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dan_sblon SPF Record Syntax: Mechanisms, Qualifiers, Modifiers, and Macros

> SPF record syntax follows one shape:

The first six words do not scream "human written" to me.

dan_sblon Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

I took one of the examples ("Leveraging sqlpipe's robust...") and just prefixed it with this:

> Rewrite this using ASD-STE100 simplified technical English:

And you get a good-enough result, it seems? Maybe add another sentence or two for guidance, but what's with needing these giant skills, when ASD-STE100 was surely in the training material?

dan_sblon UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions

I believe a big issue was that significant amounts of parking were closed at each of the host stadiums for "security reasons", fan watch areas, etc. When they did some overhead shots of the stadiums, you could see tons of empty parking lot space.

dan_sblon The startup's Postgres survival guide

`timestamptz` is probably poorly named. It doesn't actually store a timezone at all - all values are stored as UTC. The underlying storage is 8 bytes and otherwise identical for both timestamp types. However, using `timestamptz` allows you to more easily group by day, hour of day, etc. in a non-UTC timezone when that makes sense. Especially when dealing with summer time/daylight savings time, this can be quite useful.

As far as storing a datetime with an associated timezone, I agree that usually this can be problematic. However, for things like weekly repeats, you may want to store broken out components so it handles cleanly across time switch boundaries - e.g. when going in and out of DST. So you'd have `timezone`, `time` (no TZ, no date), repeat schedule (likely using interval, internally stored in months/days/microseconds), and use these to set up your next exact timestamptz value.

dan_sblon NYC Subway Signals: A Complete Guide (2012)

Very similar detailed site for the Chicago L. Here's the signals page, but a ton more to explore as well: https://www.chicago-l.org/operations/signals/signals.html

dan_sblon Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

Just an FYI- your "Read more" link under "Seat Reservations" on both pages just leads back to the same page, rather than actually linking to anything offering more information.

dan_sblon Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

GTFS is widely adopted, "standardized", but also quite a wild west when it comes to the actual details. I've been building http://mobility-bot.com/ as a spare time project for two years, parsing the alerts GTFS feeds from a handful of providers, and for just about every one of them, I have to do something in the pipeline to clean up the provided data - fixing unicode issues, remapping route and agency IDs, rewriting headers and descriptions to not be identical, etc. You also have to watch and capture the data over time to make sure you have a corpus to generalize parsing and cleanup rules from.

Most of these projects made the smart choice to focus on a single or just a small handful of related providers. As soon as you're trying to aggregate, the problem becomes a lot trickier.

dan_sblon Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

Meanwhile, the sad state of intercity trains in the United States, outside of the Northeast Corridor.

https://asm.transitdocs.com/ https://amtraker.com/map

dan_sblon Workers Cache

Billion dollar company can't afford one human copywriter. The future is great! (edit: copyrighter -> copywriter)

dan_sblon Show HN: ZeroFS – A log-structured filesystem for S3

> The test suites run in public CI.

> Each card links to the CI pipeline.

Thanks for being explicit, AI written marketing site. Wouldn't have been able to figure that out! Every currently maintained and reasonably popular open source project either runs CI in public or makes the tests extremely easy to run.

dan_sblon The history of butterfly swimming

> unveiling it to the confusion of officials and competitors in a 150 yard medley race in 1933

The article doesn't say, but did the medley relay/IM become a 4 stroke event around the same time in 1952 when FINA recognized it as a new stroke? Funny to see a 150 yard event mentioned since it seems like such an odd distance nowadays.

dan_sblon But yak shaving is fun (2019)

This feels like what is really splitting the programming community right now- those that have typically enjoyed the journey, and those that just want to be at the destination as soon as possible.

dan_sblon Google employees internally share memes about how its AI sucks

> After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop."

I'll let that stand on it's own.

dan_sblon Restartable Sequences

I definitely misread it, thanks for the empathy comment!

dan_sblon Matrix Multiplications on GPUs Run Faster When Given “Predictable” Data (2024)

> For example, when the GPU is fully idle, nvidia-smi tells me that it’s only pulling 88W of power.

I haven't used a non-laptop GPU in some time, but that is a crazy amount of "idle" power consumption. Is this normal for cards like this?

dan_sblon That Methyl Methacrylate Tank

I believe they tried to inject some chemicals to slow the reaction, but the pump and/or valves failed and clogged.

dan_sblon Smartmedia Card Spec Opened, available free (2000)

My first MP3 player used it as well. I remember how much this memory card style felt like a 5¼ floppy disk, as opposed to most other formats at the time which were hard shell.

dan_sblon Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

> As a side effect, Terms-of-service acceptance records were also reset, prompting users to re-accept on their next visit to the dashboard.

Don't get me wrong- the rest of this mess falls pretty clearly on Google Cloud, but this one feels like something Railway did to themselves.

dan_sblon What “Amazon Supply Chain Services” Tells Us About What Amazon Is

I wanted to find this interesting, but it has AI/LLM signs of writing all over it.

The dig in the middle - "you can skip the next part, but if you do skip, are you even a real reader? Not judging. Just saying" - ugh. Why would I bother reading every word if you likely didn't write every word?

dan_sblon Snowflake Postgres, Lakebase, HorizonDB: Picking the Lock-In You Want

This reads like LLM generated post. "actually" is in three of the headers, among other signs. https://tropes.fyi/

dan_sblon The Rise of the Bullshittery

This is an Internationalized domain name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name) - the actual domain shows up in browsers as マリウス.com but HN unfortunately doesn't decode or show it that way.

dan_sblon Using the Tiptap rich text editor with a Go back end

I wrote up our experience of how to get Tiptap to play nice with a Go backend server, along with a lot of inline code snippets and a gist with the backend code. Happy to answer any other questions I may have missed in writing it up.

Even if you don't use the Tiptap editor, hopefully the idea of a sidecar container is helpful to someone trying to solve a similar problem of allowing Typescript/Node code to interact with Go.

dan_sblon Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)

Wow, did not know this site was still online. I apparently have a user ID in the 200s, was an early sign up to the site. https://www.ticalc.org/community/directory/

dan_sblon Going Full Time on Open Source

Good luck, and I hope it works out! Make sure you are ready to ride the roller coaster of highs and lows, as there are going to be many. Remember that your time and experience are the most valuable things you have - make sure you're in control of both.

dan_sblon Faster continuous integration builds at Canva

> As mentioned before, the CI critical path is bound by its longest stretch of dependent actions. If one test consistently takes 20 minutes to execute and flakes, and has some logic to retry on failure, let’s say up to 3 times, it’ll take up to 60 minutes. It doesn’t matter if all other builds and tests execute in 30 seconds. That one slow, flaky test holds everyone’s builds back for up to 1 hour.

Honestly, really surprised to not see this mentioned til the end. Some of the other things in the article were almost jaw-dropping ($1+ million in instances savings, needing 48 cores to run CI, etc.), but having flakey tests regularly causing you problems, having to rerun extremely expensive jobs, is something that I would argue should have been addressed first, not last.

dan_sblon We switched from Next.js to Astro (and why it might interest you)

Like some other commenters here who started with Bootstrap/jQuery/etc., I feel stuck in the stone ages at times. My most recent content-based site uses Hugo (https://gohugo.io/), but I'm starting to tire of the magic and gotchas I keep running into.

Can someone that has used Astro and an older static site generator framework explain the pros/cons of Astro in that context?