Hacker News: iblaine

New comment by iblaine in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

iblaine — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:00:34 +0000

https://docdiagram.com - A tool for creating technical diagrams. Basically an upgrade from mermaid. Load it into your MCP, prompt it, you'll get a clean diagram binary file in svg/png/etc.

https://anomalyarmor.ai/ - A tool for managing data observability and data anomalies.

Used daily by customers but also for my own work. These tools fill a gap that helps me get sh*t done.

New comment by iblaine in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

iblaine — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:38:05 +0000

AnomalyArmor (http://anomalyarmor.ai) is a data observability platform. I got tired of being priced out of existing tools and hand-configuring per-table thresholds for every new dashboard. An AI agent sets up schema-drift, freshness, and row-count monitoring on Snowflake/Databricks in minutes, and you can ask natural-language questions when something breaks.

$5/table, about half what incumbents charge. Happy to trade a 30-day Professional trial code for honest feedback. Reply here or blaine@anomalyarmor.ai.

New comment by iblaine in "Welcome to FastMCP"

iblaine — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:42:11 +0000

FastMCP is great and this post is overdue. What did FastMCP solve? Lots of code reduction, reduced complexity and the ability to streamline auth. Offloading the auth was a huge benefit. With FastMCP I could replace all my custom JWT validation and get an auth workflow with fewer steps.

New comment by iblaine in "Claude Code Remote Control"

iblaine — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:29:42 +0000

Boggles my mind that this is actually a thing that still needs to be solved. Just remote into your computer (I prefer TeamViewer). That is it. One step.

New comment by iblaine in "There is an AI code review bubble"

iblaine — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 03:16:31 +0000

I had a bad experience with greptile due to what seemed to be excessive noise and nit comments. I have been using cursorbot for a year and really like it.

New comment by iblaine in "I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it"

iblaine — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 04:13:19 +0000

Remind me in 5 years. AI tools don’t hide the fact that the output needs to improve. Calling out the obvious problems is a lazy take.

New comment by iblaine in "GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation"

iblaine — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:50:26 +0000

This is common. Big company buys smaller company. Smaller company execs stay on and establish the idea of independence. Eventually smaller company execs move on and Big company fills the ranks with their employees. Nothing sinister. Just how it goes.

New comment by iblaine in "Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth"

iblaine — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 05:09:44 +0000

Having been aquihired three times by FAANG+, the biggest take away is have accelerated vesting. To do that you got be lucky or in the C-suite. Being bought out usually sounds better then reality for everyone but a few that get that accelerated vesting clause.

New comment by iblaine in "INNER JOIN ON vs WHERE clause (2009)"

iblaine — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 10:06:30 +0000

Is there a difference between implicit and explicit joins? No, but use an explain plan to be sure.

(Saved you a click)

New comment by iblaine in "Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?"

iblaine — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 02:48:51 +0000

An IRC bot that would kindly insult project managers should they join our engineering chat channel while doing a deployment.

New comment by iblaine in "I Like Makefiles"

iblaine — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 07:37:41 +0000

The correct answer is I don’t like makefiles when they are abused. They have no state yet people try use them as such and create pain for others.

New comment by iblaine in "ChartDB – Free and open source, database design editor"

iblaine — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 15:55:06 +0000

I used to be bullish on creating ERDs, often using them as an onboarding exercise, even for databases with 100+ tables. However, comprehensive ERDs are becoming rare, and that's okay. Their value is short-lived due to the high cost of maintenance. While polished ERDs can be nice to have, they aren't essential.

For creating ERDs as code, tools like dbdiagram.io and eraser.io are popular options. ERWin is the original tool for UML/ERD diagrams, but it's expensive.

New comment by iblaine in "Pipe Syntax in SQL"

iblaine — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 20:16:32 +0000

Looking at this reminds me of Apache Pig. That’s not a compliment.

New comment by iblaine in "Open Source Python ETL"

iblaine — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 02:48:09 +0000

Low code ETL tools (informatica, Appworx, talend, pentaho, ssis) were the original services for ELT/ETL. A lot of progress was made to go towards ETL-as-code starting with Airflow/Luigi. Going back to low code seems backwards as this point.

(I have used all of the above tools in my 15+ yr career. Code as ETL was a huge industry shift)

New comment by iblaine in "You'll regret using natural keys"

iblaine — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 03:50:34 +0000

It’s funny that indexing used to be unavailable when processing big data on Hadoop. Now that we have options to do so we now care. As tech evolves we adapt.

New comment by iblaine in "Understanding and avoiding visually ambiguous characters in IDs"

iblaine — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 01:07:51 +0000

My OCD approves of this idea. Let’s also add, IDs cannot start with 0 or O.

New comment by iblaine in "Acme Klein Bottle"

iblaine — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 01:56:03 +0000

One of the best gifts you can ever gift yourself.

New comment by iblaine in "Colorado pastor accused of multimillion dollar crypto scheme"

iblaine — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 02:23:05 +0000

Is crypto or the pastor more to blame?

New comment by iblaine in "Squeeze the hell out of the system you have"

iblaine — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 20:40:10 +0000

TL;DR; do the easy things fist, in this case it was to fix bad SQL

Given the options to optimize SQL, move read operations to replicas, shard data or go towards micro services, optimizing SQL is the easy choice.

New comment by iblaine in "Ask HN: What's the coolest physical thing you've made?"

iblaine — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 03:03:20 +0000

A walking bike with a wheel in the front and 6 Theo Jansen type legs in the back

https://www.thedailybeast.com/judge-aileen-cannon-comes-out-...