Hacker News: dan_sbl

New comment by dan_sbl in "AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T"

dan_sbl — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:42:44 +0000

https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/online-vs-in-store-s...

Basically, 80% of sales are still brick-and-mortar. That doesn't seem very depressing?

New comment by dan_sbl in "SPF Record Syntax: Mechanisms, Qualifiers, Modifiers, and Macros"

dan_sbl — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:15:35 +0000

> SPF record syntax follows one shape:

The first six words do not scream "human written" to me.

New comment by dan_sbl in "Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English"

dan_sbl — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 22:00:38 +0000

I took one of the examples ("Leveraging sqlpipe's robust...") and just prefixed it with this:

> Rewrite this using ASD-STE100 simplified technical English:

And you get a good-enough result, it seems? Maybe add another sentence or two for guidance, but what's with needing these giant skills, when ASD-STE100 was surely in the training material?

New comment by dan_sbl in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

dan_sbl — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:28:25 +0000

I believe a big issue was that significant amounts of parking were closed at each of the host stadiums for "security reasons", fan watch areas, etc. When they did some overhead shots of the stadiums, you could see tons of empty parking lot space.

New comment by dan_sbl in "The startup's Postgres survival guide"

dan_sbl — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:33:51 +0000

`timestamptz` is probably poorly named. It doesn't actually store a timezone at all - all values are stored as UTC. The underlying storage is 8 bytes and otherwise identical for both timestamp types. However, using `timestamptz` allows you to more easily group by day, hour of day, etc. in a non-UTC timezone when that makes sense. Especially when dealing with summer time/daylight savings time, this can be quite useful.

As far as storing a datetime with an associated timezone, I agree that usually this can be problematic. However, for things like weekly repeats, you may want to store broken out components so it handles cleanly across time switch boundaries - e.g. when going in and out of DST. So you'd have `timezone`, `time` (no TZ, no date), repeat schedule (likely using interval, internally stored in months/days/microseconds), and use these to set up your next exact timestamptz value.

New comment by dan_sbl in "NYC Subway Signals: A Complete Guide (2012)"

dan_sbl — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:22:56 +0000

Very similar detailed site for the Chicago L. Here's the signals page, but a ton more to explore as well: https://www.chicago-l.org/operations/signals/signals.html

New comment by dan_sbl in "Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks"

dan_sbl — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:26:41 +0000

Just an FYI- your "Read more" link under "Seat Reservations" on both pages just leads back to the same page, rather than actually linking to anything offering more information.

New comment by dan_sbl in "Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network"

dan_sbl — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 16:45:14 +0000

GTFS is widely adopted, "standardized", but also quite a wild west when it comes to the actual details. I've been building http://mobility-bot.com/ as a spare time project for two years, parsing the alerts GTFS feeds from a handful of providers, and for just about every one of them, I have to do something in the pipeline to clean up the provided data - fixing unicode issues, remapping route and agency IDs, rewriting headers and descriptions to not be identical, etc. You also have to watch and capture the data over time to make sure you have a corpus to generalize parsing and cleanup rules from.

Most of these projects made the smart choice to focus on a single or just a small handful of related providers. As soon as you're trying to aggregate, the problem becomes a lot trickier.

New comment by dan_sbl in "Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network"

dan_sbl — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 14:24:34 +0000

Meanwhile, the sad state of intercity trains in the United States, outside of the Northeast Corridor.

https://asm.transitdocs.com/ https://amtraker.com/map

New comment by dan_sbl in "Workers Cache"

dan_sbl — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 13:35:59 +0000

Billion dollar company can't afford one human copywriter. The future is great! (edit: copyrighter -> copywriter)

New comment by dan_sbl in "Show HN: ZeroFS – A log-structured filesystem for S3"

dan_sbl — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:06:03 +0000

> The test suites run in public CI.

> Each card links to the CI pipeline.

Thanks for being explicit, AI written marketing site. Wouldn't have been able to figure that out! Every currently maintained and reasonably popular open source project either runs CI in public or makes the tests extremely easy to run.

New comment by dan_sbl in "The history of butterfly swimming"

dan_sbl — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:41:49 +0000

> unveiling it to the confusion of officials and competitors in a 150 yard medley race in 1933

The article doesn't say, but did the medley relay/IM become a 4 stroke event around the same time in 1952 when FINA recognized it as a new stroke? Funny to see a 150 yard event mentioned since it seems like such an odd distance nowadays.

New comment by dan_sbl in "But yak shaving is fun (2019)"

dan_sbl — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:37:19 +0000

This feels like what is really splitting the programming community right now- those that have typically enjoyed the journey, and those that just want to be at the destination as soon as possible.

New comment by dan_sbl in "Google employees internally share memes about how its AI sucks"

dan_sbl — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:35:47 +0000

> After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop."

I'll let that stand on it's own.

Fixing Slow Dependabot Actions in Go Projects

dan_sbl — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:30:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.clarityboss.com/blog/fix-slow-dependabot-go-modules-github

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383789

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by dan_sbl in "Restartable Sequences"

dan_sbl — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:09:26 +0000

I definitely misread it, thanks for the empathy comment!

New comment by dan_sbl in "Matrix Multiplications on GPUs Run Faster When Given “Predictable” Data (2024)"

dan_sbl — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:14:28 +0000

> For example, when the GPU is fully idle, nvidia-smi tells me that it’s only pulling 88W of power.

I haven't used a non-laptop GPU in some time, but that is a crazy amount of "idle" power consumption. Is this normal for cards like this?

New comment by dan_sbl in "That Methyl Methacrylate Tank"

dan_sbl — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:10:41 +0000

I believe they tried to inject some chemicals to slow the reaction, but the pump and/or valves failed and clogged.

New comment by dan_sbl in "Smartmedia Card Spec Opened, available free (2000)"

dan_sbl — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:52:51 +0000

My first MP3 player used it as well. I remember how much this memory card style felt like a 5¼ floppy disk, as opposed to most other formats at the time which were hard shell.

New comment by dan_sbl in "Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension"

dan_sbl — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:54:27 +0000

> As a side effect, Terms-of-service acceptance records were also reset, prompting users to re-accept on their next visit to the dashboard.

Don't get me wrong- the rest of this mess falls pretty clearly on Google Cloud, but this one feels like something Railway did to themselves.