Hacker News: WesBrownSQL

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

WesBrownSQL — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 19:54:11 +0000

Munitions exporting. I fondly remember the PGP feasco. I spent years using PGP to encrypt my emails to several people who refused to use email without it. Good times.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

WesBrownSQL — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 02:07:28 +0000

Yeah, I'm stuck on X11 since Wayland and NVIDIA with two video cards for display is hot garbage. I have been a Linux user on the command line since the days of root and boot floppies. I don't think the desktop has felt this broken to me since the early days. I'm a tech veteran and don't have a problem working through issues, but when the issue is "you're running Wayland compositor," Then that's a problem I can't fix. I can't write a compositor. I'm running X11/KDE on Manjaro base, and it is stable after some cursing and poking things with a stick. Oh, and telling me "Tell NVIDIA to fix their drivers!" or some other thing, if I could effectively and efficiently use something else, I would. Again, lack of competition has hamstrung us. Oh well, I'll go back to yelling at kids to get off my lawn and coming out of my thick, luxurious neck beard.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%"

WesBrownSQL — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:21:25 +0000

I've been running https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk for a week seems to be a good balance between culling out of context and not just killing everything. I've been running https://github.com/Opencode-DCP/opencode-dynamic-context-pru... in opencode as well. It seems more aggressive.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns"

WesBrownSQL — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 19:58:27 +0000

As someone who has been dealing with SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 9001, etc., for years, I have always maintained copies of the third-party agreements for all of our downstream providers for compliance purposes. This documentation is collected at the time of certification, and our policies always include a provision for its retrieval on schedule. The problem is when you certify their policy said X and were in compliance, they quietly change that and don't send proper notification downstream to us, and captain lawsuit comes by, we have to be able to prove that they did claim they were in compliance and the time we certified. We don't want to rely on their ability to produce that documentation. We can't prove that it wasn't tampered with, or that there is a chain of custody for their documentation and policies. If I wanted to use a vendor that wouldn't provide that information, then I didn't use them. Welcome to the world of highly regulated industries.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms"

WesBrownSQL — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 05:34:58 +0000

And that's why they call it a hot take. No, it isn't going to give rise to microservices. You absolutely can have your agent perform high-level decomposition while maintaining a monolith. A well-written, composable spec is awesome. This has been true for human and AI coders for a very, very long time. The hat trick has always been getting a well-written, composable spec. AI can help with that bit, and I find that is probably the best part of this whole tooling cycle. I can actually interact with an AI to build that spec iteratively. Have it be nice and mean. Have it iterate among many instances and other models, all that fun stuff. It still won't make your idea awesome or make anyone want to spend money on it, though.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Build a Superscalar 8-Bit CPU (YouTube Playlist) [video]"

WesBrownSQL — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 05:50:18 +0000

I don't think Ben would tell you to limit yourself. There are many fantastic people doing these kinds of things. James Sharman has been working on his system for years, and it is fantastic because he is also a programmer. https://www.youtube.com/@weirdboyjim

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Red: A programming language inspired by REBOL"

WesBrownSQL — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 18:21:42 +0000

SNOBOL FTW!

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]"

WesBrownSQL — Sun, 11 May 2025 05:35:20 +0000

That's what you don't get. You aren't just watching ads. You are giving them data about you, a lot of data. That data is used to heavily manipulate you. This isn't like the old days of broadcast TV where ads air and you aren't directly tracked. If you ever find a product that is free, it isn't. You are the product that is being sold.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Go Is a Well-Designed Language"

WesBrownSQL — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 07:48:17 +0000

100% this one of the big reasons I fell in love with go. Single executable, no runtime stuff to install and crazy portable. I can look at anyone's go code and very quickly get up to speed. I don't worry about how they format it. Patterns are pretty universal which makes it easier. Does it have its warts? Oh, you better believe it but I know that any code base I go through will pretty much have the same warts the same way. Does go fit every need? Nope on that front too but man its pretty good and what it was designed to do.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Tell HN: John Friel my father, internet pioneer and creator of QModem, has died"

WesBrownSQL — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 04:09:32 +0000

I am sad for for your loss but glad he had such a large impact on my life and so many others.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Writing assembly language subroutines for Extended Color BASIC"

WesBrownSQL — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 06:20:45 +0000

I also still have the books and a CoCo 3. When everyone else I knew either had a c64 or an appleII I was on my own and just had to push through. I started with a CoCo II then UPGRADED to a CoCo III, that's how much I loved that machine. The only other friend I had that was also left out in the cold had an Atari 400. Poor kid asked for an Atari for Christmas thinking he would get a 2600 and instead got that brick ;)

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Ward Christensen (of BBS and XMODEM fame) has died"

WesBrownSQL — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 23:55:12 +0000

LEGEND! I remember pouring over the xmodem doc's back in the day. Thank you sir, without your work my life would have been a much experience.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days"

WesBrownSQL — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 02:29:56 +0000

100% contextual. In every business where I've been an executive, or had access to the budget, we talk "made" as gross revenue and EBIDA as a stand in gross profit and specifically call out net profit in internal meetings. For example, "We made 10 million with an EBIDA of 1 million and net of 200,000.00." Using EBIDA to talk to potential investors and as a guiding metric if we didn't have a well established gross profit formula that followed GAAP.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)"

WesBrownSQL — Wed, 03 May 2023 16:13:36 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPITBOL FTW! I got turned onto SPITBOL in the early '00's from a colleague who used it as a rapid utility language for writing small command line apps.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Discrete logic IC CPU (2020)"

WesBrownSQL — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 08:40:48 +0000

James Sharman's build is nuts. He has been at it for several years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iHag4k4yEg&list=PLFhc0MFC8M...

Usagi Electric is taking it all the way with a vacuum tube build. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y149hLe1zYo&list=PLnw98JPyOb...

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Fran Blanche: This Is Not Legal"

WesBrownSQL — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 02:10:30 +0000

Until it is litigated or you are charged and convicted it isn't against the law. YouTube and the entertainment industry have zero interest in your rights. Media companies make agreements between themselves. They make agreements with YouTube to avoid litigation. Larger YouTubers who make a living via YouTube don't have the motivation to band together, biting the hand that feeds you and all.

"Because copyright protection happens so easily, and lasts so long, you should assume that any work you want to use is copyrighted, unless it is very old or produced by the U.S. government." https://www.baylor.edu/copyright/index.php?id=56543 The U.S. government would have to go to YouTube and assert they produced the work in question and then sue YouTube. It doesn't help there is no clear definition how much of a work you can use before it is considered infringement. This means each claim that is made and disputed could end up in court to be decided. I don't have the solution to this. Until new laws are passed to change the situation people without the means to challenge lose.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "What is your favorite OS?"

WesBrownSQL — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 03:31:08 +0000

PC/MS DOS of course. It was the last OS I could hold in my head. I could understand every part of the OS. I could write everything from batch files to TSR's. You could reason about every part of it. Did that make it perfect? No not at all but it made it my favorite for a very long time.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Open EMR"

WesBrownSQL — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 20:47:33 +0000

1. Certification, in the USA if you want to get paid from the government you must be certified. This isn't a small undertaking at all and requires quite a bit of development and then the cost of actually doing the third party testing. It has driven companies out of business and forced consolidation even among the larger players.

2. Configurability. EMR's are crazy configurable to meet any hospitals requirements. This means lots of consultant hours to get things setup and running. Take a look at how much money Epic and Cerner make just from "consulting".

3. Interoperability. Again, there are standards like HL7 and FHIR are widely used but the data isn't always great. We are seeing more and more API endpoints all of this requires a level of customization.

All of this adds up to a ton of cost for a small-ish market with a large pool of no or low profit buyers and pretty much a replacement market.

Oh, and you are building software that could cause harm or death. I can't imagine why people don't want to come into this industry and really push the state of the art.

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Commander X16 8 bit computer now has its own website"

WesBrownSQL — Sat, 11 Jul 2020 04:17:31 +0000

I'm in

New comment by WesBrownSQL in "Ask HN: How to Find Our CTO?"

WesBrownSQL — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 15:41:09 +0000

Startup experience maybe. FAANG experience, you probably don't need. There are a ton of people out there that specialize in getting you off the ground and through your first couple of years. Realize, people coming from FAANG-like companies are use to having resources available that your very young company may not have. Finding someone that understands that to me is more important than finding the best possible technical genius. Don't forget google didn't start with "Google scale" engineers. They hired smart, driven people with a lean mindset. For your enjoyment the early google infrastructure http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/...