Hacker News: glenjamin

New comment by glenjamin in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

glenjamin — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:28:30 +0000

on the rare occasions where I need to loudly indicate my presence to a motor vehicle I wouldn't really want to be moving my hands - if I have time to move a hand to a horn I probably have time to brake/manouvre instead.

Generally in those situations I shout really loudly at the driver, and in general they seem to hear me

New comment by glenjamin in "S3 Files and the changing face of S3"

glenjamin — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:47:49 +0000

The way AWS keep their pricing section completely separate from their system and architecture docs, despite architecture being the primary driver of cost, is a major contributor to this

My heuristics are wrong. What now?

glenjamin — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:20:47 +0000

Article URL: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/03/20/ic-leadership.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47544726

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by glenjamin in "Introduction to PostgreSQL Indexes"

glenjamin — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 16:21:36 +0000

A bitmap index scan allows the database to narrow down which pages could include the data, but then still has to recheck the condition on the contents of those pages - so will still not be as performant as an proper index scan

New comment by glenjamin in "How much of my observability data is waste?"

glenjamin — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:24:27 +0000

This pitch seems ok to people using simple log aggregation tools or metric tools that have to be wary of tag cardinality

But how does it compare to an actual modern observability stack built on a columnar datastore like Honeycomb?

DoS Vulnerability in Node.js for React, Next.js, and APM Users

glenjamin — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:44:21 +0000

Article URL: https://nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerability/january-2026-dos-mitigation-async-hooks

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46617359

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by glenjamin in "The compiler is your best friend"

glenjamin — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 18:42:28 +0000

Any advice on how to learn modern Swift?

When I tried to do learn some to put together a little app, every search result for my questions was for a quick blog seemingly aimed at iOS devs who didn’t want to learn and just wanted to copy-paste the answer - usually in the form of an extension method

New comment by glenjamin in "Distributed ID formats are architectural commitments, not just data types"

glenjamin — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 11:16:15 +0000

A failure mode of ULIDs and similar is that they're too random to be easily compared or recognized by eye.

This is especially useful when you're using them for customer or user IDs - being able to easily spot your important or troublesome customers in logs is very helpful

Personally I'd go with a ULID-like scheme similar to the one in the OP - but I'd aim to use the smallest number of bits I could get away with, and pick a compact encoding scheme

New comment by glenjamin in "Stacked Diffs with git rebase —onto"

glenjamin — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:53:19 +0000

I invite you to look into feature flagging.

It is entirely viable to never have more than 1 or 2 open pull requests on any particular code repository, and to use continuous delivery practices to keep deploying small changes to production 1 at a time.

That's exactly how I've worked for the past decade or so.

New comment by glenjamin in "Stacked Diffs with git rebase —onto"

glenjamin — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:03:48 +0000

I’m amazed that this comment is so low down

Stacked diffs seems like a solution to managing high WIP - but the best solution to high WIP is always to lower WIP

Absolutely everything gets easier when you lower your work in progress.

New comment by glenjamin in "PGlite – Embeddable Postgres"

glenjamin — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 14:22:49 +0000

Does pglite in memory outperform “normal” postgres?

If so then supporting the network protocol so it could be run in CI for non-JS languages could be really cool

New comment by glenjamin in "WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]"

glenjamin — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 15:22:46 +0000

There's a couple of passing mentions of Download Monitor, but also the timeline strongly implies that a specific source was simply guessing the URL of the PDF long before it was uploaded

I'm not clear from the doc which of these scenarios is what they're calling the "leak"

New comment by glenjamin in "Data-at-Rest Encryption in DuckDB"

glenjamin — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 12:05:01 +0000

that looks neat - how but do you handle failover/restarts?

New comment by glenjamin in "Data-at-Rest Encryption in DuckDB"

glenjamin — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 20:30:28 +0000

Other than motherduck, is anyone aware of any good models for running multi-user cloud-based duckdb?

ie. Running it like a normal database, and getting to take advantage of all of its goodies

New comment by glenjamin in "Code like a surgeon"

glenjamin — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:47:10 +0000

This reminded me of a slide from a Dan North talk - perhaps this one https://dannorth.net/talks/#software-faster? One of those anyway.

The key quote was something like "You want your software to be like surgery - as little of it as possible to fix your problem".

Anyway, it doesn't seem like this blog post is following that vibe.

New comment by glenjamin in "Online Safety Act – shutdowns and site blocks"

glenjamin — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 09:35:47 +0000

This doesn't seem accurate to me - Gambling sites legally operating in the UK already have strict KYC requirements applied to them via the Gamling regulator.

Visiting a gambling site isn't restricted, but signing up and gambling is.

New comment by glenjamin in "From XML to JSON to CBOR"

glenjamin — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 14:35:36 +0000

The only mention I can see in this document of compression is

> Significantly smaller than JSON without complex compression

Although compression of JSON could be considered complex, it's also extremely simple in that it's widely used and usually performed in a distinct step - often transparently to a user. Gzip, and increasingly zstd are widely used.

I'd be interested to see a comparison between compressed JSON and CBOR, I'm quite surprised that this hasn't been included.

New comment by glenjamin in "Unexpected security footguns in Go's parsers"

glenjamin — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 13:18:25 +0000

It’s worth noting that if you DisallowUnknownFields it makes it much harder to handle forward/backward compatible API changes - which is a very common and usually desirable pattern

New comment by glenjamin in "How easy is it for a developer to "sandbox" a program?"

glenjamin — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 15:27:16 +0000

oh, I can't edit now but that was supposed to say "nudge"

New comment by glenjamin in "How easy is it for a developer to "sandbox" a program?"

glenjamin — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 19:02:25 +0000

I think in some cases (like WhatsApp) the better model exists and is available, but isn’t used by the app - possibly as a judge to get you to give it more permissions

On iOS Strava’s app is able to access a photo picker, and the app only gets the photos I actually pick

Meanwhile WhatsApp insists on using the model where it tries to access all photos, and I limit it to specific ones via the OS