HN user

rattray

6,550 karma

member of technical staff, anthropic

views my own (if that), etc.

previous:

- founder, stainless.com

- engineer, stripe

https://linkedin.com/in/alexrattray

Posts37
Comments2,112
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www.rowspace.ai 4mo ago

Rowspace launches with $50M to help investors scale their alpha with AI

rattray
15pts0
vercel.com 1y ago

Nuxt Joins Vercel

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2pts1
www.stainless.com 1y ago

Escaping Maven dependency hell (for package authors)

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6pts0
blog.cloudflare.com 2y ago

Cloudflare: Lessons from building an automated SDK pipeline

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13pts0
www.mux.com 2y ago

Mux announces new JavaScript SDK for video

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9pts0
github.com 2y ago

OpenAI Python v1 Released

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3pts0
github.com 2y ago

openai-node v4.0.0

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4pts0
neon.tech 2y ago

Neon: Comparing type-safe SQL libraries for TypeScript

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4pts1
eric-fritz.com 4y ago

Migrating from thousands of SQLite DBs to one Postgres DB (2020)

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3pts2
github.com 4y ago

pg_hint_plan

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1pts0
about.gitlab.com 4y ago

How we upgraded PostgreSQL at GitLab.com (2020)

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10pts0
vlang.io 5y ago

V: A go-like lang that compiles itself in 1s

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2pts1
www.bloomberg.com 5y ago

Apple Starts Work on Its Own Cellular Modem

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34pts7
github.com 5y ago

Temporal TC39 Proposal

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1pts1
itsfoss.com 5y ago

Manjaro Linux Review: “Arch Linux for Human Beings”

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2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Is there an ORM as good as SQLAlchemy for TypeScript yet?

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4pts5
blog.cloudflare.com 6y ago

How Cloudflare Detects Bad Bots

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10pts0
www.bloomberg.com 8y ago

GitHub Founders Will Own More Microsoft Stock Than Its CEO

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108pts113
easymorph.com 8y ago

EasyMorph: visual data transformation

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3pts1
time.com 9y ago

Election Hackers Altered Voter Rolls, Stole Private Data, Officials Say

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: What is hire.withGoogle.com?

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5pts3
www.sfexaminer.com 9y ago

SF’s Elections Commission asks mayor to put $4M toward open source voting system

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3pts0
www.cbc.ca 9y ago

Google opened first Canadian Engineering office in January

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1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: What is the eng headcount of global Google and FB offices?

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1pts2
medium.com 9y ago

Microwaving Pants: A Startup Postmortem

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1pts0
youtube-eng.blogspot.com 11y ago

Scaling MySQL in the cloud with Vitess and Kubernetes (by YouTube)

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1pts0
seenickcode.com 11y ago

Switching from MongoDB to Neo4j

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3pts0
snowplowanalytics.com 11y ago

Can graph databases enable whole new classes of event analytics?

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2pts0
www.qt.io 11y ago

Qt 5.4

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github.com 11y ago

Scaloid: Less Painful Android Development with Scala

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3pts0

... and their team is joining Anthropic to build, who knows, some dumb integration to make Hubspot data available in Claude, or something equally as boring.

Fun fact, I named it "Stainless" after Stainless Steel pipes, likening ourselves to a high-end plumbing supply shop. If you look at the earliest versions of stainlessapi.com on archive.org, you'll see our original motto was "Quality fittings for your REST API".

All that is to say, the incredibly "boring" infrastructural work of making "boring" APIs like Hubspot's more usefully accessible is absolutely the kind of thing I'm excited to do at Anthropic :)

(It also happens to be what got us all excited to work at stainless in the first place, but of course, we understand it's not for everyone!)

Hmm, that's one explanation, but I'm curious what leads you to believe it's the correct one?

I'm struck by this quote, which I'd be surprised if they could be explained fully by the distraction-reduction mentioned:

"Evaluation of symptoms on the Parent Global Impressions found that the treatment group at the end of part 2 improved more than the placebo group in part 1 on nearly all symptoms, with statistically significant improvements in GI, receptive language, and average of all symptoms. There were also marginally significant improvements in tantrums, stimming/perseveration, and cognition."

The USB Situation 3 months ago

Aren't there high quality cables available? Eg from companies like Apple or Anker?

I struggle to understand why an Apple lightning cable would be more robust than an Apple thunderbolt cable...

GPT-5.5 3 months ago

I've been very curious about that too. I wonder if it's actually much better at admitting when it doesn't know something, because it thinks it's a "dumber model". But I haven't played with this at all myself.

This seems awesome. Seems to address many of my armchair complaints about both Go (inexpensive) and Rust (bloated/complex).

I'm curious what compilation times are like? Are there theoretical reasons it'd be order of magnitude slower than Go? I assume it does much less than the rust compiler...

Relatedly, I'd be curious to see some of the things from Rust this doesn't include, ideally in the docs. Eg I assume borrow checking, various data types, maybe async etc are intentionally omitted?

Some details on how it works from a code comment:

Problem: DOM-based text measurement (getBoundingClientRect, offsetHeight) forces synchronous layout reflow. When components independently measure text, each measurement triggers a reflow of the entire document. This creates read/write interleaving that can cost 30ms+ per frame for 500 text blocks.

Solution: two-phase measurement centered around canvas measureText.

prepare(text, font) — segments text via Intl.Segmenter, measures each word via canvas, caches widths, and does one cached DOM calibration read per font when emoji correction is needed. Call once when text first appears.

layout(prepared, maxWidth, lineHeight) — walks cached word widths with pure arithmetic to count lines and compute height. Call on every resize. ~0.0002ms per text.

https://github.com/chenglou/pretext/blob/main/src/layout.ts

For our first experiment, we used ClickBench, an analytical database benchmark. ClickBench has 43 queries that focus on aggregation and filtering operations. The operations run on a single wide table with 100M rows, which uses about 14 GB when serialized to Parquet and 75 GB when stored in CSV format.

very much so…