Hacker News: jbmsf

New comment by jbmsf in "Signing data structures the wrong way"

jbmsf — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 21:02:09 +0000

That was my first thought as well.

New comment by jbmsf in "Should QA exist?"

jbmsf — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 23:19:39 +0000

QA should exist.

QA should not be forced into an engineering or automation track because the incentives are wrong. You end up with test code becoming the goal and then it usually rots due to most QA not having the experience to create a codebase that scales.

I don't think the industry today understands how to treat QA and I think that leads to a lot of assumptions that it's not useful.

New comment by jbmsf in "Algebraic topology: knots links and braids"

jbmsf — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:36:55 +0000

I get excited because I went to school with one of Vaughan Jones' children and was (and still am) into math and was blown away when I understood that he was significant.

New comment by jbmsf in "Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse"

jbmsf — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:31:12 +0000

Years and years ago (pre-smart phone), I built a mobile map and navigation product. Labeling streets was one of the more interesting side quests and the solution I found took a similar approach of generating a large number of candidates, picking one solution, and iterating. It worked quite well in practice.

New comment by jbmsf in "Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)"

jbmsf — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 03:48:46 +0000

Thanks. I've been meaning to write one of these for a long time, but you went into detail in a very effective, organized way.

I also reached a lot of similar decisions and challenges, even where we differ (ECS vs EKS) I completely understand your conclusions.

New comment by jbmsf in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

jbmsf — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 01:13:03 +0000

I can't speak to the accuracy, but I just integrated stripe's offering for our product (which involves banking). We were small enough for a while not to need it, but eventually the fraudsters find you.

If you don't take these measures, you will lose money to fraud. You may also lose your business because you aren't meeting your AML/anti-terror obligations. (I also just had to take my annual training course).

There are a bunch of mitigations, of which identity verification is just one, and all of them are lousy for our good customers. I wish the banking systems were better and we didn't need to do any of it.

New comment by jbmsf in "ASCII-Driven Development"

jbmsf — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 02:52:23 +0000

I like the idea but I think it's going to be hard to put this particular genie back in the bottle. As an engineering leader, I prefer low fidelity designs early on, but practically no one else in my company wants that.

Designers have learned figma and it's the de facto tool for them; doing something else is risky for them.

Product leaders want high fidelity. They love the AI tools that let them produce high fidelity prototypes.

Some (but not all) engineers prefer it because it means less decision making for them.

New comment by jbmsf in "What makes you senior"

jbmsf — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 03:30:00 +0000

I feel this way now, but with companies.

New comment by jbmsf in "Go ahead, self-host Postgres"

jbmsf — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 02:57:11 +0000

I started in this industry before cloud was a thing. I did most of the things RDS does the hard way (except being able to dynamically increase memory on a running instance, that's magic to me). I do not want that responsibility, especially because I know how badly it turns out when it's one of a dozen (or dozens) of responsibilities asked of the team.

New comment by jbmsf in "Announcing the Beta release of ty"

jbmsf — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 03:45:20 +0000

Meh. The end of the company many of us admire was a combination of the founders giving up control to the usual villains and the venture business model failing for developer tools. I don't think the specific departure date matters very much; things started to degrade earlier.

As for "slapping a company on it", I agree, but also I don't think we've developed a viable alternative. Python has been limping along with one toolchain or another for my entire career (multiple decades) and it took Astral's very specific approach to create something better. It's fair to ask why they needed to be venture backed, but they clearly are and the lack of successful alternatives is telling.

New comment by jbmsf in "Announcing the Beta release of ty"

jbmsf — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 01:02:57 +0000

You're not wrong, but a) most of the badness happened after the founders checked out and b) it's hard to find examples of developer tool companies doing better.

New comment by jbmsf in "Announcing the Beta release of ty"

jbmsf — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 02:46:00 +0000

We're paying for pyx. Wouldn't have if we didn't enjoy enjoy uv and ruff.

It's definitely a narrow path for them to tread. Feels like the best case is something like Hashicorp, great until the founders don't want to do it anymore.

New comment by jbmsf in "Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions"

jbmsf — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 21:14:01 +0000

I assume they want us to pay for their orchestration and also push customers back to using their compute so everything is stickier.

But nothing they've done in the last few years has demonstrated improvement in this area. As the person with both purchasing and final authority on these things in my org, it's hard to stomach.

New comment by jbmsf in "Advent of Sysadmin 2025"

jbmsf — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:28:02 +0000

I see: a page offering something interesting but vague.

If you tell me more, I might sign up. If I have to create an account first, I'm walking away.

New comment by jbmsf in "Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem"

jbmsf — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 02:17:12 +0000

It looks a lot like a CloudFront error we randomly saw today from one of our engineers in South America. I suspect there was a small outage in AWS but can't prove it.

New comment by jbmsf in "You should write an agent"

jbmsf — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 02:39:24 +0000

I agree. I find LLMs a bit overblown. I don't think most people want to use chat as their primary interface. But writing a few agents was incredibly informative.

New comment by jbmsf in "A PM's Guide to AI Agent Architecture"

jbmsf — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 02:14:27 +0000

As an engineer, I like this framework but can think of approximately zero PMs who could use it to build a product.

New comment by jbmsf in "I want to be left alone (2024)"

jbmsf — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 01:54:35 +0000

Bartleby was right.

New comment by jbmsf in "You Have to Feel It"

jbmsf — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 02:16:28 +0000

We have a recent hire who comes from a background where a) the user base was much larger and b) metrics were the best way to understand outcomes.

Our company is smaller and earlier than that. I enjoy the focus on metrics, it's a good push for us, but sometimes you just have to do the obviously good thing for users without trying to build a metrics framework around it.

New comment by jbmsf in "Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management"

jbmsf — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 14:40:04 +0000

This was always the case.