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godzillafarts

76 karma · joined May 24, 2019

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godzillafarts··on Cormac McCarthy's Library
Depends on your circumstances. I read it as a single male in university and loved it. Recently, I re-read it as an adult with two young sons. Absolutely devastating.
godzillafarts··on Tasks as Code: Move Your Tickets into the Repository
This doesn’t work in an org with stakeholders that don’t have access to the code base, I.e. most of the other company. You still need tickets, a way for stakeholders to follow, update, etc. those tickets, and a way to prioritize the tasks those tickets represent.
godzillafarts··on Why I'm Short the AI Buildout Even Though I'm Long Computers
> For the tech industry, writing code is the main bottleneck of the business.

This couldn’t be further from my experience; producing code has never been the bottleneck.

godzillafarts··on Show HN: The Only Weather App You'll Ever Need
There are not details on this website about how it works, what data it needs, etc.

All CTAs just lead to a signup page. Why do I need an account to check my weather forecast? A ZIP code, sure.

Also the "Core weather is free" qualifier leads me to believe that some features not in "Core weather" are paid? Which are those? I'd want to know that information before I go through the trouble of creating another account.

godzillafarts··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
I just wrapped up the Murderbot Diaries series and am starting in on Dungeon Crawler Carl.

I normally read a lot of nonfiction and history and am trying to make a point to read more fiction this year.

godzillafarts··on Stripe's Knowledge AI Platform
I want to read this, but the ever-changing linear gradient of the background is too visually distracting. I tried to get around it by highlighting text I want to read, but since the background is changing underneath it, so is the highlight. My eyes hurt.
godzillafarts··on I don't want to read what you didn't write
My org, like every org, is struggling with this as well. We find ourselves writing skills like `/decomment` and often running several "minimize" passes on PR descriptions, etc.

One thing that has markedly helped is tweaking our AGENTS.md prompt and prose-heavy skills like `/pr` or `/ticket` to specify that all technical output needs to be written in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English. It has helped us so much. We still have to `/decomment` or minimize to remove unnecessary stuff that's been written in ASD-STE100, but the output is a lot easier to digest.

OTOH, we have a guy in marketing that has taken it upon himself to use Claude to draft these wildly complicated and dense implementation specs that he doesn't understand for various things that he just hands off to my team to implement. He has no context for how our product is built, the various layers and their interactions, etc. so they're often flat out wrong and overly complex, invent systems that do not exist, all of that. Then he gets mad that we're not moving as fast as he wants, because he gave us the implementation spec! I have been struggling to come up with a way to diplomatically tell him that his actions are slowing us down, and if he'd just describe what he needs instead of speccing it himself, we'd be twice as fast...

godzillafarts··on Ask HN: What do you do while your agent works?
Tend to the other agents
godzillafarts··on Ask HN: Is a hands-off, family-friendly, de-Googled "home lab" feasible?
Recently went through a similar kick in the pants with both Apple (photos, videos, etc.) and Google (Nest thermostats).

I have been piecemeal migrating various services that my home uses into a self-hosted services on my homelab, following this as a rough (hardware) guideline: https://mini-rack.jeffgeerling.com/

There are self-hosted versions of everything you're asking about. You could conceivably create a relatively robust homelab + NAS that will be able to host photos and videos (check out Immich), run a Plex server, and host other services probably using something like ProxMox.

It won't necessarily be easy, or cheap, and you'll be on the hook to keep everything running. But if you're into that kind of thing, it's super rewarding and fun.

So far, we have:

- Home Assistant managing our smart thermostats (Google Nest), smart plugs and light switches (Kasa), and other misc. appliances. Prior to this, I had like seven apps on my phone to manage all our devices and it was a PITA.

- Plex media server. We don't have a ton of digital media so this is very lightly used.

- Grafana + Prometheus monitoring everything.

- Remote access outside of our home network.

Next up on my list is pulling in our extensive photo/video library from various locations like Google Photos, iCloud, two primary iPhones into Immich. The wife and I are both running into storage issues on our phones because we have so many photos and videos of our kids. Don't want to delete them to free up space, and don't want to pay Apple every month to store them. Right now in the mean time, we're exporting photos from our iPhones to the Photos app in macOS, and then archiving them on a 1TB SSD. It works, but there's friction in actually viewing the photos after that.

godzillafarts··on GitHub Stacked PRs
+1 this isn’t something new, it’s been possible all along in native git if you’re willing to do branch management and rebasing yourself. Just without the fancy UI / stack map.
godzillafarts··on GitHub Stacked PRs
“You cannot merge a PR in the middle of the stack before the PRs below it are merged.”

Huh? Some stacks need to land all at once and need to be reviewed (and merged) from the top down. It’s not uncommon, in my org at least, to review an entire stack and merge 3 into 2 and then 2 into 1 and then 1 into main. If 2 merges before 3, you just rebase 3 onto 1.

godzillafarts··on Why I don't have fun with Claude Code
> People who love using AI to create software are loving it because they don’t value the act of creating & understanding the software.

That's a pretty sweeping generalization. Just because I don't value the act of typing into a keyboard doesn't mean that I don't value the craft of creating and understanding software. I am not outsourcing my understanding to the LLM, I am outsourcing the typing of the code.

What you are describing is not engineering, it's (pardon the phrase) vibe coding. Claude Code is just a tool, and everyone is going to use that tool differently. There is nothing inherent in the tool itself that requires you to surrender your agency and understanding. If you do, that's on you, not Claude.

godzillafarts··on Code and Let Live
> When you start a feature branch on your own, do you create an entirely new development environment to do it?

… yes? We have a few wrapper scripts around worktree operations that copy some docker volumes (pg data, bundle cache, etc.) from the base and spins up an entirely new stack on different ports with a host alias. We don’t have to install any deps beyond that because we copied over the ruby gems bundle cache and we’re using Yarn PnP + “zero installs” for client-side deps.

godzillafarts··on Flock Hardcoded the Password for America's Surveillance Infrastructure 53 Times
Hillsborough, NC https://www.hillsboroughnc.gov/Home/Components/News/News/856...
godzillafarts··on Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?
My favorites this year, be genre:

Sci-fi: Exiles by Mason Coile.

Fiction (Fantasy): The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman.

Fiction (post-apocalyptic / zombie): One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford.

Non fiction: The Wager by David Grann.

godzillafarts··on Scaling LLMs to Larger Codebases
This is effectively what I'm doing, inspired by HumanLayer's Advanced Context Engineering guidelines: https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-f...

We've taken those prompts, tweaked them to be more relevant to us and our stack, and have pulled them in as custom commands that can be executed in Claude Code, i.e. `/research_codebase`, `/create_plan`, and `/implement_plan`.

It's working exceptionally well for me, it helps that I'm very meticulous about reviewing the output and correcting it during the research and planning phase. Aside from a few use cases with mixed results, it hasn't really taken off throughout our team unfortunately.

godzillafarts··on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros
My wife and I have been so fed up with the streaming landscape that we’ve been amassing a library of physical Blu-rays on the cheap from places like McKay’s, etc. It takes a little work, but it’s been really good for our family and encourages us to be thoughtful about what we consume.

Honestly I don’t see us going back to streaming. The content isn’t that compelling; most of what we watch is older (we have kids, so lots of Disney movies), and we’re not really interested in most of the newer shows that would warrant us paying a subscription in order to watch new episodes as they drop. Before we cancelled, I remember looking at the carousel on my Netflix Home Screen and being completely uninterested in any of the content they were pushing.

I’m also not worried about some licensing deal nuking one of my kids’ favorite movies from the catalog now. No ads is just the cherry on top.

godzillafarts··on Ask HN: What's your blog / portfolio stack?
SvelteKit. All data is just markdown files preprocessed with mdsvex.

When I'm on the go I don't really do any building, I'll add/edit a markdown file, push it to the remote in a branch. Cloudflare Pages will then give me a preview environment. If I like what I see, I merge the PR and it automatically deploys to "production."

godzillafarts··on Ask HN: What are your favorite index ETFs for Investing?
VTI for the majority of post-tax investments, VUG for a smaller percent that I'm more aggressive with.
godzillafarts··on FBI Stats Show Crime Still Declining, Despite the Assertions of Alarmists and
If you find your interest piqued by this article and want to dive a little bit deeper into specific examples, I highly recommend reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling.

Yes, there are problems with crime reporting. Yes, violent crimes have been on a downward trend since the 1990s. Things can be both bad and getting better at the same time.

godzillafarts··on Your GitHub pull request workflow is slowing everyone down
My experience, and my team’s experience, with Graphite has been the complete opposite. Graphite slowed us down considerably, which is a shame because it seems like Graphite was purpose built for a development workflow like ours. We continually stack changes to make code review less burdensome. We had been doing it in just git for some time and decided to try out Graphite.

Graphite is quite hostile to collaborating on stacked branches. If one dev restacks and a collaborator is working in a dependent branch, they’re hosed. If a collaborator pushes a change to a dependent branch and they're not using Graphite, hosed. I think one of the main problems is that Graphite abstracts out potentially dangerous git commands into a fancy CLI such that the dev doesn’t really know what’s happening under the hood. It makes things even worse if you’re trying to collaborate on stacked PRs and not all devs use Graphite. Just forget about it.

We could have just been using this tool “wrong” but we had to stop using it within our team because it became so disruptive. At the time it seemed like you should only use Graphite if:

1. You are the only person working on a stack. You do not expect collaborators to be pushing changes to any of the branches within the stack, and

2. Everyone on the team is using it too.

Maybe things have changed in the intervening time, but I’m always dubious of tools like this.

It’s just git. It’s a wrapper CLI around git with a nice GitHub PR integration and a dashboard. It’s already easy to stack branches in git.

godzillafarts··on A 2024 plea for lean software
Clicked the link. Immediately greeted with a CTA banner, a Google ad, and a cookie banner. Dismissing the cookie banner immediately reveals another Google ad, but this one is sticky and follows me as I scroll. Reading through the article I came across at least three more advertisements.

Kind of difficult to take this seriously.

godzillafarts··on Ask HN: Looking for lightweight personal blogging platform
I've played around with several platforms in the last year or so. I've landed on the following setup that works very well for me and ticks all your boxes:

A SvelteKit[0] app hosted on Cloudflare pages. The repo is hosted on GitHub and hooked up to the Cloudflare Pages app [1]. On PRs, I get preview environments. On merge, the changes get deployed to my "production" website. I write blog posts and other content in markdown, which is then processed by mdsvex[2] with very minimal setup.

Mostly, my requirements were more focused around getting the actual framework, hosting, etc. out of my way so that I could focus on writing. Gatsby and Next.js were too configuration heavy and turned me off once I scratched beyond the surface.

[0] https://kit.svelte.dev/ [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/configuration/git-in... [2] https://github.com/pngwn/MDsveX

godzillafarts··on Ask HN: Books you read in 2023 and recommend for 2024?
You might already be aware, but Morgan Housel has recently released a new book titled "Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes."
godzillafarts··on Ask HN: Books you read in 2023 and recommend for 2024?
- Ballou, Brendan. Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America.

- Smil, Vaclav. How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going.

- Doucleff, Michaeleen. Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans.

godzillafarts··on The Opt Out Project
I like the general idea and also try to conceal my identity as much as reasonably possible when out in the world. However, not having a smartphone just isn’t an option for a lot of parents. I’ve long wanted to ditch my iPhone and get a dumb flip phone, but my infant son’s daycare uses three (!) smartphone apps for critical services. Think checking in/out, door access, critical communications, payments. There are no alternatives; you can’t do anything of these things outside of their respective app.
godzillafarts··on CEO Update: Paving the road forward with AI and community at the center
In my opinion, SO doesn’t really have much of a choice here. Not only has the quality of questions and answers been on the decline, the entire SO experience is notoriously hostile for new comers. I find that ChatGPT/GitHub Copilot tend to give much better answers for the vast majority of programming related questions. It’s much faster, easier, and less intimidating to ask your tools questions knowing that you’ll most likely get a high quality answer and not get admonished for having asked the question in the first place.
godzillafarts··on I wish GPT4 had never happened
It may very well be, but it’s also an incredibly reductive view point. I’ve heard not one person speak to any sort of transition period wrt. training and upskilling of existing workers. So what do we do here? Just eliminate all junior positions? All internships, too? What happens when businesses decide they can’t economically hire any more juniors or do internships because LLMs can do the job better, faster, and cheaper?

Historically we’ve set aside a certain capacity, in almost every profession, to bring up and train the next generation. Apprenticeships, internships, etc. By definition, these people are shitty at their jobs, and that’s kinda the point. Were you brilliant at your first position?

godzillafarts··on A Basic iPhone Feature Helps Criminals Steal Your Entire Digital Life
Yeah the reporting here is laughable. The article literally states

> A similar vulnerability exists in Google’s Android mobile operating system.

godzillafarts··on Ask HN: What Happened to iOS Widgets?
The two iOS widgets that I find the most usable and also provide quite a lot of utility are the MyRadar (weather) and Kasa (smart home) widgets.

I can get most weather information I need from the MyRadar widget; rarely do I need to open the app. If I do, it’s mostly to check weather in other areas like my parent’s home during hurricane season.

Likewise with the Kasa widget. The only time I open the app these days is to setup a new device or an automation/scene.

Useful widgets exist, but I imagine their use cases are fairly limited to mostly trivial things. For more complex applications, it probably simply isn’t worth the dev time to create and maintain a widget.

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