Hacker News: rdoherty

New comment by rdoherty in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

rdoherty — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:56:18 +0000

I love reading, here's a few meatier books I've read recently:

* Seeing Like a State - great overview of how states (and corporations) lose visibility into reality due to the abstraction levels they operate at

* Normal Accidents - all about how things like nuclear reactors, ships and large systems naturally have accidents

* Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty - great easy read about how high reliability organizations manage complexity and dangerous, high tempo situations.

Map of America

rdoherty — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:27:07 +0000

Article URL: https://mapofamerica.wtf/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730228

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

BingeBuster

rdoherty — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:18:57 +0000

Article URL: https://bingebuster.net/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49215720

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

San Francisco Inches Closer to PG&E Acquisition

rdoherty — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:07:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.kqed.org/news/12090521/san-francisco-inches-closer-to-pge-acquisition

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48872209

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

San Francisco's housing market has lost its mind

rdoherty — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:06:03 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/08/san-franciscos-housing-market-has-lost-its-mind/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096844

Points: 4

# Comments: 4

Shopify/liquid: Performance: 53% faster parse+render, 61% fewer allocations

rdoherty — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:22:55 +0000

Article URL: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/13/liquid/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370755

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Addressing GitHub's recent availability issues

rdoherty — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:55:14 +0000

Article URL: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/addressing-githubs-recent-availability-issues-2/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366152

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by rdoherty in "Returning to Rails in 2026"

rdoherty — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:31:16 +0000

It's not just the untyped problems, the runtime definitions of functions, properties, etc make it nearly impossible to debug unless you have the state of your production data locally. (Or you ssh into your prod server and open up a REPL, load the state and introspect everything there). Good luck debugging locally in a nice IDE. It's a horrific nightmare. I use to love Ruby until I had to debug it live.

Chasing Boring at Just the Right Speed

rdoherty — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:11:20 +0000

Article URL: https://log.andvari.net/no-mttr.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47336665

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Block to lay off nearly half its staff in 'deliberate and bold' embrace of AI

rdoherty — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:34:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/block-plans-to-lay-off-nearly-half-its-staff-in-deliberate-and-bold-embrace-of-ai-81e99247

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47172288

Points: 9

# Comments: 2

New comment by rdoherty in "LinkedIn checks for 2953 browser extensions"

rdoherty — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:27:58 +0000

Skimming the list, looks like most extensions are for scraping or automating LinkedIn usage. Not surprising as there's money to be made with LinkedIn data. Scraping was a problem when I worked there, the abuse teams built some reasonably sophisticated detection & prevention, and it was a constant battle.

Ford pulls the plug on the F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck

rdoherty — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:40:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/15/nx-s1-5645147/ford-discontinues-f-150-lightning

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46282605

Points: 6

# Comments: 4

GPT's Glazing and the Danger of AI Agreeableness

rdoherty — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 05:21:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.siddharthbharath.com/gpts-glazing-ai-agreeableness/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976140

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by rdoherty in "How when AWS was down, we were not"

rdoherty — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:02:25 +0000

This is probably one of the best summarizations of the past 10 years of my career in SRE. Once your systems get complex enough, something is always broken and you have to prepare for that. Detection & response become just as critical as pre-deploy testing.

I do worry about all the automation being another failure point, along with the IaC stuff. That is all software too! How do you update that safely? It's turtles all the way down!

Incident.io Service disruption on October 20, 2025

rdoherty — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 14:33:24 +0000

Article URL: https://incident.io/blog/service-disruption-october-20th-2025

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45682265

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by rdoherty in "New California law restricts HOA fines to $100 per violation"

rdoherty — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 22:26:54 +0000

I'm a HOA president and while HOAs can be very extreme, the flip side is if homeowners are breaking rules designed to protect property or common areas (pool, lawns, playground, etc) a $100 is not enough to stop people. Thankfully our HOA focuses on our common areas and is responsible for all exteriors and lawns (it's all townhomes), so the lines are a bit clearer.

We've had all sorts of wild issues such as building scaffolding on top of balconies (not attached), ripping up common area plants, parking issues (we all have garages, street parking is guest only), drying food on the pool deck (really), dumping garbage bags outside in the common area and more. If we can only levy a $100 fine there's little incentive for some people to stop doing things that impact the community.

I do cringe when I hear about these crazy HOAs of what are usually a collection of single family homes. I think a better approach would be some kind of limitations of the what HOAs can have rules about vs the penalties. Interiors of homes should be generally off limits (aside from townhomes that are all technically 1 building, so you should not be doing anything structural without approval). For single family homes with private property surrounding them I'd rather there be limits that are purely for safety, legal reasons or impacting common areas.

New comment by rdoherty in "Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at SFO"

rdoherty — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 18:40:22 +0000

I took a Waymo that drove on an 'expressway' which had a speed limit of 40mph and it was definitely a different feeling. I did feel a bit scared, at 25mph it feels like a gentle theme park ride, at 40mph it's beyond that and feels dangerous.

Civics is boring, so, let's encrypt something (2024)

rdoherty — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 18:58:00 +0000

Article URL: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3703126

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45107505

Points: 55

# Comments: 70

New comment by rdoherty in "Atlassian terminates 150 staff"

rdoherty — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 22:45:16 +0000

Not explicitly, but there were rumors a few days before. Also the signs were there: every single meeting room was booked, meeting rooms all had water & tissues, etc.

New comment by rdoherty in "Atlassian terminates 150 staff"

rdoherty — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:08:04 +0000

I worked at Yahoo in 2008 when they laid off thousands and yes every single person got a calendar invite and met in a meeting room 1:1 with a manager. It was difficult but they did it. Times definitely have changed.