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alpb

7,137 karma · joined October 26, 2011

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alpb··on Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly
Similarly 0 grammatical errors flagged: "My name John. What your name? What day today?"
alpb··on The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State
Doesn't that include all home Starlink devices?
alpb··on Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet
It's not a tiling manager but slightly related: I replicated Spectacle/Rectangle (macOS apps) on Windows a while ago to snap windows to edges/corners/two-thirds/one-thirds etc a while back. If you're interested: https://github.com/ahmetb/RectangleWin/blob/main/README.md
alpb··on Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated
Unfortunately our country has no motion any longer and the crumbling infrastructure is a good sign of prolonged decay that has started.

I think this whole article/title is ragebait at best.

alpb··on DeepSeek open source DeepEP – library for MoE training and Inference
That’s an impossible ask. Sam is the pinnacle of capitalist ruling class, he’s a pure businessman. He has no interest in giving anything for free unless there’s a business plan. He doesn’t care about humanity. He’ll pretend to change the world and tell you that they’re inventing AGI, Q*, strawberry or whatever they’re branding it, but the reality is he knows it’s all over and unless there’s a major breakthrough this company will be in major financial trouble. Sorry for the rant but he doesn’t deserve much respect for turning all this science to grift. He’s actually the person the old openai board warned everyone about.
alpb··on Write the post you wish you'd found
I'm working one of such blog posts as we speak. Past few months I've been purely publishing articles in my domain (Kubernetes) that go really deep into things that I've discovered the hard way, or code walkthroughs in OSS codebases.
alpb··on One year after switching from Java to Go
Presumably you control the entire handler stack in Go. So you can extend the HandlerFunc signature with parameters customizations to carry explicit structs, or return “error”, for example.
alpb··on Show HN: yknotify – Notify when YubiKey needs touch on macOS
I'm looking at the source code but not seeing any notification popups etc. Where's the notification mechanism beyond writing to stdout? Am I misunderstanding the project's use case?
alpb··on Nobody cares
FWIW there are definitely homeless people in Tokyo. Under a lot of overpasses in the affluent Shinjiku area, you'll find many homeless people living long-term. I was there as recent as last year and I wouldn't say it's nonexistent. :) Definitely an order of magnitude less than any major US city, however.

https://www.huckmag.com/article/yusuke-nagata-photographer-d...

https://metropolisjapan.com/tokyos-homeless/

alpb··on Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
Yeah, I'm not sure why we're pretending this will benefit the public. The only benefit is that it will create employment, and datacenter jobs are among the lowest paid tech workers in the industry.
alpb··on Show HN: LLMpeg
I'd probably use GitHub's `??` CLI or `llm-term` that already this without needing to install a purpose-specific tool. Do you provide any specific value add on top of these?
alpb··on Show HN: Interactive systemd – a better way to work with systemd units
Why have you picked Python for this project? I feel like Rust/Go have better TUI ecosystems and the ability to use native bindings.
alpb··on Nobody cares
It's most likely capitalism doing this to us. A lot of people are disenfranchised in society, most are alienated from their labor, don't feel happy about the work they do –if they have any control over it at all. Most of us don't have "third places" we go every day, we don't spend our days hanging out with our loved ones. Most of us are mainly isolated, maybe not intentionally, but work-rest-sleep-work cycle doesn't leave a lot of room for recreation or socializing.

Money doesn't fix any of our problems either, even if you're one of the few lucky to have enough of it, you can't possibly be happy living society perpetually decaying. We'll always be as happy as our neighbor.

alpb··on FFmpeg by Example
I love "X by Example" sites! But if you don't work with a tool like ffmpeg imagemagick day in and out, there's no way you'll remember their unintuitive syntax or will want to spend the time to get your one-time job done. I'd still probably not use this site to scan a dozen of examples and try to put together the pieces of the puzzle; instead, I'd probably just use an LLM who already scanned the entire web corpus and can probably get me to a solution faster, right? At that point, I wonder what folks get out of this site?
alpb··on Snyk security researcher deploys malicious NPM packages targeting cursor.com
Wiz.io (who almost sold to Google for $25bn) also had founders from IDF Unit 8200. Dozens of other companies like Waze, Palo Alto Networks were also the same.
alpb··on TiDB – cloud-native, distributed SQL database written in Go
Yeah that and the actual core storage engine is a key-value store library called https://github.com/tikv/tikv which is written in Rust. I suspect the Go part only handles the replication component, MVCC, query planner, server etc.
alpb··on Show HN: Artemis, a Calm Web Reader
I initially thought this would be an Instapaper alternative, or maybe a "Reader mode" similar to the one in Safari, but turns out it's a RSS reader? If so, I wouldn't necessarily call it a web reader.
alpb··on Breaking down OpenAI's outage: a hidden DNS dependency in Kubernetes
I think the author is assuming OpenAI is using CoreDNS which is likely not true.
alpb··on Show HN: I built an open-source data pipeline tool in Go
Congrats Burak, I can tell a lot of work has gone into this. If I may recommend, a comparison of this project with similar other/state-of-the-art projects would be really good to have in your documentation set for others to understand how your approach differs from them.
alpb··on Cyphernetes: A Query Language for Kubernetes
Kubernetes only lets you query resources by object type and that's only a prefix range scan on etcd database. There are no indexes whatsoever in the exhaustive LIST queries, and kube-apiserver handles serialization of the objects back and forth between multiple wire types. Over the years there has been a lot of optimizations, but you don't wanna list all pods in a 5000 node high density cluster every time you spin up client-side tools like this.
alpb··on Cyphernetes: A Query Language for Kubernetes
During many years of operating several-thousands of nodes production clusters on Kubernetes, I've never seen any of these observability tools that query kube-apiserver work at that scale. Even the popular tools like k9s make super expensive queries like listing all pods in the cluster that if you don't have enough load protections, can tip your Kubernetes apiserver over and cause an incident. If you're serious about these querying capabilities, I highly recommend building your own data sources (e.g. watch objects with a controller and dump the data in a sql db) and stop hitting apiserver for these things. You'll be better off in the long run.
alpb··on This website is hosted on Bluesky
Right now it's the only page under site:bsky.network if you search for that. Hilarious and awesome! https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Absky.network Daniel is a great hacker.
alpb··on Show HN: Rill – Composable concurrency toolkit for Go
There are also libraries like https://github.com/Jeffail/tunny or https://pkg.go.dev/go.uber.org/goleak or https://github.com/fatih/semgroup to help deal with concurrency limits and goroutine lifecycle management.

As the author of https://github.com/ahmetb/go-linq, it's hard to find adoption for libraries offering "syntactic sugar" in Go, as the language culture discourages those kind of abstractions and keeping the code straightforward.

alpb··on Visualizing 13M Bluesky Users
Twitter used to have a Firehose API, too. Over time they closed it, and made it only available to large users like Google Search with real-time indexing needs.
alpb··on A change of heart regarding employee metrics
I don’t know if you’ve worked in a large corporate environment but usually your success depends on others. If you’re a a tech lead, you rely on other individuals to deliver. If the whole project fails, nobody gets their promotions or bonuses anyway. So it’s rather a collective effort to get the teams in a well executing state.
alpb··on A change of heart regarding employee metrics
OK, I'll bite. I think if you're a technical team lead in a large organization, it is rather your job to point out what's working and what's not working from a technical perspective. If managers could figure this out, they most likely would not end up being people managers after all (insert if those kids could read meme.jpg). Sadly, nowadays even the most large tech companies have enough red tape and bullshit going on (OKRs, alignments, escalations, Q4 plannings, weekly 1:1s with all reports etc) to keep people managers full-time occupied. Most people managers nowadays neither have the chops to understand the work that's taking place on the ground, nor have the time to track it.

So it falls on a tech lead to point out who are the sailors in the ship that are not rowing (or worse paddling backwards). I'm not saying "go build a git commit counter dashboard" but if you're working with dozens of people and it appears someone isn't delivering a lot of work lately, it helps you double check your assumption. (Again, not saying commits are a good metric.)

This blog post is definitely relatable to most of us because we join teams that are somewhat dysfunctional, and if you have the influence capital and the chops to turn that team into a place where hiring is done properly, people have motivated and the right amount of work and the room to grow, I think you can turn the ship around. Or maybe I'm too naïve and have a lot more to learn.

alpb··on Notepad++ is 21 years old
I expected to see some archaic screenshots not gonna lie. The article disappointed.
alpb··on Wait Until 8th
I feel like every sentence on this website has a missing <sup>[citation needed]</sup> next to it.
alpb··on Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
They've been doing 20% layoffs two years in a row now.
alpb··on JSON Patch
One of the biggest drawbacks of jsonpatch is not being able to patch an associative array (e.g. arrays with a unique key element).

This is most obvious in Kubernetes, where you have a list property like:

    "conditions": [{"type":"a", "status":"b"}, {"type":"c", "status":"d"}, ...]
and you can't really create a patch like "change the conditions[type="a"].status to foo". As a result, you usually end up doing a whole field patch.
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