). It dumps a stable, normalized DDL representation from...

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re://go:fix inline and the source-level inliner on Monday March 16, 2026 @12:25AM (#47395222)
Someone else said this below...

> Go designers distinguish between Go language as defined by Go spec and implementation details. > //go:fix is something understood by a particular implementation of Go. Another implementation could implement Go without implementing support for //go:fix and it would be a fully compliant implementation of Go, the language. > > If they made it part of the syntax, that would require other implementations to implement it.

...I'm not sure I buy that argument TBH.

Re://go:fix inline and the source-level inliner on Monday March 16, 2026 @12:17AM (#47395184)
These are called directives [1], and are treated as metadata by the compiler.

[1] https://pkg.go.dev/go/ast#Directive

That is...disturbing.
Which $600 model has an OLED screen?
Why is GIF worse (I'm not a frontend developer, so I'm genuinely curious)?
Re:'I found your dad': The mystery of a missing climber on Saturday May 03, 2025 @08:32PM (#43883515)
They were not. The daughter is 31 and her father went missing 22 years earlier.
Re:Ghostty 1.0 on Thursday December 26, 2024 @07:23PM (#42518956)
Preach!
Peak enshittification.
Re:Go Protobuf: The New Opaque API on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @06:43AM (#42440571)
This is probably what you want: https://github.com/planetscale/vtprotobuf

Show HN: "mk" – one-liner make rules on the command-line

https://github.com/alecthomas/mkVery handy in conjunction with Just to give you make-like functionality, eg. build-protos: @mk protos/myproto.pb.go protos/myproto.tsx : protos/myproto.proto -- protoc --gen_go=protos --gen_tsx=protos protos/myproto.proto PS. My one and only Rust project, so expect some odd code.

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
Re:gRPC: The Ugly Parts on Saturday September 07, 2024 @07:23PM (#41477068)
Connect [1] is one and it's fantastic. The Go implementation in particular is much nicer than grpc-go.

[1] https://connectrpc.com/

Re:What Postgres Full Text Search Is Missing on Thursday August 08, 2024 @11:05PM (#41198481)
And that's why we pay AWS the big bucks.
Re:Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity? on Monday May 13, 2024 @04:59AM (#40341124)
This was an illuminating comment because I think I finally understand why people have wildly varying experiences with CoPilot.

I think if you regularly use CoPilot to write entire functions or use its prompt mode, you will spend more time verifying its output is accurate than it would save writing the code manually. If instead, you use it iteratively via autocomplete to write small fragments of code, a line or two at a time, its trivial to verify its correctness, and it will save you a good 20-30 seconds at a time, adding up to large savings over time.

I exclusively do the latter, so I find it incredibly useful. The few times I've tried using the prompt mode, or comment-driven code generation, it's been very average or awful.

Re:Secure Randomness in Go 1.22 on Tuesday May 07, 2024 @06:30AM (#40284033)
For those unaware, gosec (and by extension golangci-lint) will warn about uses of `math/rand`

https://github.com/securego/gosec/blob/d3b2359ae29fe344f4df5...

Re:Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years on Sunday April 28, 2024 @06:40PM (#40192640)
Damn, that second one is excruciating to read. I wonder if they're aware of how they put people off the Rust ecosystem with their rabid defensiveness.
Re:Write OpenAPI with TypeSpec on Wednesday March 27, 2024 @03:38PM (#39843614)
I would be absolutely stunned if anyone, ever, has described OpenAPI as "beloved". It does its job, but that's about the best you can say about it.
Manhattan has a population density of 28,154 per sqkm according to Wikipedia?

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