grey's comments | WingNews

grey | 2 months ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)

  Location: Ontario, Canada
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Go, Python, Java, AWS, GCP, K8s, SQL, etc.
  Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hFPH4PgodS_mIZ3lxERSU0hFbJX9KrvNd87jcPxwTiA/edit?usp=sharing
  Email: [email protected]

Staff+ Engineer with a backend and distributed systems focus. I love to build teams, orgs, and products with care. Have dabbled in a little bit of everything from microcontrollers to huge cross-cloud applications. I lean a little towards devops and though I haven't ever been an SRE/DevOps specialist, leaning that way has been a superpower for building products and platform tools.

grey | 4 months ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)

  Location: Ontario, Canada
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Go, Python, Java, AWS, GCP, K8s, SQL, etc.
  Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hFPH4PgodS_mIZ3lxERSU0hFbJX9KrvNd87jcPxwTiA/edit?usp=sharing
  Email: [email protected]

Staff+ Engineer with a backend and distributed systems focus. I love to build teams, orgs, and products with care. Have dabbled in a little bit of everything from microcontrollers to huge cross-cloud applications. I lean a little towards devops and though I haven't ever been an SRE/DevOps specialist, leaning that way has been a superpower for building products and platform tools.

grey | 5 years ago | on: Google Play Music, Music Play Store and Music Manager are going away

I have the opposite frustration here, where I queue up some music videos on my TV and inevitably after 1-2 songs, I'm staring at static album covers when I know there's an awesome music video that should be playing instead

grey | 6 years ago | on: Managed Kubernetes Price Comparison

You should look into multistage docker builds, that lets you still use a full fat image for your build but then leave all the build tools out of your final image

I liked jpetazzo's post on the subject but there are plenty to choose from https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog/2020/02/docker-images-part1-r...

grey | 8 years ago | on: WebGraphviz: Graphviz in the Browser

Plugging my old student project for GraphViz reference/examples: https://graphs.grevian.org/

I wouldn't mind changing it to use a js renderer, currently it's using the (deprecated!) Google image api but I hadn't really found anything as complete/safe/reliable to replace it

grey | 8 years ago | on: Why Isn’t It a Crime to Kill a Cyclist with a Car?

A while ago it was suggested to me to mentally translate "accident" to "collision" in context of cars hitting cyclists. Most collisions with cyclists are easily avoidable, and caused by negligence, impatience or ignorance.

Treating collisions as unavoidable, unintentional mistakes relieves drivers of a lot of the inherent responsibility of controlling a vehicle. Watch the road. Respect other users of the road. Be patient, safe, and focused.

grey | 9 years ago | on: Riot Games Messaging Service

Riot accounts are tied to different geographical regions, so I would expect the service doesn't have to span across them, http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Servers

grey | 10 years ago | on: Discovering the Computer Science Behind Postgres Indexes

I've wanted something like this for years! A great real world example of a data structure that really made an impression on me during my computer science education, connecting theory to implementation

grey | 11 years ago | on: SpaceX Sells 10% Stake to Google, Fidelity for $1B

I think Google has shown they're trying very hard to become a primary infrastructure host for any business in "The Cloud", getting more people online opens up new opportunities there too

grey | 12 years ago | on: Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com

Any chance of a California King any time soon?

grey | 12 years ago | on: Google Acquires Seven Robot Companies, Wants Big Role in Robotics

I'm surprised I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but at I/O during his Q&A Larry Page talked a fair bit about how he wants to see manufacturing get more streamlined, Maybe this could be related?

> Smartphones, Page said, are “relatively expensive,” with the raw material costs — glass and silicon — is “probably like $1, or something like that. I think glass is 50 cents a pound. Phones don’t weigh very much. So I think when I see people in industry making things, I ask this question, how far are you off the raw materials costs. So as an engineer, trying to go to first principles, what is the real issue? What’s the real issue around our power grids, or around manufacturing? I think a lot of people don’t ask those questions, and because of that, we don’t make the progress we need to. If you’re going to make a smartphone for a dollar, that’s almost impossible to do. But if you took a fifty-year view, you’d probably make the investments you need to, and you’d probably even figure out how to make money. So, I encourage non-incremental thinking.”

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2013/05/15/google-c... (The first transcript I could find)

grey | 12 years ago | on: Detained in the US for “Visiting Thailand Too Much”

Really? As a Canadian who crosses that border fairly regularly, the iris & fingerprint records are only for the "Enhanced Drivers License" as far as I knew, I've crossed the border dozens of times with just my passport

grey | 13 years ago | on: Switched away from App Engine, couldn't be happier

If some requests are taking 30s to service, front ends will be spinning up very often because during those 30s, other requests will be queueing up

grey | 14 years ago | on: Books Programmers Don't Really Read But Recommend

I've always found that knowing the deficiencies of a language is the best way to know the language. Anything that works well should be pretty intuitive and comfortable, but knowing exactly where the trouble spots of a language are let you be aware when you approach them, and know how to handle them.

grey | 14 years ago | on: The myth of the eight-hour sleep

Has anyone ever read http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm or put it through any verification? It looks good but I'm no biologist, I've used it as my basis for years to avoid polyphasic schedules and embrace naps and biphasic sleep when my life allows for it.

grey | 14 years ago | on: Postgresql 9.2 will have boat-loads of performance enhancements

There's a fair number of really good Postgres tools out there, or tools that support Postgres among other platforms, They're just pricey. The free tools are passable but not that good.

grey | 14 years ago | on: What Eric S. Raymond and Richard Stallman gets wrong on Jobs

I think you misunderstand. You're right that to him "free === good, proprietary === bad" and since his software (GNU) is one of the few platforms that really qualifies as "free" he encourages people to use it, however he's made it perfectly clear what it takes to qualify something as "free" and many many other independent developers have released software that meets this qualification.

To consider Stallman a "dictator" is simply ludicrous, the entire point of his philosophy is that once software is released to the end user, that end user has almost all the rights to do anything they please with it, The only thing they can't do is take those rights away from others.

grey | 14 years ago | on: Why no Steam, Notch?

Notch has a similar attitude, as expressed at http://www.minecraft.net/about.jsp,

specifically "once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source."

grey | 14 years ago | on: Amazon Set to Publish Tim Ferriss

Ok, It's been a while since I read 4HWW, but how is there so much praise for this guy? That book was like a how-to on being an amoral, freeloading douchebag.

grey | 14 years ago | on: Joyent Open Sources SmartOS: Zones, ZFS, DTrace and KVM

The Linux implementations of ZFS are dog slow, and for the last few weeks I've been evaluating btrfs as a possibility for my home storage server, and I've ruled it out completely.

btrfs has been "Close to a stable release" for years now, but if you follow their mailing list there are still people reporting total loss of large filesystems once or twice a week (This week I saw filesystem corruption from an unexpected power outtage, and last week there was a data loss/corruption bug caused by a pool of drives with different sector sizes), I desperately want btrfs to be mature but it's more than a few releases away from being stable.