Hacker News: brycethornton

New comment by brycethornton in "Facebook is cooked"

brycethornton — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:41:43 +0000

I still use Groups and Marketplace but my home feed is blocked thanks to News Feed Eradicator. Check it out if you haven't heard of it. It's a browser extension that can block the home feed (and more) for a number of social sites.

New comment by brycethornton in "PlanetScale for Postgres"

brycethornton — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 18:42:21 +0000

Really cool. It'll be interesting to see how Multigres (by Supabase) shapes up compared to this. I think it's great to have more/better competitive hosted Postgres offerings.

New comment by brycethornton in "The Llama 4 herd"

brycethornton — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 20:50:22 +0000

I believe Mixture-of-Experts is a way for a neural network to group certain knowledge into smaller subsets. AFAIK there isn't a specific grouping goal, the network just figures out what goes where on it's own and then when an inference request is made it determines what "expert" would have that knowledge and routes it there. This makes the inference process much more efficient.

New comment by brycethornton in "LinkedIn is the worst social media I've ever seen"

brycethornton — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 21:51:12 +0000

Nice. I use one in the chrome store called News Feed Eradicator. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/news-feed-eradicato...

New comment by brycethornton in "Sonos CEO Patrick Spence steps down after app update debacle"

brycethornton — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 21:12:08 +0000

Yeah, I believe the firmware on all compatible devices was auto-updated to the new architecture and apparently they can't go back to the old firmware for some reason. What a mess.

New comment by brycethornton in "Pgroll – Zero-downtime, reversible, schema changes for PostgreSQL (new website)"

brycethornton — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 19:09:11 +0000

Hey Paul! Try out pg-osc if you haven't already. I use it quite a bit for this type of thing. https://github.com/shayonj/pg-osc

New comment by brycethornton in "Pgroll – Zero-downtime, reversible, schema changes for PostgreSQL (new website)"

brycethornton — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 19:28:33 +0000

Can you add https://github.com/shayonj/pg-osc? It's my favorite PG migration tool.

New comment by brycethornton in "Wait Until 8th"

brycethornton — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 21:13:10 +0000

Apple Watches have been great for us. Both of my kids (ages 10 & 13) use a cellular Apple Watch which gives them a way to call/text with us and their friends but it doesn't give them access to social media. I know they'll want a phone soon (my youngest is already asking) but it's an easy "no" for us. I think waiting until around age 14 (or later) sounds about right. I'd like to delay even longer if possible. We'll see how hard they push.

New comment by brycethornton in "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Can Be Cleaned for $7.5B"

brycethornton — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 15:09:30 +0000

I don't think anybody is assuming it will stay clean without continued work to clean and improve the root causes of the pollution. Still worth doing.

New comment by brycethornton in "Brain-Health Benefits of Weightlifting"

brycethornton — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 12:42:27 +0000

Probably "air" squats, just squatting to parallel or below without any weights.

New comment by brycethornton in "Memory and new controls for ChatGPT"

brycethornton — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 20:54:04 +0000

I don't think so, just a handy feature.

New comment by brycethornton in "Why is Bluetooth sound quality bad on my Mac"

brycethornton — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 16:42:47 +0000

ToothFairy for macOS is what I've been using to handle this. It has an advanced setting for headphones that "Improve sound quality by disabling audio input from device". It's always good to have multiple tools out there to solve problems like this.

New comment by brycethornton in "Pgroll: zero-downtime, reversible schema migrations for Postgres"

brycethornton — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 17:21:41 +0000

Thanks for the reply. My question was specifically about the MVCC feature that creates new rows for updates like this. If you're backfilling data into a new column then you'll likely end up creating new rows for the entire table and the space for the old rows will be marked for re-use via auto-vacuuming. Anyway, bloat like this is a big pain for me when make migrations on huge tables. It doesn't sound like this type of bloat cleanup is a goal for pgroll. Regardless, it's always great to have more options in this space. Thanks for your work!

New comment by brycethornton in "Pgroll: zero-downtime, reversible schema migrations for Postgres"

brycethornton — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 16:17:18 +0000

Does pgroll have any process to address table bloat after the migration? One of the (many) nice things about pg-osc is that it results in a fresh new table without bloat.

New comment by brycethornton in "Scaling Databases at Activision [pdf]"

brycethornton — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 16:54:13 +0000

They have a PlanetScale logo on the last slide. Is this just to say "Thanks for your work on Vitess!" or are they using the PlanetScale service for some of this?

New comment by brycethornton in "T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B"

brycethornton — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 15:14:54 +0000

If you're looking for an alternative T-Mobile MVNO Tello.com might be worth a look. I used to use it and it was _cheap_. I ended up moving to another MVNO on Verizon because T-Mobile coverage isn't great around my house but I was happy with the price and service.

New comment by brycethornton in "Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons"

brycethornton — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 19:37:05 +0000

I used Evernote for a decade before switching to Apple Notes a couple years back. It took some getting used to but now it feels seamless. I'd highly recommend it if you don't need anything too fancy.

New comment by brycethornton in "DALL·E now available in beta"

brycethornton — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:38:21 +0000

I'm blown away by this:

"Starting today, users get full usage rights to commercialize the images they create with DALL·E, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise. This includes images they generated during the research preview."

I assumed this was going to be the sticking point for wider usage for a long time. They're now saying that you have full rights to sell Dall-E 2 creations?

New comment by brycethornton in "Deploys at Slack"

brycethornton — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 21:49:15 +0000

Sure, I see your point. I'd just like to see a pattern that works for most that could gain some traction. At the end of the day we're all trying to do the same thing (deploy high quality software), just in different ways. Deployment strategy shouldn't need to be a main competency of most teams.

New comment by brycethornton in "Deploys at Slack"

brycethornton — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 21:00:38 +0000

It's always nice to see how other teams do it. Nothing too groundbreaking here but that's a good thing.

I did notice the screenshot of "Checkpoint", their deployment tracking UI. Are there solid open source or SaaS tools doing something similar? I've seen various companies build similar tools but most deployment processes are consistent enough to have a 3rd-party tool that was useful for most teams.