Hacker News: bretthopper

Quien – A better WHOIS lookup tool

bretthopper — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 03:31:30 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/retlehs/quien/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47727076

Points: 68

# Comments: 24

New comment by bretthopper in "Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?"

bretthopper — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 19:03:20 +0000

https://brandur.org/

There's a Reason Bar Ice Looks Better Than Yours (and You Can Fix It)

bretthopper — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 23:55:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-make-clear-cocktail-ice-11773197

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44665365

Points: 28

# Comments: 4

Don't Tolerate Unsolicited Spam

bretthopper — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 13:52:04 +0000

Article URL: https://benword.com/dont-tolerate-unsolicited-spam

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705559

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bretthopper in "Google Makes over $92B per Year by Owning Android"

bretthopper — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 19:24:53 +0000

Google made $280B in revenue in 2022 which means this article is claiming that at least 1/3 of it (since they said over $92B) is coming from Android only.

Does that align?

Kenton's House

bretthopper — Fri, 19 May 2023 14:59:43 +0000

Article URL: https://kentonshouse.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36002756

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

Adventures in Garbage Collection: Improving GC Performance in Our Monolith

bretthopper — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 15:39:33 +0000

Article URL: https://shopify.engineering/adventures-in-garbage-collection

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35469896

Points: 12

# Comments: 0

New comment by bretthopper in "From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a better developer experience"

bretthopper — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 21:27:45 +0000

You are missing a few things about the Ruby based CLI:

1. dependencies for Gems are specified in the gemspec file and not the Gemfile. See https://github.com/Shopify/shopify-cli/blob/main/shopify-cli... for example. There's a few non-development dependencies.

2. since it's difficult to package up a Ruby gem for distribution, maybe dependencies were vendored directly in the codebase: https://github.com/Shopify/shopify-cli/tree/main/vendor

This isn't meant to be a comparison of the number of dependencies or anything. Just pointing out a few nuances to how the Ruby dependencies were handled.

New comment by bretthopper in "Shopify tells employees to just say no to meetings"

bretthopper — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:31:11 +0000

This is an editorialized title. Bloomberg's is "Shopify Tells Employees to Just Say No to Meetings"

New comment by bretthopper in "WordPress testing official SQLite Support"

bretthopper — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 00:10:52 +0000

I'd guess very hard. But just refactoring the WordPress codebase isn't enough, you'd ideally want every plugin to adopt the new API as well... Although you could always keep this implementation as the fallback behaviour.

New comment by bretthopper in "WordPress testing official SQLite Support"

bretthopper — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 23:58:50 +0000

I'm highly in favour of this, but wanted to point out an important implementation detail in case people don't want to look through the code.

Since WordPress doesn't have a database abstraction, SQLite integration is done by transforming the SQL query strings meant for MySQL. This not only means doing regexp matches with string replacement, but trying to emulate MySQL functions with either SQLite equivalents, or in the worst case, in PHP application code.

The Mysterious Case of the Fucking Good Pizza (2021)

bretthopper — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 23:25:22 +0000

Article URL: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpgd7/the-mystery-of-fcking-good-pizza-travis-kalanick-cloudkitchens-future-foods-delivery-restaurants

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624256

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by bretthopper in "Wp-SQLite: WordPress running on an SQLite database"

bretthopper — Mon, 16 May 2022 13:41:18 +0000

There's an existing WP "drop-in" plugin that can be used with Composer: https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db

Using that + a WP composer package (like https://packagist.org/packages/roots/wordpress) is much easier to maintain that a full "fork" of WP.

New comment by bretthopper in "Building a web app with no framework"

bretthopper — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 05:02:10 +0000

There's about 4-5 very predictable comments already that boil down to: "you’ll end up building a framework"

The author of this article directly addresses that common trope, so these comments are lazy. In fact, this article has a very nuanced but important rebuttal to that argument:

> no, you’re going to write an app instead of a framework.

New comment by bretthopper in "Ask HN: Any recommendation for a good History of Science book?"

bretthopper — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 17:54:51 +0000

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

This is specific to "Information, communication, and information theory." but it's still quite broad and a great read.

Neural network from scratch

bretthopper — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 16:44:24 +0000

Article URL: https://sirupsen.com/napkin/neural-net

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29796789

Points: 208

# Comments: 38

New comment by bretthopper in "Is Digital Ocean Down?"

bretthopper — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 20:40:38 +0000

Of course not, their status page says All Systems Operational! (yes it's down)

https://status.digitalocean.com/

New comment by bretthopper in "Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower"

bretthopper — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 20:01:43 +0000

The one caveat this article doesn't mention is worse handling but they replied in the comments about it. And handling matters way more at higher speeds, plus they commented the extra weight matters more for steep climbs too.

New comment by bretthopper in "Show HN: SpectaQL – auto-generate GraphQL API documentation"

bretthopper — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 23:38:33 +0000

We quickly ran into the same issue at Shopify. We've since moved from a flat list into sections by "domains"; within each section is the breakdown by type. You can see it here: https://shopify.dev/docs/admin-api/graphql/reference

Of course this grouping has to be done a little manually. And it's not perfect, but definitely better than the flat alternative. For reference, we have thousands of types.

New comment by bretthopper in "Show HN: Singlelink – an open-source micro-site platform"

bretthopper — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 01:22:19 +0000

I clicked on an example site (https://singlel.ink/u/gloomytoons) and opened up my network inspector:

15 requests 18.65 MB / 3.55 MB transferred Finish: 2.22 s DOMContentLoaded: 529 ms load: 2.23 s

All of that just to render a simple"micro site" that displays a little text and 6 links.