Hacker News: fredrb

Lipstick on a Pig

fredrb — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:18:21 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.fredrb.com/2026/05/29/lipstick-on-a-pig/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48325286

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by fredrb in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

fredrb — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:46:18 +0000

This news has to be read alongside the immigration visa emission pause for 75 countries by DOS[1].

Since USCIS is blocking Adjustment of Status, and the Department of State is blocking green card emission for citizens of 75 countries, this means that if you are from the following countries you are effectively banned from getting a Green Card:

Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bhutan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominica, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, The Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Kyrgyz Republic, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Republic of the Congo, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.

[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/i...

Interview with Jon Gjengset: Defending Democracies with Rust

fredrb — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 10:16:46 +0000

Article URL: https://filtra.io/rust/interviews/helsing-jun-25

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44375562

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by fredrb in "Root for your friends"

fredrb — Sat, 24 May 2025 07:44:01 +0000

I’m sorry that has been your experience. The culture you’re brought up in is hardly representative for 8 billion people’s experience.

New comment by fredrb in "Ask HN: Why do message queue-based architectures seem less popular now?"

fredrb — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 07:07:01 +0000

It’s not that bad if you need to deploy at least 3 things and for most cases it beats the alternatives. You can get away with a bootstrapped deployment yaml and a couple of services for most scenarios. What should you use instead? Vendor locked app platforms? Roll out your own deploy bash scripts?

Sure the full extend of Kubernetes is complicated and managing it might be a pain, but if you don’t go bonkers is not that hard to use it as a developer.

New comment by fredrb in "Python notebooks for fundamentals of music processing"

fredrb — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 18:18:04 +0000

I picked this up as a first reference as someone who had no knowledge in DSP and it was an absolute gem. Really helped with the mental model for sound processing. This repository has some amazing resources too: https://github.com/BillyDM/Awesome-Audio-DSP

New comment by fredrb in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2024)"

fredrb — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 13:07:53 +0000

Location: Berlin, Germany

Remote: Indifferent

Willing to relocate: not at the moment, but open to discuss depending on the job

Technologies: backend/systems engineer generalist. At the moment I work with Go, Kubernetes and Linux. I’m interested in C, Rust and Python as well. Would work in any programming language.

CV: Upon request via LinkedIn or email. I have a outdated one here [1] without much information about my current employer.

Email: fred.rbittencourt [at] gmail [dot] com

New comment by fredrb in "My personal C coding style as of late 2023"

fredrb — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 08:45:08 +0000

Sharing preferences and opinions on code ergonomics certainly has value for me, and I bet it has to other people too. This is, after all, a developer's forum.

I'm certain your opinion on petunias and your possible distaste for orchids will be welcomed in a flower-news type orange site. :-)

Solving the same problem multiple times

fredrb — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 16:45:58 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.fredrb.com/2023/09/08/same-problem-multiple-times/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37436025

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

On bash one-liners: unmaintained go.mod dependencies

fredrb — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 23:22:43 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.fredrb.com/2023/08/13/bash-one-liner-gomod/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37115632

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

On sound programming: playing a single note with SDL2

fredrb — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 17:51:46 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.fredrb.com/2023/08/08/audio-programming-note-sdl/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37052901

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by fredrb in "Beej's Guide to Network Programming"

fredrb — Mon, 22 May 2023 06:15:45 +0000

I don't work with it either. But I find that learning the abstraction below where you're working at can be quite beneficial to understanding the constraints of your layer, debug, and solve problems.

E.g.: Learn the basics Transport Layer protocols (TCP/UDP) if you work with HTTP

Textbooks on Every Subject (2011)

fredrb — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 07:49:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-textbooks-on-every-subject

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35760463

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

History of printing from the 20th century

fredrb — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 21:05:07 +0000

Article URL: https://www.prepressure.com/printing/history/1900-1949

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35757181

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

A case for Go code generation: testify

fredrb — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 22:40:16 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.fredrb.com/2022/11/06/testify-code-generation/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33498255

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by fredrb in "Which programming paradigm had the most impact on you as an engineer and why?"

fredrb — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 08:15:29 +0000

It's interesting to see how many people in this thread have had negative experiences with OOP. As much as I don't do OOP that much anymore, I think it had a positive impact in me. But like every popular practice, there is a lot of bad patterns you have to navigate through.

Things like depending on interfaces as opposed to concrete implementations; or prefer message passing over direct data access are practices that I learned in OOP that I still value. The "Small Talk crowd" from the first team I worked in and influential authors in the topic (specially Sandi Metz) still have a dear place in my heart for how they improved the way I view software design.

New comment by fredrb in "When the push button was new, people were freaked"

fredrb — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 21:15:23 +0000

That’s usually how human conversations go. It’s not always efficient. You should try it sometime.

New comment by fredrb in "Character Encoding and UTF-8"

fredrb — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 17:34:37 +0000

Thanks for pointing this out! Should have looked it up before. Fixed in the post.

New comment by fredrb in "Character Encoding and UTF-8"

fredrb — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 08:22:19 +0000

Thank you for these points. I've made some corrections in the post.

> consider that something like à can consist of either a precomposed "à" code point or an "a" + "` diacritic" sequence

If Unicode provides a precomposed combination doesn't it mean that in fact has a code point for every character? Regardless of offering diacritic combination codes?

New comment by fredrb in "Character Encoding and UTF-8"

fredrb — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 01:05:40 +0000

Right. Impossible might have been an exaggeration, I will fix that. The point is that if you're reading a file with the text "hello world", you can only make out the characters because you know the encoding. Given two completely different encodings that map the same hex values in the message it would be impossible to determine which is the correct string. There is no such thing as plain text.