Hacker News: barake

New comment by barake in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

barake — Fri, 29 May 2026 01:47:29 +0000

It was sealed sets, still NIB, not individual pieces. No one would bother selling $200k of loose bricks on consignment.

New comment by barake in "PyInfra: Infrastructure Deserves Real Code in Python, Not YAML Soup"

barake — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:33:12 +0000

It's due to fragmentation in implementations. The YAML spec is fairly large, and library authors understandably aren't excited at the prospect of dealing with all the minor details of less commonly used bits, like anchors.

You end up with YAML libraries being widely available and they all implement _most_ of the spec, but the portion not implemented varies. Plus there are minor variations in how people have read the spec, and even options _within_ the specification on how to handle parsing:

https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/#chapter-10-recommended-schemas

This isn't really a problem for projects like Kubernetes where most of the ecosystem uses the same library. On the other hand, OpenTelemetry is rolling out "declarative configuration" across all the supported languages. I work on OTel, and have avoided contributing in that area because I lack the patience to deal with the inconsistences - I don't hate YAML, but it can be frustrating.

AFAIK, the only 100% spec compliant implementation is libfyaml.

New comment by barake in "Show HN: Typed-FFmpeg 3.0–Typed Interface to FFmpeg and Visual Filter Editor"

barake — Thu, 29 May 2025 23:44:02 +0000

Prompted the Jules preview to see what would happen. The implementation is pretty naive - there are much easier to read approaches I can think of. So not _awful_ considering the very short prompt I used.

Changes are on this branch for the curious:

https://github.com/matt-hensley/typed-ffmpeg/tree/feature/mu...

New comment by barake in "MacBook Air M4"

barake — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 22:12:53 +0000

If you use the product filter it only shows laptops that come pre-configured with 2TB of storage. If you choose a custom build you can configure the latest X1 Carbon with 32 GB RAM, 2 TB storage, and a 2.8k display.

If you choose the custom build route some even can ship with Fedora or Ubuntu, so presumably Linux support is reasonable.

New comment by barake in "United States Power Outage Map"

barake — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 20:44:33 +0000

Know some folks who used to work at Genscape. The whole business was selling live power generation data. They mostly accomplished it "hands-off" and without the permission of utilities.

If you had property adjacent to a power plant they would happily lease space to setup sensors.

Apparently there are tons of businesses like this gathering data that is mostly live and selling to hedge funds etc.

New comment by barake in "I got OpenTelemetry to work. But why was it so complicated?"

barake — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 19:42:52 +0000

Everything is either in development or stable. There aren't statuses like alpha, beta, release candidate, etc. except for individual library releases. Metric clients will be marked as "development" until it goes "stable" [0]. Consequently it can be hard to determine the actual maturity level of any given implementation.

Tracing is very mature, with metric and logging implementations stable for a number of popular languages [1].

the "experimental" status was renamed "development"

[0] https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/versioning-and-stab...

[1] https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/#status-and-releases

New comment by barake in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

barake — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 16:33:29 +0000

Over 50% of the increased prices are from producers not just recouping their additional expenses, but also increasing profit margins.

Typically you would expect this to be an opportunity for competition, but generally speaking companies are suspiciously raising prices together. They've taken advantage of the COVID shortage and inflation narratives to squeeze consumers.

https://fortune.com/2024/01/20/inflation-greedflation-consum...

https://www.marketplace.org/2024/08/05/ftc-grocery-prices/

New comment by barake in "OpenTelemetry and vendor neutrality: how to build an observability strategy"

barake — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 21:49:26 +0000

Java has really good OTel coverage across tons of libraries. It should mostly Just Work™, though you'll still need to consider sampling strategies, what metrics you actually want to collect, etc.

Would say .NET isn't too far behind. Especially since there are built-in observability primitives and Microsoft is big on OTel. ASP.NET Core and other first party libraries already emit OTel compliant metrics and traces out of the box. Instrumenting an application is pretty straightforward.

I have less experience with the other languages. Can say there is plenty of opportunity to contribute upstream in a meaningful way. The OpenTelemetry SIGs are very welcoming and all the meetings are open.

Full disclosure: work at Grafana Labs on OpenTelemetry instrumentation

New comment by barake in "Final Cut Pro transforms video creation with Live Multicam, new AI features"

barake — Tue, 07 May 2024 15:16:59 +0000

Any iPad with a USB-C port supports video capture via UVC. This allows you use devices like the El Gato Cam Link for as a video source.

Also, I cofounded a startup eons ago that makes an iOS specifically to do multi-camera video production and is still trucking along. There is definitely a market for using iPhones and iPads to produce video.

New comment by barake in "LED Matrix Earrings"

barake — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:31:07 +0000

Could use an optical sensor like the Timex Datalink watches from the 90s[1]

Could set the earrings on a phone screen and transfer the patterns over. Sounds like a fun project.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink

New comment by barake in "The Eagle Never Sleeps: one Kentucky newspaper still screams for press freedom"

barake — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 02:38:05 +0000

Hit me up if you come back, there is a decent tech community in Louisville and Lexington.

New comment by barake in "The Eagle Never Sleeps: one Kentucky newspaper still screams for press freedom"

barake — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 01:59:00 +0000

The Mountain Eagle and Appalshop both have no reason to be as good as they are. Consider supporting both!

New comment by barake in "Amazon Has an Honesty Issue"

barake — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 19:45:01 +0000

We've had the same experience. Prime shipments were 5-7 days regardless of order size, now most items show up in 1-2 days.

Not sure the logic in that.

New comment by barake in "Snapdragon Oryon, faster than Apple's M2 chip at 30% less power"

barake — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 23:51:12 +0000

I daily drive a T14s with a Ryzen 5 CPU. It's easily the best non-ARM laptop I've used.

New comment by barake in "Snapdragon Oryon, faster than Apple's M2 chip at 30% less power"

barake — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 22:17:01 +0000

They already sell the X13s: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx/th...?

I've been sorely tempted to pick up a refurb off eBay, they're only about $500. Supposedly can run Linux OK too.

New comment by barake in "A Call for Developers – Jellyfin"

barake — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 23:15:20 +0000

You're likely in for a treat if you haven't written C# in a while. The language has evolved quite a bit, especially around all kinds of nice ergonomics. Interesting things like pattern matching, using statements, and performance oriented primitives.

I got back to writing C# full time earlier this year and it's a joy.

New comment by barake in "San Francisco Shoplifting: Much More Than You Wanted to Know (2022)"

barake — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 11:13:25 +0000

Blaming shrink may be a way to not spook the market for issues with their business:

> Target’s business has struggled for more than a year with company-specific challenges, including a glut of unsold inventory, backlash to its Pride merchandise collection and a pullback in consumer spending on discretionary items such as apparel and home goods.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/26/target-says-it-will-close-ni...

New comment by barake in "Melatonin as a treatment for food waste"

barake — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 23:17:48 +0000

Didn't realize it was available in a liquid form like this. I've been buying "child" tablets and breaking the 3mg apart.

10mg is the same as an edible for me, and super unpleasant when trying to rest.

New comment by barake in "Why does nuclear power plant construction cost so much?"

barake — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 22:47:38 +0000

France has sort of done this - they have 56 reactors in operation all based on the same 3 basic designs[1]. It's pretty incredible how quickly the plants were designed, tested, and built. Over a span of 15 years they brought 56 reactors online[2] - in the US we'd be lucky to build and commission a single reactor in that time span.

[1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t... [2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...

New comment by barake in "Ask HN: Do you refuse to do coding challenges for software engineer interviews?"

barake — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 15:04:47 +0000

If it's something reasonable, I don't mind it at all. My GitHub profile is pretty sparse as everything I write is for work.

A 30-60 minute skills check is nbd, especially if it's used to understand how I approach problems.