Hacker News: bhollis

New comment by bhollis in "Springs and Bounces in Native CSS"

bhollis — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 19:37:32 +0000

This is one of those "easy" things that should really be built into the CSS standard (as Josh points out in the article).

New comment by bhollis in "The Old Robots Web Site"

bhollis — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 18:56:56 +0000

Neat, they have Newt, the robot my dad built that was the first mobile robot with its own onboard computer. Newt is still there in his basement, and as a kid I did science fair projects programming behaviors for it. At that point the computer had been upgraded to a Motorola 68K. https://www.theoldrobots.com/Newt.html

Bitdrift Turns 2: A Retrospective

bhollis — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 22:18:08 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.bitdrift.io/post/bitdrift-turns-2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945890

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bhollis in "Just People in a Room"

bhollis — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 22:01:03 +0000

An incorrect assumption (though it was nice to have seen a familiar face when I came across it) but good to know what you think of it. I assumed HN deduped posts but I guess not.

Just People in a Room

bhollis — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 21:09:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bonnycode.com/posts/just-people-in-a-room/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945367

Points: 15

# Comments: 9

The Amazon DynamoDB data modeling MCP tool

bhollis — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 20:49:31 +0000

Article URL: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-the-amazon-dynamodb-data-modeling-mcp-tool/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44830171

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by bhollis in "Sea creatures evolve into crabs, databases evolve into DynamoDB"

bhollis — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 19:26:59 +0000

I've found that once you make the jump to a real partitioned datastore (like DynamoDB) you can actually go back and undo a lot of the queues and caches that were used as band-aids to reduce pressure on the DB. If you have something that has consistent performance at any scale and true elasticity, you just don't need all that other stuff, and the whole system gets far easier to understand and operate.

Hyperpb: Faster dynamic Protobuf parsing

bhollis — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 17:32:37 +0000

Article URL: https://buf.build/blog/hyperpb

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44661785

Points: 76

# Comments: 19

New comment by bhollis in "Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale"

bhollis — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 17:53:25 +0000

The pattern I've always used for this, which I suspect is what they landed on, is to have an optimistic notification method in a separate message queue that says "something changed that's relevant to you". Then you can dedupe that, etc. Then structure the data to easily sync what's new, and let the client respond to that notification by calling the sync API. That even lets you use multiple notification methods for notification. None of that involves having to have the database coordinate notifications in the middle of a transaction.

New comment by bhollis in "Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin"

bhollis — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 19:35:47 +0000

Slow startup was definitely one reason to have long lived servers, but I’m surprised not to see the major other reasons:

- Keep-alive/pooled connections to remote services can significantly reduce average latency for making those calls.

- In-memory caches that allow amortizing repeated lookups across requests.

Just those two alone mean that a serious high performance server probably couldn’t get away with just CGI even ignoring startup time.

New comment by bhollis in "How Google measures and manages tech debt"

bhollis — Fri, 09 May 2025 20:16:45 +0000

The flip side of technical debt is, what tools do you have to actually solve technical debt? Some technical debt comes from conscious decisions to choose an expedient solution over a long term one, but a lot of it just comes from not knowing what the future is going to bring, and not wanting to over-engineer for every possible outcome.

The question I'd ask is, shouldn't we have tools that make it super easy to change things, so we can adapt to different outcomes without it becoming a huge slog?

Monitoring GitHub Action Runners with StatelyDB, AWS CDK, and Lambda

bhollis — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 19:04:02 +0000

Article URL: https://stately.cloud/blog/monitoring-github-action-runners-with-statelydb-aws-cdk-and-lambda/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43730975

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The Safari bug that punishes you for using content blockers

bhollis — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 17:13:44 +0000

Article URL: https://benhollis.net/blog/2025/01/04/the-safari-bug-that-punishes-you-for-using-content-blockers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43495689

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

Migrating Destiny Item Manager to StatelyDB

bhollis — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 18:29:04 +0000

Article URL: https://stately.cloud/blog/migrating-destiny-item-manager-to-statelydb/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42855981

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by bhollis in "GitHub Linux ARM64 hosted runners now available for free in public repositories"

bhollis — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 19:18:57 +0000

We're using Go, so cross-compilation has never been a big problem (for producing artifacts). But this'll be great for testing on ARM. I'm interested to see the performance of these instances too - our experience has been that Amazon's Graviton processors have fantastic bang-for-buck vs. Intel/AMD.

Securely and conveniently managing passwords

bhollis — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 06:34:33 +0000

Article URL: http://benhollis.net/blog/2012/06/25/securely-managing-passwords/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4170554

Points: 1

# Comments: 0