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This sort of thing is part of the problem. If it takes reading such a long manual to understand how to properly use Git, it's no wonder everyone's workflow is different.

I don't see it as a problem that everyone's workflow is different, and, separately, I don't see it as a problem that it takes reading such a long manual to understand all the possibilities of Git. There is no royal road to geometry. Pro Git is a lot shorter than the textbook I learned calculus from.

Unlike calculus, though, you can learn enough about Git to use it usefully in ten minutes. Maybe this sets people up for disappointment when they find out that afterwards their progress isn't that fast.


Agreed. Back when I first came across git in 2009 I had to re-read the porcelain manual 3 times before I really got it, but then the conceptual understanding has been useful ever since. I have often the guy explaining git to newbies on my team.

Agreed. I'd read the manual if there was something I needed from it, but everything is working fine. Yeah I might've rsynced between some local folders once or twice when I could've used git, maybe that was an inelegant approach, but the marginal cost of that blunder was... about as much time I've spent in this thread so whatever.

The nice thing about knowing more about git is that it unlocks another dimension in editing code. It’s a very powerful version of undo-redo, aka time travelling. Then you start to think in term of changes and patches.

Ane example of that is the suckless philosophy where extra features comes as patches and diff.


Do you know any construction folks?

> All-nighters are not worth it.

I disagree. I made some of my best friends through all nighters and continue to occasionally pull them because they reinvigorate meaning into my work as they did my coursework.

If your only metric for success in school is your GPA, then yes all nighters aren’t worth it. But climbing a metric leaderboard isn’t the only measure of doing well in a course.

It is curious because Andrej recognizes this with his comments concerning coffee.


Occasional all-nighters can be fun. We even did them at work back in the dotcom days. I wouldn't do them now, because they don't really accomplish anything. But they can be fun.

This is an article about doing well in courses, not in making friends

Making friends is one of the most important reasons to go to college. Friends from that era of my life later hired me into excellent jobs that changed my generational wealth. About half of my friends met their life partners during college. Several of my lifelong best friends are people I met through college friends and activities.

The more career-minded might call it "networking".


Nevertheless, the article is specifically about doing well in courses.

The course I did best at in school was the one that led to a job opportunity through some friends I made.

Why do friends need to be made through all-nighters? Could you have made the same friends by organizing study groups during regular hours, and then doing something else fun with those people in the evenings?

They don't have to be, nor am I claiming that all nighters are unilaterally positive. But they were an integral part of my college experience and many of my friends' and I enjoyed them in a type 2 fun kind of way.

Asserting that they're not worth it misses the broader picture.


Like in army training, shared suffering helps comradery.

This is a very clever insight, nice work!


Since there’s monitors that work over USB-C, could one replace the capture card and somehow get the laptop to pull video like a USB-C monitor?


Those USB-C display outputs are real raw GPU output patched through electronically, not like image over USB protocol. They just use the connector, and they can't be captured as USB data.


not really. The video stuff needs explicit hardware support, so the laptop would need to include what's essentially a capture card already. It'd be awesome if vendors did that, but to my knowledge nobody does.


What is teamwork if not a feedback loop?


I would be pretty impressed by anyone who managed to do that nominally. Moving a dozen billion dollars alone seems not trivial to do.


Blowing a giant hole in Hoover Dam while somebody pees in Lake Mead would also be impressive. It just won't stay impressive for very long.

Even if the guy peeing is a world champion urinator named Sam.


turns losing money scales well

you can even pay people to help you out, and that helps even more!


Given that four of the five are Asian languages, there's a lot of transferability. Not a crazy amount but enough to give you a boost. Knowing Chinese made learning Japanese feel a notch easier, and learning Korean afterwards felt yet another step easier.

The 2200 hours represents learning from scratch.


This makes it difficult to configure Caddy in anything except the native Caddyfile language due to a lack of thorough documentation. It's an interesting idea, but configuring Caddy with a yaml config that someone prior deemed a great idea was quite painful.

Curiously, LLMs have made it a lot easier. One step away from an English adapter that routes through an LLM to generate the config.


I wonder if it would be more productive to bake that into ffmpeg at some point.

For example, something like

> ffmpeg -llm "can you take input.mp4 and resize it to 720p, transcode to vp8 output to output.webm"


How about just using a LLM that can execute commands

> llm -yolo "can you take input.mp4 and resize it to 720p, transcode to vp8 output to output.webm"

separate tools for separate jobs. ffmpeg doesn't need more features.


Then people will keep building tools like this. Which, there's nothing specifically wrong with, but rather it's clear there's a demand for ffmpeg-but-more-ergonomic and ffmpeg is in the best position to do that.


Isn't most non-linear editing software basically ffmpeg-but-more-ergonomic?


Why write prompts instead of just using a GUI ?


You do not need to execute. Copy pasting command from a LLM answer to terminal takes less than a second.


sure, but I can imagine something more like

llm --yolo "combine all the files in videos/vacation in alphabetical order into a single video, do not use the audio from the videos, add the music from music/soundtracks/my-favorite-things.mp3 as background music, but a title at the front 'Our Summer Vacation'"

or something more involved. Yes, it might be able to spit out multiple commands


you can use shell oracle for that


then you have to ship a model with ffmpeg lol


With the recent Whisper integration there's already precedence for a way to do that.


Am I just a package manager?


You pass butter


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