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brian-armstrong

5,214 karma · joined November 29, 2015

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brian-armstrong··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
Ah, in that case, you would certainly be excused for trying to kill one or two of them.
brian-armstrong··on MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID
The people who still use Windows yet complain about this are quite confusing to me. There's been every indication that it will keep going like this for years now, and the cost of switching is just not that high. If you're still riding that train it's time to just embrace it.
brian-armstrong··on Tidal Cycles – Live coding music with Algorithmic patterns
Is this related to the streaming service of the same name?
brian-armstrong··on Show HN: SIMD Viterbi Decoder in Rust
Interesting. I'll have to give it a try. If I understand your suggestion, you're saying that rather than doing 2 lookups for logs, then an addition, and then another lookup to exp back, we could just precompute the whole thing for any 2 arguments and do one lookup in a table? It's worth noting that some of the operations already use the mul_log format which just does an add with wraparound, but I could certainly see the big table option helping when we truly need field.mul

As far as LDPC, I'd love to, but I need to get a better understanding of them first. I'll probably go for Turbo next just because conceptually they feel closer to the convolutional codes I have already. But time willing, it'd be fun to do both.

brian-armstrong··on Show HN: SIMD Viterbi Decoder in Rust
Oh! Gotcha! I put a table in the README that lays it all out https://github.com/brian-armstrong/fec#performance

tldr: My library matches or beats libfec's SSE2 assembly for convolutional codes and pretty steadily beats it in Reed-Solomon. For the convolutional codes, my crate is using a generic, templated decoder rather than hand-written assembly, so it was nice to see that I could match the performance.

brian-armstrong··on Show HN: SIMD Viterbi Decoder in Rust
I used the benchmarking binaries that ship with libfec. My own crate has a libfec-compatible C shim, so I can link the benchmark against the Rust crate. The benchmark itself reports time spent for a given number of iterations, so the throughput can just be extrapolated from that.
brian-armstrong··on Show HN: SIMD Viterbi Decoder in Rust
You could certainly call this crate through a shim in goestools but you'd have to add a Rust dependency. But you could also rewrite goestools in Rust, though it wouldn't be a small undertaking. This crate does have everything you'd need for the forward error correction, at least.
brian-armstrong··on Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling
The models would have to get significantly better for this to help, though. Unedited LLM dialog is quite bad. Though, I wouldn't put it past AAAs to try anyway.
brian-armstrong··on GLM-5.2 is a step change for open agents
I read these stories and I can never figure out how people are managing to use these $200 plans. If I really go full bore, I can sometimes max out the $20 plan. Even then, it already produces more code than I can reasonably review and merge.
brian-armstrong··on 'We had to get out of the way': The backlash over delivery robots
Absolutely. Let them fend for themselves in the streets.
brian-armstrong··on Ferrari Luce
Yikes. That's a car that looks like it gets its lunch money taken by the other cars.
brian-armstrong··on Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans
It's good, but you still have to pay monthly for it. Feels like it kind of defeats the point of having a local collection.
brian-armstrong··on GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay
What? Most (all?) platforms let you opt out of this, and you receive payment when your shares are borrowed. And shares are fungible, how would it matter if one share is borrowed by 10 people or by none?
brian-armstrong··on Incident with Issues and Webhooks – Resolved
Not comparable at all. Xbox would be mostly transient traffic. It's probably not much more than packet forwarding for a lot of traffic.

Github is a giant complicated stateful mess with a lot of reads and writes. It also has a lot of features at this point. Hard to scale and hard to optimize.

brian-armstrong··on Spain's parliament will act against massive IP blockages by LaLiga
Why would you ever accept a mismatched certificate? Even assuming that you think your ISP has no nefarious plans, are you going to be able to rigorously confirm it's their certificate? At that point you've bypassed all the mechanisms in your browser that do this heavy lifting for you.
brian-armstrong··on 8647 Is a Prime Number
Or the Cinco Encyclopedia of Numbers https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZI3QxgjLGbQ

Thanks, Cinco

brian-armstrong··on How Costco Won in Japan
It'd be nice if AI-written articles had an [AI] after the headline
brian-armstrong··on Launch HN: RunAnywhere (YC W26) – Faster AI Inference on Apple Silicon
What kind of self-disrespecting dev is using MacOS in TYOOL 2026?
brian-armstrong··on Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
It seems unlikely that "is user adult" is not already easily modeled by any of these companies to within a very high degree of confidence. Even 15 or 20 years ago Google search could bracket your age pretty effectively. It doesn't seem like this adds metadata that wasn't already there.
brian-armstrong··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)
Location: SF / Remote

Remote: Mostly (Open to 0 - 3 days/wk in office)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Rust, Elixir, Typescript, Python

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-armstrong-sf/

Email: brian.hn.hireme@gmail.com

Hello HN! I'm a Staff Software Engineer with a variety of backend experience. I helped Discord scale its WebRTC system and helped guide its media infra (blog post: https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-resizes-150-million-ima... ). Currently open to work where I can put my skills to use and help get your projects into production.

Some of my personal and working traits: I'm a big fan of data-driven decision making. I think the best time to think about "how are we going to deploy this" is before any code gets written. I think empathy is underrated and I prefer over-communication to under-.

Cheers!

brian-armstrong··on Microsoft suspects some PCs might not boot after Windows 11 January 2026 Update
You don't really need Windows for gaming anymore unless you're playing the games that absolutely insist on kernel-level anti-cheat. Proton is extremely good on Linux these days.
brian-armstrong··on Purdue University approves new AI requirement for all undergrads
https://archive.ph/g1a1X
brian-armstrong··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)
Location: SF / Remote

Remote: Mostly (Open to 0 - 3 days/wk in office)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Rust, Elixir, Typescript, Python

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-armstrong-sf/

Email: brian.hn.hireme@gmail.com

Hello HN! I'm a Staff Software Engineer with a variety of backend experience. I helped Discord scale its WebRTC system and helped guide its media infra (blog post: https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-resizes-150-million-ima... ). Currently open to work where I can put my skills to use and help get your projects into production.

Some of my personal and working traits: I'm a big fan of data-driven decision making. I think the best time to think about "how are we going to deploy this" is before any code gets written. I think empathy is underrated and I prefer over-communication to under-.

Cheers!

brian-armstrong··on LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs
I'm curious, how did you make it this far in life without realizing that paint is delicate and scratches easily? Do you have untreated brick walls in your house or something?
brian-armstrong··on Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data
It would surely depend on the SSD and the firmware it's running. I don't think you can entirely count on it. Even if it were working perfectly, and your strategy was to power the SSD on periodicially to refresh the cells, how would you know when it had finished?
brian-armstrong··on Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data
It's quite possible. Some SSDs are worse offenders for this than others. I have some Samsung 870 EVOs that lost data the way you described. Samsung knew about the issue and quietly swept it under the rug with a firmware update, but once the data was lost, it was gone for good.
brian-armstrong··on Unpowered SSDs slowly lose data
Powering the SSD on isn't enough. You need to read every bit occasionally in order to recharge the cell. If you have them in a NAS, then using a monthly full volume check is probably sufficient.
brian-armstrong··on LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs
As long as the car is dirty, then contact with it can damage the top coat. This is a lot more true if you need to drag or scrape the magnet to remove it.
brian-armstrong··on LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs
Decided to scratch up some peoples' clear coats for a little science experiment?
brian-armstrong··on How many video games include a marriage proposal? At least one
Thank you for sharing the video way back when. I remember thinking it was very touching.
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