Hacker News: jonathanoliver

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft"

jonathanoliver — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:47:17 +0000

Kinda reminds of the time Microsoft used git internally but was pushing Team Foundation Server.

New comment by jonathanoliver in "San Francisco coyote swims to Alcatraz"

jonathanoliver — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:31:04 +0000

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br4-VsvRcII

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Consider using Zstandard and/or LZ4 instead of Deflate"

jonathanoliver — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 21:34:17 +0000

For Go, we've been using this library which supports ZSTD. https://github.com/klauspost/compress

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Geocoding APIs compared: Pricing, free tiers and terms of use"

jonathanoliver — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 03:08:12 +0000

Founder of Smarty here, so there's some obvious bias.

We've been in the geocoding space for over 12+ years. A geocoding API should be easy to set up, deliver rooftop-accurate geocodes, be transparent about accuracy, persist in perpetuity, have a clear pricing structure, and be lightning fast.

Smarty has geocodes for 210 million US addresses, including 20 million non-USPS addresses. Our US Rooftop Geocoding product is 97% accurate to the rooftop or parcel of the property. Perpetual use of our geocoding data is also available, and Smarty does have licensing available for re-syndicating lat/long points in your APIs. Our entry-level plans for US Rooftop Geocoding have rate limits of 25,000 addresses/second. (Most customers won't reach this speed, but you're welcome to try.)

The best way to determine a company's geocoding accuracy is to test their products directly.

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)"

jonathanoliver — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:04:01 +0000

Debian is fat?? I always thought it was a nice, minimalist server distro.

New comment by jonathanoliver in "IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp"

jonathanoliver — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 05:45:02 +0000

We use Nomad where I work and we LOVE it. Previous to Nomad we used K8s for several years which, at that point, allowed us to become cloud agnostic. With the move to Nomad about 3+ years ago, we were able to transition away from cloud and back to leased, bare metal machines. During our time with K8s, it didn't have a good bare-metal strategy with their ingress mechanism. In contrast, as we investigated Nomad, it was easy to deploy on pure metal without a hypervisor. The result of our migration to Nomad was having so many capable and far-less-expensive hosting options. Lastly, as part of our Nomad control plane, we also adopted Vault and Consul with great success.

I know there are horror stories around this acquisition and lots of predictions about what will happen, but only time will tell. On a minimum, it has been a delight to use the Hashicorp software stack along with the approach they brought to our engineering workflow (remember Vagrant?). These innovations and approaches aren't going away.

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)"

jonathanoliver — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 01:38:38 +0000

I just replied to an earlier message on this thread with the same offer:

I’d love to have you email your mailing address to support@smarty.com with a link to this HN thread. We may be able to help fix some of this.

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)"

jonathanoliver — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 01:37:15 +0000

Send your address to support@smarty.com and link to this HN thread. I’ll keep an eye watching out for it. I’d love to see what our system does with your address.

We have non-postal addresses and a lot of other mechanisms to help here. We also have contacts at the USPS and others to help fix addresses.

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)"

jonathanoliver — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 01:32:47 +0000

Thanks for the shout-out. Founder of Smarty here.

Regarding article, it really depends on the use case of whether to use ZIP Code (TM), postal code, Canada Post Forward Sortation Area, lat/lon, Census Bureau block and tract, etc.

As has been noted, the ZIP Code is often good enough for aggregating data together and can be a good first step if you don’t know where to start.

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Second-Hand Bookshops in Britain: 2024 Report"

jonathanoliver — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 07:18:46 +0000

A.Z. Fell has a decent bookshop but when I called recently they said: "Fell's Bookshop. We probably don't have what you're looking for and we wouldn't sell it to you if we did."

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Go-Safeweb"

jonathanoliver — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 04:05:36 +0000

They should put it on all of their officially supported ones too!

https://killedbygoogle.com/

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Robot Dog with Gun Turret for Hunting Aerial Drones Being Tested by Army"

jonathanoliver — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 02:09:56 +0000

This reminds me of the droid in the 1987 Robocop movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYsulVXpgYg

What could go wrong?

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Can we talk to whales?"

jonathanoliver — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 18:27:23 +0000

Why would you start with the two-smartest species on the planet? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...

New comment by jonathanoliver in "BlazingMQ: High-performance open source message queuing system"

jonathanoliver — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 22:12:26 +0000

Aeron is another awesome project from Martin Thompson (Disruptor, Simple Binary Encoding, Mechanical Sympathy, etc.).

That guy really knows his stuff regarding performance.

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Australians scour desert for dangerous radioactive capsule smaller than a penny"

jonathanoliver — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 05:31:31 +0000

Obligatory Spaceballs reference about combing the desert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYge6ehH9fo

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Photos capture life inside a drop of seawater"

jonathanoliver — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 13:28:45 +0000

I probably shouldn't mention how much seawater I accidentally swallow whenever I'm in the ocean swimming.

New comment by jonathanoliver in "How to store your app's entire state in the url"

jonathanoliver — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 20:29:20 +0000

When I saw this idea all I could think of was the ASP.NET "postback" form data and URL data! I'm glad to not have to deal with that anymore.

New comment by jonathanoliver in "Building a website like it's 1999"

jonathanoliver — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 21:22:11 +0000

I only had Notepad (the default Windows text editor). I longed for Microsoft Frontpage and HoTMetaL and Dreamweaver. Looking back, I'm glad gained experience on the native experience rather than through the editor abstractions because it forced me to learn.

New comment by jonathanoliver in "2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?"

jonathanoliver — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 21:19:29 +0000

I've been running Arch Linux for about 2 years two high-powered desktop machines (home and work). I run `sudo pacman -Syu` every day and I've only had one video driver update (nvidia) that broke me. I had to login from the CLI (which I'm using all the time anyway) to rollback and pin the version.

It's been an incredibly smooth experience.

That said, the one thing that I still haven't migrated over to fully is Linux on a laptop. I'm macOS on an Apple MacBook Pro 14" (powered by Apple's M1 Pro).

New comment by jonathanoliver in "The pocket guide to debugging"

jonathanoliver — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 14:33:27 +0000

Just bought the 12-pack version. I love Julia's website.