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abrahms

642 karma · joined October 27, 2007

Programmer living in PDX.

b376d5d679f0a69bbfd9776d1ef1038e5ecb88146fb1629153ecdf7dd1a6c0063e0040f74e56e48002dcb1796915fe3df3babfc3921baf52f86bbde511bceccd

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/justinabrahms; my proof: https://keybase.io/justinabrahms/sigs/5R6gbHKSQ5wFy1cywMe52FSJ-ROaemrqjrG-0MIfCho ]

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abrahms··on After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
This doesn't sound correct. We have computers write binary for us. We still make protocols which are optimizations for binary representation.. not because it's a pain to write.. but because there's some second order effect that we care about (storage / transfer costs, etc).
abrahms··on Gleam Gathering 2026
tl;dr - New(ish?) erlang-y language
abrahms··on Wikipedia as a Graph
I've wanted this for literal years. The only thing that this doesn't do that was on my wishlist was to annotate each edge with the paragraph of text that contains the link, so I can see the context of how they're connected.
abrahms··on US tech rules the European market
If you recall that "venture capital" was literally about financing ships in the 16-1700s.. it would make sense that NL & UK, both massive naval powers, would have some experience and a culture around VC.
abrahms··on Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
Interestingly, this webpage doesn't load due to "no healthy upstream" and there's no status.starlink.com . That's.. quite the outage! Interested to hear what went wrong.
abrahms··on Local-first software (2019)
You don't have to keep servers running if there aren't servers (p2p) or you offload it onto some other cloud.
abrahms··on OpenFeature – a vendor-agnostic, community-driven API for feature flagging
Forgive my ignorance, but what should it be doing instead?
abrahms··on How ham radio endures
You don't have to learn morse code to pass the initial HAM test.
abrahms··on How Deep Can Humans Go?
There was a youtube video I came across a few weeks ago which took Usain Bolt's world record and did a bio-mechanical analysis to see how far off he was from his absolute theoretical best. It was... surprisingly close. I think they had him at like an 8.9s 100m if he did everything perfectly.
abrahms··on There aren't that many uses for blockchains (2022)
I believe this depends on the location of hosting. One version is that things are hosted by URI on wizards.com. Another is the data being stored on something content-addressable like IPFS where anyone with the content can verifiably attest to both ownership (b/c it's on the block chain) and that this is the real thing (b/c the content hashes match).
abrahms··on There aren't that many uses for blockchains (2022)
Not OP, but based on my (limited) understanding.. it should be possible to use something like a smart contract to provide a stable and auditable surface area whereby two parties could exchange funds for goods via escrow. You would be trusting the underlying platform, but it seems to remove the dependence on the person selling to you as being a good actor.
abrahms··on Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon
Almost certainly not. Apple wants people to use apps, so "pushing people to use apps" wouldn't be cause for backlash.

Instead, I suspect they saw the money that patreon made and want a (30%) slice of that pie.

abrahms··on OpenFeature: Standardizing Feature Flagging
Just mentioning that tracking isn't left as a rough draft, but rather it's being actively worked on. For reference, eBay uses OpenFeature for their experimentation tooling.
abrahms··on Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative
Folks here might also be interested in https://calagator.org/ (portland's tech meetup calendar) which is open source and also in rails. https://github.com/calagator/calagator
abrahms··on Visualizing algorithms for rate limiting
You have to choose good defaults. For some systems, that's fail open. For others, it's different. I'd also begin to ask "are there solutions that are futher upstream and/or lower on the OSI model where we could handle this level of overwhelm?"
abrahms··on Visualizing algorithms for rate limiting
You could set it in a header (w3c baggage?) which is monitored by a dashboard, as an example.
abrahms··on Show HN: Goralim - a rate limiting pkg for Go to handle distributed workloads
https://stanza.systems is a managed thing that offers this functionality (and a bit more) if y'all are looking for an escape valve away from redis as the coordination mechanism.
abrahms··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2024)

  Location: Portland, OR
  Remote: Yes, hybrid in PDX is fine.
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Go, Python, Rust, Java, Javascript/Typescript, AWS, Kubernetes, etc
  Résumé/CV: https://justin.abrah.ms/resume.pdf
  Email: justin@abrah.ms
Hey folks.

I care a bunch about engineering efficiency, shipping products that customers like, and generally being a helper. I've been serving as a principal engineer for Fortune 500 companies for the past few years and I appreciate how that role allows me to help lots of folks get better at their job.

A role will probably be a good fit for me if:

  - the team wants to be better tomorrow than they are today (always learning / improving)
  - customer happiness/delight is a priority to the company
  - there is a clear direction for "success" (even if we might not yet know how to get there) and some way to measure if we've gotten there (even if that measurement might change over time)

I feel especially capable at helping you with:

  - cross-organizational initiatives
  - fundamental technology shifts and the reducation/replatforming that it requires
  - iteration of a legacy/needs-some-love code base towards a more maintainable place
  - open source strategy / involvement
Let's chat?
abrahms··on OPML is underrated
The "here's the content, you do the rendering" is very close to what gemini does. https://geminiprotocol.net/
abrahms··on Firefox on the brink?
My experience w/ most news outlets is that they have a random article I'm linked to. That's not worth a subscription in my mind. A news service you have an ongoing relationship with is.
abrahms··on Ask HN: Git hosting sites that do not require 2FA?
It isn't a true second factor. See here for a discussion on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/1Password/comments/1247mho/help_wit...
abrahms··on Seeking comments on the Data Catalog (DCAT) US standard v3.0
recommended title update: Replace DCAT with "Data Catalog (DCAT)"
abrahms··on Htmx is part of the GitHub Accelerator
Mobile phones have less powerful CPUs. Parsing large json objects and then building up a corresponding html structure may be more difficult than on the server (where you already have it loaded into memory anyway).
abrahms··on NASA has funded a bunch of early stage technologies
Astopharmacology sounds so cool, especially the use of microorganisms to synthesize medicines. I wonder how those drugs will mutate as the organisms go through breeding cycles..
abrahms··on Cedar is an open source policy language and evaluation engine
OPA allows you to make API calls from it. This doesn't. This makes the latency more deterministic.
abrahms··on Startups Are Scooping Up Big Tech’s Cast-Off Workers
It's not just the actual death toll but the trauma we cause children with active shooter drills, etc.
abrahms··on Ask HN: Open-source water cooler locations
Various foundations (CDF, CNCF, etc)
abrahms··on Marko: An HTML-Based Language
Put simply, many people are using older versions. There have been large developer experience improvements in the past year or so.
abrahms··on Job Hunting in 2022
It's a selection for socio-economic status. Hiring people who have enough excess time to do this grinding excludes people like parents of young toddlers. So.. you'll probably get a bunch of young single people w/ enough income to not need to have multiple gigs.
abrahms··on Ask HN: What are the reasons behind your success as a self-taught programmer?
The real answer for me (and probably many other folks who are talking financial success): 1. Genuine interest in tech 2. Long periods of time alone with a computer 3. Being fairly early in a big section of the industry (web) 4. Aggressive "speed running" salary which got me near really smart folks
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