Hacker News: joeatwork

New comment by joeatwork in "Strudel REPL – a music live coding environment living in the browser"

joeatwork — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 11:51:36 +0000

It will run locally in a web browser, it’s open source and if I recall correctly the authors provide a downloadable way to serve it from your local machine.

New comment by joeatwork in ""Swiss Cheese" Failure Model"

joeatwork — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 11:11:26 +0000

The page doesn’t say it, but this is why adding redundant safety systems and defense in depth stops working after a while - such systems end up running with (acceptable, unobserved) “holes” after a while - the more complex the system, the harder it is to perceive the holes, until one day they line up and become very obvious indeed.

New comment by joeatwork in "Getting Started Strudel"

joeatwork — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:44:17 +0000

Even if you’re not interested in making your own music with Strudel, this site is worth a visit for the showcase. A lot of folks are making a lot of interesting music with it!

New comment by joeatwork in "Kamal Proxy – A minimal HTTP proxy for zero-downtime deployments"

joeatwork — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 12:29:48 +0000

I think this is part of a lighter weight Kubernetes alternative.

New comment by joeatwork in "The Academic Culture of Fraud"

joeatwork — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 12:11:51 +0000

Palladium magazine is published by The American Governance Foundation. I couldn’t find out much about it by Googling, does anybody know what its deal is?

New comment by joeatwork in "Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech"

joeatwork — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 18:46:19 +0000

UXN / Varvara (a project by these folks) is something really special https://100r.co/site/uxn.html - an approach to creating intelligible software by applying strict complexity constraints, sort of like Viewpoint Research’s STEPS project, but with more concrete goals and an even smaller and simpler basis.

New comment by joeatwork in "Rebooting (something like) early Triplebyte"

joeatwork — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 11:33:48 +0000

I ran the interview team for TripleByte FastTrack early on (I’m not part of or in touch with the otherbranch folks) and I’m excited to see something like it return! The program was good at uncovering different sorts of engineering excellence. We could identify and attest for folks who were particularly fluent coders, or particularly deep systems folks, or particularly excellent debuggers, and then match them with shops that needed the sorts of things those people could do well. If the otherbranch process is like early TripleByte I’d encourage folks to give it a try because they’ll have a shot at landing jobs that are better fits for their skills and interests (in addition to just saving a bunch of time during the search!)

New comment by joeatwork in "It's not just you, Next.js is getting harder to use"

joeatwork — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 10:52:11 +0000

Software tools backed by businesses that target enterprises have very strong pressures towards obscurity, complexity, and generally optimizing for institutional goals and away from development experience and effectiveness. As tools that get developer adoption move up market they get worse and worse for the folks building with them.

New comment by joeatwork in "Computers Reduce Efficiency: Case Studies of the Solow Paradox (2023)"

joeatwork — Sun, 05 May 2024 12:28:04 +0000

Something this article leaves out is that mostly, when people are given better tools, they don’t just produce more widgets per unit time: often instead they build different (more complex, better) widgets. When I was in school I read a study about this - a design shop had N draftsmen, they introduced CAD tools anticipating reducing the staff, and when researchers went back to the shop they had the same staff, but they were designing things that wouldn’t have been practical or possible before.

New comment by joeatwork in "They Live"

joeatwork — Sun, 05 May 2024 09:46:27 +0000

This movie is a lot of fun, and a great window into its moment.

New comment by joeatwork in "Common DB schema change mistakes in Postgres"

joeatwork — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 11:03:31 +0000

I have managed to make a lot of these mistakes, and they’re lead to scary outages and bummers. This is a pretty great article.

New comment by joeatwork in "Subroutine calls in the ancient world, before computers had stacks or heaps"

joeatwork — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 15:13:25 +0000

Getting recursive functions into ALGOL turns out to have been a controversial move that made for a fun story: https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/how-recursion-got-...

New comment by joeatwork in "Prolog language for PostgreSQL proof of concept"

joeatwork — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 10:41:28 +0000

An alternative query language for PostgreSQL would be a wonderful thing! But it isn’t clear that’s what this is.

New comment by joeatwork in "Readyset: A MySQL and Postgres wire-compatible caching layer"

joeatwork — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 14:12:09 +0000

This isn’t an open source project (which isn’t a bad thing! Just a non-obvious thing if you don’t scroll down their whole readme)

New comment by joeatwork in "Show HN: Numbat – A programming language with physical dimensions as types"

joeatwork — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 18:27:03 +0000

If I’m reading this correctly, the Frink language has similar features (and also seems darn useful!) https://frinklang.org/

New comment by joeatwork in "Database Performance at Scale – A free book"

joeatwork — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 16:15:51 +0000

There are a bunch of common workloads (including i’m guessing HN itself) where the trade offs for distributed databases make them a lot harder to use well, or where distributed databases don’t make sense.

New comment by joeatwork in "US Government may require open source software to use memory safe languages"

joeatwork — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 12:06:43 +0000

I’m not seeing “require” in this document. It looks like the document is proposing education and funding for memory safe projects here.

New comment by joeatwork in "Jacobin: A more than minimal JVM written in Go"

joeatwork — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 14:39:42 +0000

slow clap

Rotatingsandwiches.com Wins the Tiny Awards

joeatwork — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 13:28:38 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/kleinkleinklein/status/1683822941895532545

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36861899

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by joeatwork in "I claim Rich Hickey is wrong about non-null arguments to functions (2020)"

joeatwork — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 22:58:24 +0000

I think the poster means that adding null is a big, substantial change to the interface - if you have a function that used to not make sense with a null argument, and then it suddenly does make sense with a null, then the function has changed in a way observable to callers.