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spooneybarger

4,484 karma · joined February 2, 2009

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spooneybarger··on Moving our warehouse off DuckDB
Unless something has changed in the last year, a lot of teams have serious problems with stability.
spooneybarger··on Pulsar at ESUG 2026 (new Smalltalk IDE)
It's taught in at least one of the universities there.
spooneybarger··on Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article
I've gone back to using Opus 4.6. It's quite nice along all these fronts.
spooneybarger··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
Thank you. The tweet values the readers time. The blog post. Dear lord. So much noise.

This was a great summation.

spooneybarger··on Choose DuckDB rather than SQLite
well played sir. well played.
spooneybarger··on .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
I, as a human, find that website decidedly unfriendly to quickly getting information. Particularly on mobile.
spooneybarger··on Codex for open source
Same. But I got one from Anthropic.
spooneybarger··on Alpine Linux 3.24.0 Released
It was never alpine.
spooneybarger··on Building Pi with Pi
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263889
spooneybarger··on “Too dangerous to release” or just too expensive?
Because the only thing keeping those vulnerabilities in existence was laziness.
spooneybarger··on Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI
Cirrus gave a ton of support for years to open source projects. I congratulate them on cashing out. Running a business like Cirrus did is always a hard road and I will never fault folks who gave time and resources on their platform away for taking the money.

I wish Fedor and everyone at Cirrus the best of luck and OpenAI and thank them immensely for the years of free CI they gave to us in the Pony programming language despite it not having any marketing value to them.

spooneybarger··on Top laptops to use with FreeBSD
That's a very small list.
spooneybarger··on Ask HN: Do you feel less happy when coding with agent?
No
spooneybarger··on Bombadil: Property-based testing for web UIs
An important step with property based testing and similar techniques is writing your own generators for your domain objects. I have used to it to incredible effect for many years in projects.

I work at Antithesis now so you can take that with a grain of salt, but for me, everything changed for me over a decade ago when I started applying PBT techniques broadly and widely. I have found so many bugs that I wouldn't have otherwise found until production.

spooneybarger··on Tony Hoare has died
Came through personal contact who is close to the family.
spooneybarger··on Tony Hoare has died
Yes. He died last week.
spooneybarger··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
More stuff for pony than you can shake a stick at.
spooneybarger··on Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents
predicting that a startup will fail is.. well, you got a ton of probability on your side there. so it isn't a particularly impressive thing to be right about.
spooneybarger··on GitHub experience various partial-outages/degradations
well played sir. well played.
spooneybarger··on You can't pay me to prompt
Well played sir. Well played
spooneybarger··on You can't pay me to prompt
That's an exceedingly unkind summation of the piece in question.
spooneybarger··on Ask HN: Will AI kill open-source software?
No
spooneybarger··on [dead]
working fine for me.
spooneybarger··on I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too
Well played sir. Well played
spooneybarger··on Httpz – Zero-Allocation HTTP/1.1 Parser for OxCaml
The OxCaml work is great. I don't use OCaml much but I have been following along with OxCaml as they are doing fascinating work that leverages a lot of research that interests me.
spooneybarger··on Httpz – Zero-Allocation HTTP/1.1 Parser for OxCaml
As a general rule, not all system calls are thread safe.
spooneybarger··on 500k tech workers have been laid off since ChatGPT was released
500k tech workers have been laid off since accounting for expenses under Section 174 changed on January 1, 2022.
spooneybarger··on I canceled my book deal
This sounds like my experience with a "major" technical publisher except we managed to get to the end.

I'd say that almost no one should work with the major technical publishers more than once. There's some good basic skills you learn but otherwise, they contribute very little that you couldn't get done on your own.

spooneybarger··on Tell HN: HN was down
Yes
spooneybarger··on GraphQL: The enterprise honeymoon is over
There are a lot of public facing graphql servers that use it without issue other than frustrating users of non adversarial but complex requirements. The problem is that it is generally on a per request basis.

An adversary is going to utilize more than a single query. It mostly protects against well intentioned folks.

Other forms of protection such as rate limiting are needed for threat models that involve an adversary.

The same problems exist with REST but there it is easier as you can know query complexity ahead of time at end points. GraphQL has to have something to account for the unknown query complexity, thus the additional heuristics.

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