Hacker News: brianolson

New comment by brianolson in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"

brianolson — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 18:39:57 +0000

I worked in blockchain 5 years trying to build good tech, and speculators ruin everything and don't care about good tech, but the real punch line is that

good tech is like 2% of a real answer

Here's a rant about a bunch of other layers of 'so you want to move money'

https://voidfox.com/blog/payment_processor_fun_2025_making_y...

and different parts of the blockchain ecosystem are working on some parts of that, and all together they're still a long ways off

New comment by brianolson in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"

brianolson — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 12:18:53 +0000

I worked in blockchain ("builder") for 5 years. I started 'eh, there are speculators, whatever, I build good tech' but finished 'holy crap speculators completely dominate and distort everything, nobody cares about good tech'

New comment by brianolson in "Green Tea Garbage Collector"

brianolson — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 11:03:08 +0000

"In select GC-heavy microbenchmarks ... we observed anywhere from a 10–50% reduction in GC CPU costs"

- Yay!

"The Go compiler benchmarks appear to inconsistently show a very slight regression (0.5%)"

- Boo

"Green Tea is available as an experiment at tip-of-tree and is planned as to be available as an opt-in experiment in Go 1.25"

I definitely know some application code that spends 30% of CPU time in GC that needs to try this.

New comment by brianolson in "Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua"

brianolson — Fri, 16 May 2025 14:29:13 +0000

I designed and named the Transaction Execution Approval Language for the Algorand blockchain in 2020. I'm partial to the original, but as it grew it got rebranded to be the "Algorand Virtual Machine". Glad someone still remembers it as TEAL!

New comment by brianolson in "A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen"

brianolson — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 16:17:18 +0000

Great concept. Bring back real small trucks. My grandpa ran a farm with a truck this size.

Disappointed in towing capacity of 1000 pounds ish. I can already do 1700lb on my hybrid rav4

New comment by brianolson in "Faster interpreters in Go: Catching up with C++"

brianolson — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 13:01:58 +0000

I built a 'slice of function pointers' bytecode interpreter in Go in 2019 for the Algorand VM (Blockchain smart contract stuff) and before that the same pattern in C for a toy JVM around 2005.

It's a good pattern!

The Algorand VM was focused on low overhead running thousands of tiny programs per second. Version 1 had no loops and a 1000 instruction limit.

The JVM was focused on low memory, towards possible embedded microcontroller use.

So, 'array of function pointers' is nothing new, but it is a good pattern.

New comment by brianolson in "When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines"

brianolson — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 21:12:09 +0000

I think the 'law of large numbers' says that it's very unlikely for you to follow 4k and have _none_ of them posting. You could artificially construct a counter-example by finding 4k open but silent accounts, but that's silly.

The other workaround is: follow everyone. Write some code to get what you want out of the jetstream event feed. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/jetstream

New comment by brianolson in "Bluesky Is Not Decentralized"

brianolson — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 08:22:02 +0000

If you want to dedicate a VM to it, bsky Personal Data Server has a pretty easy install

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

New comment by brianolson in "Bluesky Is Not Decentralized"

brianolson — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 08:19:59 +0000

95% of end users don't care; but Bluesky has the right bits built in anyway. There's a grand central aggregator of all 13 million accounts, but it's not _special_, someone else could run one (several hobbiests are processing this level of data). Migration works* (and works better than Mastodon, all your history and network move even better than a masto server move) (*okay, it's a weird command line tool at the moment, but as soon as someone cares that'll get cleaned up). You can run your own Personal Data Server and hook it in to the bsky network and then everyone can see your posts and interact with them. It's newer, only a couple years old, but all the right parts are headed in the right direction.

New comment by brianolson in "ATProto for distributed system engineers"

brianolson — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 10:41:44 +0000

atproto PDSes are like blog servers with RSS (but better) and bsky.app is the prevailing RSS reader. It's an open protocol because anyone can host a source and anyone can run a different reader.

New comment by brianolson in "ATProto for distributed system engineers"

brianolson — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 10:37:23 +0000

OP is a link to the atproto site because it got a major new revision within the last week

New comment by brianolson in "Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky"

brianolson — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 20:44:42 +0000

2 million new bsky accounts https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3l36zm4e6ee2w

New comment by brianolson in "Ask HN: How to finish last 30% of a side project?"

brianolson — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 20:09:14 +0000

Maybe don't finish! Maybe you did the interesting part and that's enough.

Is there something about finishing that's interesting? Some value intrinsic to you in finishing?

New comment by brianolson in "Three ways to think about Go channels"

brianolson — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:34:50 +0000

Rust async/await is less nice than Go coroutines. There are things you can't do and weird rules around Rust async code. Every Go chan allows multiple readers and multiple writers, but Rust stdlib and tokio default to single-reader queues.

New comment by brianolson in "Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source"

brianolson — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 23:48:14 +0000

Bitcoin is still wasting gigawatts every year, but later blockchains are literally a million times more efficient. If the current generations of AI turn out to be useful, maybe someone will figure it out an efficiency optimization.

New comment by brianolson in "How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip"

brianolson — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 23:39:19 +0000

It's not. It's not about efficiency. Compute-per-watt will certainly be better in other systems. This is about pushing a small system as fast as possible because it's easier to program for a small system. A few problems are 'embarrassingly parallel', but lots have substantial overhead as parallelism increases so running each core as fast as possible is a win for some problems.

New comment by brianolson in "Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?"

brianolson — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 23:40:32 +0000

going way back: Science Fair in High School landed me summer internships that rolled over into my first job out of college. ("Science and Engineering Fair" project was building robots with microcontrollers) I think it was the proof that I could do that kind of work in a self directed way that made them notice me.

New comment by brianolson in "Rolls-royce confirms all of its current engines can run on 100 percent SAF"

brianolson — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 15:31:55 +0000

there's a bunch of chemical pathways for turning plant matter into jet fuel

https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/sustainable_aviation_fuel.html

New comment by brianolson in "What the Goddamn Hell Is Going on in the Tech Industry?"

brianolson — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 12:12:09 +0000

I have heard many times: Google hires good engineers not to _do_ things, but to _not do things elsewhere_. (even if 80% of Google engineers are 'productively' working on products Google cares about, thats thousands of grade-A engineers spinning their wheels, and given the rate Google discontinues and replaces its own software, 80% is certainly high)

New comment by brianolson in "Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB"

brianolson — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 18:16:21 +0000

but as always: Are you sure your data doesn't fit in PostgreSQL? You should probably try PostgreSQL first.