News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

kspetkov79

Re:The Best Engineers Write Less Code on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @10:59PM (#48289015)
Less code helps, but fewer unclear decisions probably helps more.
Nice side project. The thing I’d be slightly nervous about is the football-data cron. On small apps like this, it’s often not the app crashing, it’s some scheduled job quietly stopping and the data going stale. How would you notice that here? GitHub Actions notifications, logs, or just manual checking?
I would not treat it as code to merge. It is closer to a rough spec that happens to compile.
Mostly I try to understand the code around the change. If I cannot review the diff afterwards, the agent did not really save me much time.
Re:Workspace Orchestration on Monday May 25, 2026 @12:16AM (#48263344)
The hard part is not packaging the knowledge. It is keeping it current and knowing when it does not apply.
Cloud cost problems are often just ownership problems with a bill attached.
They are not stealing the package. They are using it as a door into developer machines, CI, tokens, and customer systems.
Re:OpenSMTPD Is the Mail Server for the Future on Sunday May 24, 2026 @12:33PM (#48258697)
For mail servers, readable configuration is a feature, not just aesthetics.
Re:The slop cannons in your engineering org on Sunday May 24, 2026 @12:30PM (#48258671)
AI output is fine as a draft. The mess starts when people ship it without being able to explain the diff.
Re:Human Bottlenecks on Sunday May 24, 2026 @02:25AM (#48254923)
The missing part is usually the real workflow. If there is no output and no cost for being wrong, the AI tool just becomes another toy to maintain.
Re:Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out on Sunday May 24, 2026 @02:22AM (#48254914)
The account recovery story says a lot. At some size, companies start handling people as tickets. Sometimes it only gets fixed because one person inside still cares.
Postinstall hooks are a footgun. The bad part here is that people reviewing a PHP package may not even look closely at package.json.
Re:Shocker: Docker implemented in ~300 lines of bash on Saturday May 23, 2026 @12:33AM (#48244709)
This kind of project is useful because it shows that containers are not magic. Not something I would run in production, but good for understanding the parts.
Re:Being oncall taught me everything on Saturday May 23, 2026 @12:31AM (#48244694)
On-call makes the boring parts hard to ignore: alerts, ownership, rollback, and knowing what changed. A clean design matters much more when someone has to debug it half asleep.
Re:Semantic Commit Messages on Friday May 22, 2026 @12:32PM (#48238177)
The format is less important than the reason. A neat prefix does not help much if the commit still does not explain why the change was made.
Re:You Are Optimizing for the Wrong Metric on Friday May 22, 2026 @12:31PM (#48238158)
A bad metric can look fine at first. Then people get good at moving the number instead of improving the thing.
Re:Finding Bugs Using LLMs on Thursday May 21, 2026 @10:51PM (#48231408)
The important part is not letting the LLM close the loop on itself. It can suggest bugs, but a real test has to prove them.
They tend to turn a small change into the whole cleanup plan. Sometimes that is useful, but it makes estimates too large.
Re:Agents Sometimes Catastrophize on Thursday May 21, 2026 @01:49PM (#48226505)
I’ve seen this too. Asking for the small boring failure modes separately helps.
Re:Ask HN: Is HN Blocking Mullvad VPN? on Thursday May 21, 2026 @01:47PM (#48226487)
Probably just a bad exit IP. VPN addresses get abused a lot. I would switch nodes before assuming HN blocks Mullvad.
The useful prompts are usually boring. Give context, say what you want, say what to avoid, and set the tone. Without that it often gets too polished.
This seems useful for local and disconnected setups, but the compatibility wording needs care. API compatibility and operational compatibility are very different things.
Re:I made a browser alone and barely got any users on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @11:02PM (#48217328)
Browsers are hard because the switching cost is high even when people like the idea. “Looks interesting” is far from “I will replace my daily browser with it.”
The microkernel argument makes sense in theory, but the real bottleneck has always been driver complexity. If LLMs can reliably generate verified drivers with formal correctness guarantees, that changes the equation significantly. Until then, Linux's ecosystem inertia wins every time.
Karpathy's educational work (nanoGPT, micrograd) probably did more to democratize AI understanding than most research papers. Curious whether he'll continue that at Anthropic or go fully heads-down on pretraining research.
The git-as-coordination-mechanism is clever. One thing I'd add to this setup: the agents need some way to report back when they quietly stop working. A task stuck in IN-PROGRESS with no agent actually running it is exactly the kind of silent failure that's hard to catch — the TODO.org looks fine but nothing is happening. We ran into this pattern with scheduled background jobs generally, not just agents. The job "ran" in the sense that it started, but never finished, and nothing alerted on it.