Hacker News: sam_bristow

New comment by sam_bristow in "GitHub Stacked PRs"

sam_bristow — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:31:59 +0000

Any idea if their internal version has improved dramatically since they stopped maintaining the public version?

New comment by sam_bristow in "GitHub Stacked PRs"

sam_bristow — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:10:27 +0000

What does Facebook use internally these days. I'm amazed that the state of review tools is still at or behind what we had a decade ago for the most part.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years"

sam_bristow — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 22:43:45 +0000

I believe that once the OpenBSD team started cleaning up some of the other gross coding style stuff as part of their fork into LibreSSL that even fairly simplistic static analysis tools could spot the underlying bugs that caused heartbleed.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Why New Zealand is seeing an exodus of over-30s"

sam_bristow — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 08:11:41 +0000

I'll give you most of those criticisms, but I'm a little surprised you think our tax system is overly complicated. For the vast majority of people it's pretty much just a progressive PAYE income tax handled by your employer and a flat 15% GST/VAT on purchases without all the carve outs that seem common elsewhere.

Genuinely curious what I'm missing.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Ada 2022"

sam_bristow — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:27:38 +0000

Assuming your discomfort is around the defense side of things here's an example of a diving reberather system using Spark/Ada from a while back.

https://youtu.be/zL9vVs5vHuQ?si=-thG-FkelkW6oFfb

New comment by sam_bristow in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

sam_bristow — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:31:56 +0000

One of my the papers I share around a lot is "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2002)"[1]. I like it because it's not purely about software so the examples resonate better with some exec level people in other teams I work with.

[1]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1167285

New comment by sam_bristow in "uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts"

sam_bristow — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 23:55:37 +0000

I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-bait (big part). It's the same reason I dropped Spotify a few years ago.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Show HN: A 45x45 Connections Puzzle To Commemorate 2025=45*45"

sam_bristow — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 07:08:32 +0000

2025 had a bunch of bits of fun mathematical trivia:

45² = 45 x 45 = 2025

Also,

9² x 5² = 2025

40² + 20² + 5² = 2025

My favourite?

1³+2³+3³+4³+5³+6³+7³+8³+9³ = 2025

New comment by sam_bristow in "Blue-Green Marker Light Standard for Autonomous Vehicles Gets Approved"

sam_bristow — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 07:38:18 +0000

I imagine pink is considered too close to red tail lights.

New comment by sam_bristow in "A “frozen” dictionary for Python"

sam_bristow — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 08:50:04 +0000

Honestly, if I was writing some code that depended on dicts being ordered I think I'd still use OrderedDict in modern Python. I gives the reader more information that I'm doing something slightly unusual.

New comment by sam_bristow in "The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video]"

sam_bristow — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 08:48:48 +0000

One key point that people overlook with that paper is that they were applying the coding standards retroactively. Taking an existing codebase, running compliance tools, and trying to fix the issues which were flagged. I think they correctly identified the issue with this approach in that you have all the risks of introducing defects as part of reworking the existing code. I don't think they have much empirical evidence for the case where coding standards were applied from the beginning of a project.

In my opinion, the MISRA C++ 2023 revision is a massive improvement over the 2008 edition. It was a major rethink and has a lot more generally useful guidance. Either way, you need to tailor the standards to your project. Even the MISRA standards authors agree:

"""

  Blind adherence to the letter without understanding is pointless.

  Anyone who stipulates 100% MISRA-C coverage with no deviations does not understand what the are asking for.
  
  In my opionion they should be taken out and... well... Just taken out.
    - Chris Hill, Member of MISRA C Working Group (MISRA Matters Column, MTE, June 2012

"""

New comment by sam_bristow in "PCB Edge USB C Connector Library"

sam_bristow — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 20:46:01 +0000

Back in my undergrad days I built a similar clip out of a broken clothes peg, hot glue, and some 2.54mm headers. It worked well.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink"

sam_bristow — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:23:03 +0000

I think the web itself would be stronger if it was served in pure HTML and not 95% created by JS SPAs.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Abstraction, not syntax"

sam_bristow — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 06:21:00 +0000

Stoke Space[1] uses a similar system, letting people write arbitrary code to generate a static configuration for their launch vehicle. It means you get all the power of something like Python during development but also a deterministic, bounded config for the critical flight systems. I think their config files are just TOML that is consumed by Rust.

I'll try dig out a link to the talk one of their Flight Software Engineers did on the concept.

[1] https://www.stokespace.com/

New comment by sam_bristow in "Vali, a C library for Varlink"

sam_bristow — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 06:10:40 +0000

I've only had a cursory look at Varlink, but it almost felt too simple. In particular the lack of unsigned or sized integers.

This might enf up being be fine, but it gave me pause when I looked at it previously.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Tutorial (2024)"

sam_bristow — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 06:47:19 +0000

I found Hillel Wayne's series of articles about the relationship between software and other engineering disciplines from a few years fairly insightful [1]. It's not _exactly_ the same topic but a lot of overlap in defining wht is "real engineering".

[1] https://hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

New comment by sam_bristow in "After the AI boom: what might we be left with?"

sam_bristow — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 20:57:38 +0000

Wasn't there a phenomenon with the GPUs being retired from crypto mining operations being basically cooked after a couple of years. Likely because they weren't keeping temperatures in check and just pushing the cards to their limits.

New comment by sam_bristow in "Jeep pushed software update that bricked all 2024 Wrangler 4xe models"

sam_bristow — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 20:34:57 +0000

Multi-version approaches to developing software aren't as good at reducing common-mode failures as many people expect[1].

[1] J. C. Knight and N. G. Leveson, “An experimental evaluation of the assumption of independence in multiversion programming,” IIEEE Trans. Software Eng., vol. SE-12, no. 1, pp. 96–109, Jan. 1986, doi: 10.1109/TSE.1986.6312924.

New comment by sam_bristow in "All-New Next Gen of UniFi Storage"

sam_bristow — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 23:09:47 +0000

Yes. Synology introduced the requirement to use first-party drives earlier this year and it was such an unmitigated disaster for them that they rolled it back just a couple of days ago.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/synology-caves-walks...

New comment by sam_bristow in "Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian"

sam_bristow — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:37:23 +0000

One feature I wish the Arch wiki had last time I used it was conditionally hiding sections. It presented various options throughout their guides and depending on which options you chose later sections weren't relevant. I often found I'd get partway through a step only to discover it wasn't relevant.

It would be great if, when presented with different options, you could indicate which one you'd selected and have it hide the irrelevant stuff further down the page