<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: evancordell</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=evancordell</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:45:15 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=evancordell" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Using the expand and contract pattern for schema changes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We always called these "four-phase migrations". An old Stripe article used similar naming[0].<p>[0]: <a href="https://stripe.com/blog/online-migrations" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/blog/online-migrations</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2025 14:57:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876602</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876602</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876602</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "The U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This video is a great overview of the history and the recent hearings, came here to link it.<p>Not sure I agree with his conclusion though - once all manufacturers are required to include the technology, surely they will still compete on price and find ways to get cheaper models to market? They will be unencumbered by the risk of patent violation to innovate on cheaper approaches to the same problem.<p>He also argues for riving knives and blade guards as an alternative, which are great, but not all cuts can be made with them in place.<p>As a hobby woodworker that sometimes makes mistakes, I've wanted a SawStop for a long time but have been stymied by the cost, so maybe I'm just being optimistic.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Apr 2024 14:44:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39979997</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39979997</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39979997</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "DBOS Operating System"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>At the risk of making a classic "I have a few qualms with this app" blunder, I'm not super clear on what this has over other durable workflow solutions.<p>It seems to take the durable workflow idea and lock you into a specific language, operating system, and database, when other projects in the same space give you choice over those components.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 Mar 2024 02:17:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39722734</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39722734</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39722734</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Macaroons Escalated Quickly"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The community that formed around building open source “standard” Macaroons decided to use untyped opaque blobs to represent candidates.<p>I assume "candidates" was supposed to be "caveats" - and as an author of a "standard" macaroon implementation, I completely agree that this is the biggest downfall of Macaroons. With no common caveat language (and no independent "dischargers") it really limits their use to within a single org. And at that point you're basically asking everyone to invent their own token format anyway.<p>Though I don't personally use them much anymore - I think the use-cases for Macaroons are much more limited if you have a Zanzibar! - I appreciate seeing Macaroon discussions pop up and this post and the related discussions it linked out to were a great read.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:18:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39208803</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39208803</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39208803</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Macaroons Escalated Quickly"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To be fair, this is a mistake that started with the Google paper, and everyone else just copies the mistake.<p>The paper calls them Macaroons as a play on (browser) Cookies with layers (of caveats) - so clearly they meant macarons as well, since a macaroon doesn't have layers. Or at least, that's always been my interpretation of the name. It's possible it was just an arbitrary play on hMAC cookies and not the layers?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:10:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39208704</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39208704</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39208704</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Pitfalls of Helm – Insights from 3 years with the leading K8s package manager"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is interesting, I have the opposite opinion. I dislike helm for public distribution, because everyone wants _their_ thing templated, so you end up making  every field of your chart templated and it becomes a mess to maintain.<p>Internal applications don't have this problem, so you can easily keep your chart interface simple and scoped to the different ways you need to deploy your own stack.<p>With Kustomize, you just publish the base manifests and users can override whatever they want. Not that Kustomize doesn't have its own set of problems.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 14 Dec 2023 16:37:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38643279</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38643279</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38643279</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "You have a right to know why a health insurer denied your claim"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> my wife is still receiving bills from the birth of our most recent child, 18 months ago<p>I've been dealing with this as well, and the uncertainty has been the most frustrating thing.<p>Medical bills from the same institution should be required to be high watermarks - i.e. if you give me a bill in March, you can't send me a bill in April that has charges from February that _weren't on the bill from March_. It feels like fraud (and maybe it is, but who has time to figure that out?)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Nov 2023 20:54:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38211122</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38211122</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38211122</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "The midwit home"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Also a happy Lutron fan, but I went with RadioRA2. It's a bit "smarter" but it's very reliable, not connected to the internet, and some basics can even be programmed without the management software.<p>One thing that stands out with Lutron products is their use of a unique spectrum[0], unlike almost all other smarthome products that share the same noisy bands.<p>[0]: <a href="https://assets.lutron.com/a/documents/clear_connect_technology_whitepaper.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://assets.lutron.com/a/documents/clear_connect_technolo...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Oct 2023 19:11:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37861689</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37861689</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37861689</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "What happened to Wirecutter?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Quality aside, it's the paywall that grinds my gears.<p>Wirecutter articles are essentially long, well-researched ads for the products they (affiliate) link to.<p>I always found these ads useful, at least as a starting point. But putting a paywall in front of the ads rubs me the wrong way, like an unwritten contract was broken.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Aug 2023 03:00:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231370</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231370</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231370</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Policy Engines: Open Policy Agent vs. AWS Cedar vs. Google Zanzibar"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The article was comparing OPA/Cedar to Zanzibar, which is why my head went there. I did go looking for info on how OPAL deals with caching and consistency and found these:<p>- Authz data is kept in memory, so what you can authorize over is limited by the memory of the box you run OPAL/OPA. The docs also mention sharding, but I'm not clear on how you actually do that with OPA. [0] Maybe there's another doc that I missed.<p>- You can get a token representing the last time data was synced to the cache in an OPAL health check, but I'm not clear on how you'd use it to ensure consistency in your application since hydrating the cache is asynchronous. [1]<p>Anyway, those are the types of things Zanzibar is concerned with, so that comparison (instead of Cedar) would've made more sense to me. Without spending more time on it, I'm not sure if I've represented OPAL correctly above, that's just what I found when I went looking.<p>[0]: <a href="https://docs.opal.ac/faq/#handling-a-lot-of-data-in-opa" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://docs.opal.ac/faq/#handling-a-lot-of-data-in-opa</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://docs.opal.ac/faq/#how-does-opal-guarantee-that-the-policy-data-is-actually-in-sync-with-the-actual-application-state-we-get-that-opal-server-publishes-updates-to-opal-client-but-is-there-error-correction-in-place" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://docs.opal.ac/faq/#how-does-opal-guarantee-that-the-p...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Aug 2023 22:10:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37168881</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37168881</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37168881</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Policy Engines: Open Policy Agent vs. AWS Cedar vs. Google Zanzibar"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've seen the sentiment in this article pop up in a few places, which I'd summarize as: Policy languages like OPA and Cedar are fast to evaluate and simple to write, so you should use it for all of your authorization needs.<p>But policy engines are only <i>really</i> fast and simple if they already have all of the data they need at evaluation time.<p>If you look at the examples in the Cedar playground[0], they require you to provide a list of "entities" to Cedar at eval-time. These entities are some (potentially large) chunk of your application's data. And while the policy evaluation over that data may be fast, the round trip to your database is probably not. And then you start to think about caching, data consistency, and so on, and suddenly you're thinking about a lot of the problems that Zanzibar was designed to address (but you're on your own to build it out).<p>IMO policy engines are best suited for ambient request data: things you already know about a request because of a session, a route, or a network path, and policies that make sense to manage on the same lifecycle as your application.<p>Disclaimer: I work on SpiceDB[1], a Zanzibar implementation, but I do also like policy engines.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.cedarpolicy.com/en/playground" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cedarpolicy.com/en/playground</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/authzed/spicedb">https://github.com/authzed/spicedb</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Aug 2023 20:44:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37167777</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37167777</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37167777</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://evancordell.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://evancordell.com/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Jul 2023 19:45:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36606052</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36606052</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36606052</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Microwaved plastic containers release microplastics into food"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Longer than that; I remember being warned about plasticizers leaching into food if microwaved.<p>Found this paper from 1982: <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/44540143" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.jstor.org/stable/44540143</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 30 Jun 2023 13:51:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36534893</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36534893</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36534893</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Maximizing CockroachDB Performance: Our Journey to 1M QPS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We're saving some of that for a future blog post - we tested many different configurations and scales (of both SpiceDB and CRDB)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Jun 2023 15:49:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36228425</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36228425</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36228425</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "A New Era of Podcast Mergers Is Just Beginning"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you just mean comedic quality or do you mean production quality as well?<p>Some that I've listened to are good on both fronts (in my opinion): Mission To Zyxx, Dungeons and Daddies, Beef and Dairy Network.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 30 May 2023 20:30:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36130308</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36130308</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36130308</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Learn Makefiles with the Tastiest Examples"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I looked at both and came away thinking mage was more convenient for go-only projects. Just looked good and I would probably pick it for something that wasn't go-only (if make didn't make sense instead).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 May 2023 14:20:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35988316</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35988316</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35988316</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Learn Makefiles with the Tastiest Examples"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Couldn't you have achieved this even more simply by using make with a go shell?<p>Make is still really about file to file transformations, and `go` already wraps up all of the behavior one would normally use make for. Plus you need make + a shell + go, vs. mage where all that's needed is go.<p>I can't speak for the author, but I assume they're reacting to how Makefiles tend to be used in go projects and not how make works generally.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 May 2023 14:18:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35988300</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35988300</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35988300</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Learn Makefiles with the Tastiest Examples"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have long held similar opinions on make, and I've recently started using mage[0] in more and more go projects and have been happy with the result.<p>It's more task-oriented, the way people tend to write Makefiles with .PHONY rules, but it's all in go. It can be bootstrapped just with go too, and comes with some utilities to do make-like incremental builds if you need to.<p>[0]: <a href="https://magefile.org/" rel="nofollow">https://magefile.org/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 May 2023 01:48:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35956904</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35956904</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35956904</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Jsonnet – The Data Templating Language"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> But weirdly given its focus on schemas I couldn't find any way for a document to link to a schema in-band!<p>In cue there's no real distinction between "schemas" and "documents". If you say:<p><pre><code>   value: string
   value: "abc"
</code></pre>
then cue "unifies" the definitions for `value`, sees that "abc" is a string, and therefore `value` is valid.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Mar 2023 17:25:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329529</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329529</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329529</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by evancordell in "Spack – scientific software package manager for supercomputers, Linux, and macOS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's a good interview with the author in an episode of The Manifest: <a href="https://manifest.fm/11" rel="nofollow">https://manifest.fm/11</a><p>It's been a while since I've listened, but I remember it being pretty interesting.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Mar 2023 20:49:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238466</link><dc:creator>evancordell</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238466</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238466</guid></item></channel></rss>