Hacker News: brianm

New comment by brianm in "Warranty Void If Regenerated"

brianm — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:08:52 +0000

Huh, I got cottage core, not dystopia!

New comment by brianm in "A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy"

brianm — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:39:37 +0000

Not really -- non-profit boards are usually volunteers, even ion the non-profit has revenue used for operations.

New comment by brianm in "Rust library for building no-boilerplate CLI apps"

brianm — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 16:55:38 +0000

I've seen a couple of cli apps recently take the path of "config file is long form arguments, minus the --, separated by newlines, overridden by actual arguments", so if you were doing `dsh` (which doesn't support this) it might look like

    verbose
    show-machine-names
    remoteshell ssh
    forklimit 4

TBH, I quite like it. Less to memorize, easy to know what to override, etc.

New comment by brianm in "Rust library for building no-boilerplate CLI apps"

brianm — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 15:28:18 +0000

I generally use [click](https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/). Need to try typer now :-)

New comment by brianm in "Notes on Taylor and Maclaurin Series"

brianm — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 19:28:25 +0000

A coworker, once, had a cool idea to use Taylor Series to encode histograms for metrics collection. Basically a digest method akin to sketches or t-digests. We wound up using t-digests as Stripe (iirc) had a good OSS implementation at the time, but using Taylor Series has been lingering in my mind ever since.

New comment by brianm in "Old vs. new growth trees and the wood products they make"

brianm — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 20:06:42 +0000

I'm not sure how this applies in softwoods (like the hemlock & fir type stuff usually used in construction), but it is not really so obvious that slow growth (tight rings) is better than fast growth (wide rings) in hardwoods. The fast growth wood is usually much less likely to shatter or split under strain -- which for some purposes (anything delicate, or with staked construction such as Windsor chairs, basically stuff which needs to bend some under use) is preferable.

I'd need to break out my [Hoadley](https://www.tauntonstore.com/understanding-wood-2nd-edition-...) to confirm, but my belief is that you are trading modulus of elasticity for modulus of rupture.

New comment by brianm in "Ask HN: How did yall meet your SO?"

brianm — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 19:20:03 +0000

Introduced by mutual friend

New comment by brianm in "What can I do as an amateur hacker to get the best programming job next year?"

brianm — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 17:01:26 +0000

20 years ago I was in a very similar position, but it was perl I was writing instead of python :-) This advice is therefore dated, and exhibits survivor bias, but it is what I know:

1) Shore up your formal learning in at least data structures, databases, and architecture. I took night classes at the local community college, but there may be better ways now.

2) Find something to hack on where you get useful critical feedback both on your design approach and code. Critical feedback on your work hurts, but it is necessary to grow. Open Source can work well for this, as long as it is some project you actually use for something real(ish) so that the contributions you make are driven by your actual usage.

3) Network -- join local user groups, go to meetups, be curious and engage with people there. Folks are usually thrilled to rattle on about the stuff they are interested in, listen, ask questions, care.

If you have a decade of experience in some domain, look for ways to leverage that experience in a transition into tech. My first job in this career was as a technical writer and trainer, because my previous career involved a LOT of writing, and I was good at it. My next job was at a company where I had a lot of domain expertise in their target market, so despite having limited technical experience in the role, I brought a bunch of domain knowledge to the table.

New comment by brianm in "OpenTF announces fork of Terraform"

brianm — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 16:15:37 +0000

Learn both, you will eventually have to anyway, and it won't hurt your learning curve, in fact will probably help to see similar ideas implemented and expressed very differently.

New comment by brianm in "Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC"

brianm — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 01:22:26 +0000

beelink or minisforum have you covered

New comment by brianm in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

brianm — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 18:06:34 +0000

https://skife.org/

Kind of on pause for last few years, but not dead :-)

New comment by brianm in "The long life of Apache httpd 2.4"

brianm — Sat, 20 May 2023 18:03:37 +0000

Apache uses [APR Versioning](https://apr.apache.org/versioning.html) which I think had a big influence on semver, fwiw

New comment by brianm in "The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review"

brianm — Wed, 17 May 2023 16:56:59 +0000

Most companies, in my experience, don't actually know how to make use of Staff+ engineers. I spent years at a medium sized public "tech" company just trying to help the company change engineering enough to make use of these folks, and we go to a place where we could... mostly.

FANG and FANG-model (anyone copying FANG engineering/product model) companies do it well and have the bulk of success cases. Look for engineering-lead companies first, product lead companies second.

A key question when interviewing is "how is the roadmap established?" You want answers where senior leadership establishes goals (strategic or metric), product provides their understanding of opportunities, and engineering decides what to actually do. Even then, there will be the common failure model of EMs doing the roadmapping, not senior (staff+) ICs, but you can tease apart how that works, as it is always going to be a mix.

New comment by brianm in "Service Weaver: A Framework for Writing Distributed Applications"

brianm — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 01:20:40 +0000

Hah, wave. That is a name (latchkey, not jboss) I have not heard in a very long time :-)

I was thinking of the EJB 1 & 2 era xml wiring of all the things.

New comment by brianm in "Service Weaver: A Framework for Writing Distributed Applications"

brianm — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 23:58:54 +0000

This is... EJBs. It is probably less painful to use, but the model is pretty much the same. Fascinating.

New comment by brianm in "Ask HN: Have licenses ever stopped you from combining two FOSS programs?"

brianm — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 17:58:05 +0000

Yes, but it mainly has come up when combining libraries and releasing something else as OSS. For example, the ASF has a good examination of the effect of combinations with the AL2: https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html

New comment by brianm in "Why do new cars look like wet putty?"

brianm — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:37:14 +0000

glitter

New comment by brianm in "Kill Bill – Open-Source Subscription Billing and Payments Platform"

brianm — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 20:18:14 +0000

It predates Groupon, was actually started at/around Ning (if anyone remembers them). Groupon hired a bunch of the core folks at the time they decided to adopt it.

New comment by brianm in "Letters about Soap (1997)"

brianm — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 18:17:42 +0000

Thrift and GRPC fill that niche nicely.

New comment by brianm in "Apache PLC4X announcing end of community support due to missing funding"

brianm — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 17:49:46 +0000

The title is misleading -- one developer (a major one, mind you) is stepping back from offering free community support. This is not "Apache PLC4X" announcing an end of community support, it is one of the core developers announcing he will be doing so.