Hacker News: speedbird

New comment by speedbird in "Software Architecture Guide (2019)"

speedbird — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 10:06:12 +0000

You can use a well known template like ARC42 and insist on the maintenance of suitable indexes for agent access and review for coherence on a regular basis.

Ultimately any useful documentation needs active curation.

Getting devs to do this well is hard. Agents can be driven to do a fair job through suitable prompt frameworks and repetition eg as PR reviewers.

I’ve had reasonable success with a combination of space dimensions structured requirements and component based indexes and time dimensions of decision records and commits.

Also a strong design model to give common structure - hex arch with ports and adapters and pure business logic.

YMMV

New comment by speedbird in "Looking Forward to Postgres 19: It's About Time"

speedbird — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 22:04:44 +0000

Talk about back to the future. Pre-SQL Postgres had time travel.

New comment by speedbird in "thunderbolt-ibverbs: We have InfiniBand at home"

speedbird — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:53:17 +0000

Nice project but you should be able to get infiniband up between a pair of Linux boxes with cheap adapters / cables off ebayy

New comment by speedbird in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

speedbird — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:00:01 +0000

You can absolutely build robust products using agile. Apart from some of the human benefits of any kind of incremental/iterative development, the big win with Agile is a realistic way to elicit requirements from normal people.

New comment by speedbird in "Single vaccine could protect against all coughs, colds and flus"

speedbird — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 02:34:20 +0000

Interesting topic, offensive website. Back to the story …

New comment by speedbird in "gRPC: From service definition to wire format"

speedbird — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 13:57:32 +0000

And still I found it easier to use than gRPC.

New comment by speedbird in "Using an engineering notebook"

speedbird — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:28:35 +0000

This was definitely something I picked up from science education. Basically a technical journal.

These days I split between technical notes a write and store on the project git so others and the AI tools can read - eg architecture decision records, bug reports etc and then a separate personal linear time journal of what I’m doing / thinking/ task lists meeting notes etc, often with links to the project specific docs. Great for searching. What I miss from paper is ability to quickly sketch diagrams.

New comment by speedbird in "Avoiding fan traps in database design and system diagrams"

speedbird — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:28:20 +0000

Got to love the relational model. Learned about fan traps in data modelling course at uni in the early 80s

New comment by speedbird in "How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground"

speedbird — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 18:12:00 +0000

Sigh. Urban expectations. Come live in the sticks where I do and pay £35/m for about 15Mb. Actually had to go Starlink to be able to work from home properly. Swish fibre came round a few years ago and dug up all our roads and put fibre to all the phone poles but then vanished and nothing has happened since.

New comment by speedbird in "Minnesota officials say they can't access evidence after fatal ICE shooting"

speedbird — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:43:00 +0000

The US is so far out of line with the rest of the mostly civilised west it astonishes me. We know how this will go. Officer claims felt life was in danger (it wasn’t, and well over by the time he shot), investigation will drag to drop from popular consciousness, DA will say nothing to answer, civil prosecution, private settlement, nothing changes.

New comment by speedbird in "Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds"

speedbird — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 17:54:48 +0000

So why are you there then?

New comment by speedbird in "Germany votes to bring in voluntary military service programme for 18-year-olds"

speedbird — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 16:13:33 +0000

I think if you want the benefits of living in a country then you should be willing to defend it. This attitude of entitlement without responsibility is exactly what gives migrants a bad name.

New comment by speedbird in "UK's first small nuclear power station to be built in north Wales"

speedbird — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 13:25:50 +0000

Wylfa was Magnavox, not AGR. AGR was the next generation that never went full commercial.

Had a tour of the place back in the day before 9/11 and all that made the world a lot less fun.

New comment by speedbird in "How one of the longest dinosaur trackways in the world was uncovered in the UK"

speedbird — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 13:48:04 +0000

I think you missed the /s

New comment by speedbird in "As food delivery drones take off in Ireland, here are the most popular items"

speedbird — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 19:53:43 +0000

Dublin ain’t in the UK anymore

New comment by speedbird in "Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Alien: Covenant – Contemporary Horror of AI (2020)"

speedbird — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 19:31:07 +0000

Gotta have a boss fight at the end

New comment by speedbird in "A vibrator helped me debug a motorcycle brake light system"

speedbird — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 08:18:01 +0000

Fun signal processing project and all the sampling problems sound typical. Unless this is just for your bike, given that some of the pokey fours run up to 15k rpm ~ 250Hz primary, I think it would be a lot easier to use a significantly higher sample rate and then treat in the digital domain. If you can recognise the engine speed and signal as a reliable pattern (use a digital PLL?) you might be able to subtract it and get more of the chassis signal left. As another poster pointed out, if you could do a motorway run with a high sample rate you have a good dataset to experiment with, including seeing how far you could downsample and still get appropriate sensitivity and selectivity.

New comment by speedbird in "Britain's spies-for-hire are running wild"

speedbird — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 21:46:03 +0000

Time to reinforce treason legislation.

New comment by speedbird in "Gridfinity: The modular, open-source grid storage system"

speedbird — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 12:37:49 +0000

She’s quite a card

New comment by speedbird in "Gridfinity: The modular, open-source grid storage system"

speedbird — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 12:35:08 +0000

Got a proper chuckle, TU