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appwiz

2,342 karma · joined May 21, 2016

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/appwiz; my proof: https://keybase.io/appwiz/sigs/i0N1HdFNJO0FpHZP8eq_eZ11xJtYZTEY0JQBXfcTCcY ]

Technologist at Goldman Sachs. Previously, Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Comments/opinions are my own. To contact, email hn AT rohand dot com

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appwiz··on Tell HN: Happy New Year
Happy New Year from the foothills of the Cascades in Washington state!

Vibe coding helped me build several small games for my daughter and unlocked her interest in programming.

Wishing everyone a wonderful 2026 - it's going to be a great year!

appwiz··on Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira
Cloudflare for the domains that it supports.
appwiz··on Lessons from a fountain pen addict
Another Lamy Safari fan here. It’s my preferred pen amongst the others in my collection. Though, I just discovered the Lamy CP1, which feels like a sleeker version of the Safari. I’m giving the CP1 an honest go right now.
appwiz··on Microsoft Paint now has layers and transparency
Actual blog post from Microsoft: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/09/18/paint-a...
appwiz··on Compiling Rust for .NET, using only tea and stubbornness
1-click link to Uniffi https://mozilla.github.io/uniffi-rs/
appwiz··on Why bumblebees love cats and other beautiful relationships (2021)
Obligatory Oatmeal comic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill
appwiz··on Microsoft open sources Salus software bill of materials (SBOM) generation tool
There is an open source UI for querying based on SBOM called DependencyTrack (https://dependencytrack.org/). Commercial offerings exist from vendors like TideLift (https://tidelift.com/).
appwiz··on How to Open a Door (1979) [video]
Order sushi like a CEO https://youtu.be/-gdjieGyB5s
appwiz··on I started a paper website business
Pricing is at https://openai.com/api/pricing/
appwiz··on Three Former U.S. Intelligence Operatives Admit Hacking for United Arab Emirates
Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28530963
appwiz··on Simulator of digging a tunnel through the earth
Somnath temple https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somnath_temple
appwiz··on Amazon.com and its app are currently broken
I’d guess there’s a statement in the source code somewhere like

  if user == ‘jeff bezos ’
that needs to be updated to

  if user in (‘jeff bezos’, ‘andy jassy’)
Pseudo code above. Could be the userids, usernames, internal aliases, levels, etc.

This is first time an Amazon CEO has changed so infrequently used code paths are going to be exercised.

appwiz··on Can’t use iCloud with “true” as the last name
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26364569
appwiz··on Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
Apple acquired buddybuild in 2018 (https://www.buddybuild.com/blog/buddybuild-is-now-part-of-ap...).

For CI/CD providers, it depends on how they offer the underlying macOS environment. If they target enterprise workloads that have stringent compliance needs, then this offering is a net benefit especially if the enterprise is already on AWS. The cost isn't cheap but there are many ways to price it as a value added provider.

appwiz··on 'Person in jetpack' spotted flying again near LA airport
Is that Elon Musk working on his jetpack personal transporter? <grin>

More seriously, if you are so inclined to build your own, here are instructions: https://timwylie.com/files/jetpack/building.pdf

I tried but quickly decided that I wasn't sufficiently motivated.

appwiz··on Microsoft Excel’s 35th birthday
One of the best Excel tips video I’ve seen is by Joel Spolsky - aptly named “You suck at Excel”. I’ve been an Excel user forever and this video taught me about features that I never knew existed.

Have a look: https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c

appwiz··on Hotels of Pyongyang
I read a blog diary by someone that took the train from Vienna thru Russia, then the closed (in 2008) border town of Tumangan, and then to Pyongyang. They spent multiple days touring Pyongyang and thereabouts in what appeared to be a strictly guided tour. Fascinating read.

http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/

appwiz··on Simon Says: 'Invent'
> originator of video game systems (U.S. Patent No. 3728480) that now nurture a $15 billion a year industry.

Article needs a 2010 tag. Wikipedia[1] states the 2018 estimate is $135 billion.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry
appwiz··on CRDTs: The Hard Parts [video]
Got it. I’ve typically seen Operational Transforms brought up as the alternative to CRDT for real-time collaboration. But, if you don’t need to solve for that use case and the format is JSON, it’s a different problem to solve and you don’t need that journal of changes.

If you have code available in the public domain, I’d love to see it.

appwiz··on CRDTs: The Hard Parts [video]
> I've ended up using other less sound (more prone to failure), but more practical methods of doing sync.

Could you share the alternative methods that you’ve used?

appwiz··on The Constrained RESTful Application Language (CoRAL)
Looks like I posted a early draft. The latest draft is at https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-core-coral-03
appwiz··on Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?
tldr from the article: possibly, I don’t know.
appwiz··on Show HN: Base24 binary-to-text encoding for humans
I’d love to see your implementation.
appwiz··on Modern cloud architecture on AWS: server fleets and databases
You can have millions of consumers read concurrently from a single SQS queue. Messages that are read remain in the queue up to the configured retention period or until a consumer calls DeleteMessage.

Source: I’ve built very high volume services that continue to run production workloads and use SQS as the buffer between components.

appwiz··on A Year with the Surface Go
Are there specific sellers that you follow?
appwiz··on Show HN: Chromda – Serverless Website Screenshots
Very nice! You should publish it to the Serverless App Repo (https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/serverlessrepo/)
appwiz··on Man sentenced to prison after assault of domain name owner who refused to sell
Long version of this story - https://onezero.medium.com/the-influencer-and-the-hit-man-6c...
appwiz··on The Amazon Builders' Library
Colm and Marc frequently post great threads about distributed system design on Twitter. Definitely worth a follow: https://twitter.com/mndoci/status/1202641319643869184

And on a personal note, I’m astounded and so lucky that I get to work with these amazing engineers!

appwiz··on Amazon Braket – Get Started with Quantum Computing
Jeff Barr's post - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-braket-get-started-w...
appwiz··on Building a Parser
Neat article.

If you’re interested in more material, there is also Ruslan’s phenomenal 17 part series that walks thru how to build an interpreter.

https://ruslanspivak.com/lsbasi-part1/

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