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Andys

1,797 karma · joined February 20, 2007

https://github.com/andys [ my public key: https://keybase.io/andy_snow; my proof: https://keybase.io/andy_snow/sigs/ki9L8r0Gt97fbtpZIwvw4kqxcdzvZKrC0DM-XBxewTU ]
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Andys··on Quake – 30th Anniversary Update
IIRC it came down to something crazy simple, like, using the FPU registers to bit-blit was the fastest way, but only on the genuine Intel Pentium.
Andys··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
Working on https://tapitalee.com

  - Deploy containerized apps to your own AWS account with minimal config!
  - CLI tool with instant console sessions
  - Set up SQL/Redis instantly with Heroku-like add-ons.
  - For enterprise: Autoscaling, preview apps, audit trail, release approvals.
Andys··on AWS North Virginia data center outage – resolved
I worked in a DC that had multiple redundant chillers on the roof, and multiple redundant coolers on each floor, but the whole building's cooling failed at once when the water lines failed somehow.

They didn't say how, but apparently the pipes between each floor and the roof were not redundant. It took almost 24 hours to fix.

Andys··on What are skiplists good for?
Or..? A golden era for people who want to think of new things and test out their ideas quickly by having AI code it up.
Andys··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
Deploy to your own AWS account with minimal config!

  - Any containerized app, uses Fargate (no Kubernetes)
  - Heroku-like CLI tool with instant console sessions
  - Set up SQL/Redis instantly with Heroku-like add-ons.
  - Autoscaling, preview apps, audit trail, release approvals.
https://tapitalee.com
Andys··on Covering electricity price increases from our data centers
Every piece of progress looks like this to begin with.
Andys··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
https://tapitalee.com Deploy to your own AWS account like Heroku
Andys··on Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems
We did this at Chargify, but with MySQL. If Redis was unavailable, it would dump the job as a JSON blob to a mysql table. A cron job would periodically clean it out by re-enqueuing jobs, and it worked well.
Andys··on Elasticsearch was never a database
This is made possible because Elastic gained a write-ahead log that actually syncs to disk after each write, like Postgres.
Andys··on Start your meetings at 5 minutes past
I came to a similar conclusion. What about measuring enjoyment? Turns out people enjoy meetings more than work!
Andys··on [dead]
I'm surprised that we're circling back to banning things being the answer, when we (the Internet) know that doesn't work long-term.

It seems nice at face value, so it appeases everyone, while being an overly blunt tool used as a political weapon, etc.

Andys··on Eurostar AI vulnerability: When a chatbot goes off the rails
Imagine viewing the same chat logs, while logged in an admin interface, then it isn't self-XSS anymore.
Andys··on Kiro: A new agentic IDE
Try kilocode - https://kilocode.ai/ Its a VScode extension and allows different LLMs to be used.
Andys··on How much slower is random access, really?
What if you factored in time to sort them first?
Andys··on How much slower is random access, really?
Thanks for sharing that.

Presumably if you'd split the elements into 16 shares (one for each CPU), summed with 16 threads, and then summed the lot at the end, then random would be faster than sorted?

Andys··on Is TfL losing the battle against heat on the Victoria line?
Ice blocks were trialed in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground_cooling#cit...
Andys··on An Image of the Australian Desert Illuminates Satellite Pollution
This is a regressive view. Developed countries profit from the educational nature of the Internet. We're all better off from having banked and shared common knowledge.
Andys··on An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system
Ceph is massively over-complicated, if I had two teams I'd probably try and write one from scratch instead.
Andys··on MySQL transactions per second vs. fsyncs per second (2020)
I thought PostgreSQL did, but now that I check the docs, you are correct, the default `commit_delay` is zero. That would be worth increasing a little if you can afford the latency.
Andys··on Bigscreen Beyond 2
How is it low res when the specs say 5120 × 2560?
Andys··on Forces deep underground seem to be deforming Earth's inner core
Additionally, the magnetic shape and location of the poles are also shifting, which I think suggests the core is also shape changing.
Andys··on I Went to SQL Injection Court
Not a lawyer, but why not use opensource as an example? Many successful public e-commerce websites have public schemas and aren't all hacked.
Andys··on To buy a Tesla Model 3, only to end up in hell
But its a weird distribution, because of owners who never have a single problem.
Andys··on The Mythical IO-Bound Rails App
CockroachDB can too, although its licensing has made it unpopular.
Andys··on About availability of TikTok and ByteDance Ltd. apps in the United States
This is exactly what we saw when Sept 11 happened (over 20 years ago) and the Republicans decided to invade Iraq and carry out all sorts of extra-judicial mischief.

I started to think the world was going to end but its ticking along in the same manner which has now coloured my views.

Andys··on Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff
They're rewriting Heroku to be a hosted K8s offering. Presumably using aforementioned LLMs.
Andys··on Static search trees: faster than binary search
You're really just exploiting hidden O(?) implementations inside the CPU, so it still applies, just less visibly.
Andys··on Ruby-refrigerator: Freeze all core Ruby classes
Lesson learned for me though, if you "put a require behind a feature flag", you'll get surprise failures when your staging and test environments are no longer able to properly test what might happen in production. Put the require outside the flag and make the flag wrap the smallest possible part of the feature.
Andys··on Alley Cat Remeow Edition
Technically they still exist, you can buy new 8086 machines and 386s with new motherboards and recycled industrial CPUs, etc.
Andys··on The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)
https://winworldpc.com/product/framework/10
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