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mattacular

Re:Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after navier-stokes on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @07:34AM (#49725122)
Counter-point: Doesn't make it hard to read at all, definitely not "egregious" as it's a very common style to find for informal writing all over the internet.

Author's own style is certainly refreshing and welcome over LLM slop that dominates most HN posts now.

Re:Let's make quality the norm again on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @07:00AM (#49710578)
Also it doesn't even matter if the rare company making a high quality product long enough to get a positive brand rep is incentivized to sell out (although I don't disagree with you that is a pressure to act in short term interests) thanks to this great thing called: private equity!
I pretty much assume every smart home device capable of doing this is doing it already.

Nothing gets connected to wifi. If temporary connection is required it gets a random one time use guest network SSID and pass that I remove after. (Yes they can collect and send setup metadata during this temporary access period but sometimes it is a worthwhile tradeoff)

Re:Creepy Crawlies on Monday August 31, 2026 @04:33AM (#49507129)
Snowflake defense
Re:Don't Paste the AI, please on Thursday August 20, 2026 @10:25AM (#49375025)
The problem to me is, if people slowed down enough to carefully review and also rewrite model output in their own words (even if we're not counting code output), then what you have is a tool that probably makes you slower overall instead of much faster. I don't think that is a bad idea per se, but it is generally the opposite of how you're expected to perform with AI tools.
Re:How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @11:30AM (#48908367)
"Byte-for-byte"
Re:We should be more tired than the model on Friday May 29, 2026 @09:19AM (#48322767)
What are some traditional automated refactoring tools that can do stuff like those tasks from the example?
Re:YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos on Thursday May 28, 2026 @02:22PM (#48313250)
For one made by a real band check out Sturgill Simpson's cover
A lot of software engineers do still care how software is produced. That's a good thing!
Re:My adventure in designing API keys on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @09:27AM (#47778676)
That's how JWT is designed to work
Re:Be intentional about how AI changes your codebase on Thursday March 19, 2026 @08:46PM (#47448750)
Code cannot and should not be self documenting at scale. You cannot document "the why" with code. In my experience, that is only ever used as an excuse not to write actual documentation or use comments thoughtfully in the codebase by lazy developers.
Re:When AI Writes the Software, Who Verifies It? on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @09:01AM (#47247490)
Test automation is kind of like a religion. It is comforting to believe that the solution to code is more code.
Re:Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015 on Monday February 16, 2026 @11:12AM (#47036807)
I find it to be more difficult. Especially if I can't pane the files in view comfortably (ie. beyond 2 or 3 it gets significantly harder to work across them).

Some frameworks or coding styles really lean into having lots of tiny files. That necessitates a more complicated directory structure for the project. Locating files eventually tends to requires search capability rather than being able to look through the tree in a sidebar.

None of this is "hard" per se but I find the opposite is nicer to work with typically.

Re:Claude Opus 4.6 on Friday February 06, 2026 @08:01AM (#46912314)
That settles it
Re:Claude Opus 4.6 on Friday February 06, 2026 @07:58AM (#46912265)
It's hard to tell with these releases if Anthropic's astroturfing campaign has come to HN or not but I feel like it probably has
Re:How I Estimate Work as a Staff Software Engineer on Saturday January 24, 2026 @09:47AM (#46744021)
Estimation is an art, not a science. It's always going to be a judgement call by the engineers tasked with giving them to management. Taking all of the factors from this article and beyond can and should go into making that judgement call.

I always tell my teams just skip the middlemen and think of estimates as time from the jump. It's just easier that way. As soon as an estimate leaves an engineer's mouth, it is eagerly translated into time by everyone else at the business. That is all anyone else cares about. Better said - that is all anyone else can understand. We humans all have a shared and unambiguous frame of reference for what 1 hour is, or what 1 day is. That isn't true of any other unit of software estimation. It doesn't matter that what one engineer can accomplish in 1 hour or 1 day is different from the next. The same is true no matter what you're measuring in. You can still use buffers with time. If you insist on not thinking of your labor in terms of hours spent, you can map time ranges to eg. points along the Fibonacci sequence. That is still a useful way to estimate because it is certainly true as software complexity goes up, the time spent on it will be growing non-linearly.

Trade Joe's maybe I could see but how did Whole Foods make this list?
I see them as conflicting viewpoints because as a general rule companies do not focus on

> Long term financial interests, mostly.

It's great that you as an individual feel otherwise (I do too), but there are larger macro forces at work which compel firms to act the way they do: pursue short term growth at all costs. The counter-balance to this is either a strong regulatory environment, or a hope and prayer that a majority of companies suddenly gain a strong CEO who feels otherwise and is not obligated to satisfy shareholders who don't. Only a few such CEOs come to mind, and they're looking increasingly short for this world.

> Not a great regulatory move, in my opinion. > But I really wish ad companies would implement this rule across the board.

You don't see how these are conflicting viewpoints? What do you think would compel a company to act in some way that is not in line with its short term financial interests? Sheer luck?

Account created 16 hours ago posting highly dubious AI hype? This user is almost certainly part of the intense astroturfing campaign likely financed by Anthropic that has been ongoing for days/weeks now.
Re:JavaScript's For-Of Loops Are Fast on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @06:44AM (#46525279)
Their rationale is written here, May 21 2021 final comment on the closed issue from the creator themself. Even in 2021 this was a dubious argument to make given the browser landscape, and they are clearly just frustrated to be challenged on this topic. They think legacy browsers are forever and furthermore readability of .forEach() is better anyway:

> in the latest version of all browsers. Despite marketing, no browsers are "evergreen" according to the google analytics of major websites I've been able to review over the last couple years. (Nothing but safari will likely ever support PTC - which is not an optimization - so that's not really relevant to discuss) Performance isn't important, readability is.

ref: https://github.com/airbnb/javascript/issues/1122#issuecommen...

Re:The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @06:37AM (#46525225)
Absolute madness and no thank you.

Have others not noticed the extremely obvious astroturfing campaign specifically promoting Claude code that is mostly happening on X in recent days/weeks?

Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB? on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @03:56PM (#46518598)
I think that's true and it's also a convenient way to "smuggle" in Google's most important doodads: their tracking apparatus which includes all of the single sign on and MFA stuff on top of the usual analytics
Re:JavaScript's For-Of Loops Are Fast on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @06:23AM (#46511054)
The AirBNB JS style guide is kind of like a relic in time from the transition to ES6 etc. Leave it in the past. Their only argument for not supporting eg. "for-of" is because of "legacy" browsers not supporting it. Maybe a salient argument at the time of writing (these issue threads are nearly 10 years ago), but certainly not today.
Re:Lessons from 14 Years at Google on Monday January 05, 2026 @10:22AM (#46499813)
I'm not talking about unnecessary (nor incidental) complexity. That is a whole other can of worms. I am talking about the complexity required given what you need to a system to spec. If choices are made to introduce unnecessary complexity (eg. "resume driven development" or whatever you want to call the proclivity to chase new tech) - that is a different problem. Sometimes it can be eliminated through practical considerations. Sometimes organization politics and other entrenched forces prevent it.
Re:Lessons from 14 Years at Google on Sunday January 04, 2026 @09:36PM (#46494737)
Nothing can remove complexity other than simplifying requirements. It can only be shuffled around and distributed to other areas of the system (or library, or vendor functionality etc)
Re:Maybe comments should explain 'what' (2017) on Sunday January 04, 2026 @06:46PM (#46493639)
I hear this argument as an excuse not to write comments (sometimes at all). Maybe I am just lucky but I have never had this issue as you've described in codebases, and if I did, certainly not to that extent where it became a memorable thorn in my side.

If there are no comments, you are reading the code (or some relatively far away document) for all understanding anyway. If there are inaccurate comments, worst case you're in the same boat except maybe proceeding with a bit more caution next comment you come across. I always ask of fellow engineers: why is it unduly difficult to also fix/change the comments as you alter the code they refer to? How and when to use comments is a balancing of trade-offs: potential maintenance burden in the future if next writers are lazy vs. opportunity to share critical context nearest its subject in a place where the reader is most likely to encounter it.

Re:Maybe comments should explain 'what' (2017) on Sunday January 04, 2026 @08:21AM (#46487688)
Explain "why not what" is good general advice. My further advice for comments is: even bad comments can be useful (unless they're from LLM output maybe...) therefore when in doubt, write a comment. Write it in your own words.

Had to add the last sentence for the circa 2020s developer experience. LLM comments are almost never useful since they're supposed to convey meaningful information to another human coder, anything your human brain can think of will probably be more helpful context.

Re:Stranger Things creator says turn off "garbage" settings on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @08:57AM (#46433366)
The soap opera effect (caused by motion smoothing and similar settings) is the one that bugs me most. It's good for sports where the ball is in motion and that's it. Makes everything else look absolutely terrible, yet is on by default on most modern tvs.
My Nest works great other than the app trying me to get to change my account to Google, which I just close out of every-time. Basic functional UI and works as billed. The unit itself has a nice sturdy feel to it with a very intuitive wheel-and-click interface. It's the only smarthome thing I have besides Hue lightbulbs

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