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DylanSp

677 karma · joined March 25, 2020

https://github.com/DylanSp/
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DylanSp··on We scaled PgBouncer to 4x throughput
First time I've heard of so_reuseport, which is interesting. The important parts of the setup seem to be that + peering; is peering built-in to PgBouncer and simple to set up?
DylanSp··on Show HN: Race to the Bottom
They're very small on desktop as well.
DylanSp··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (Jan 2026)
I've been learning the basics of using Z3 by creating a solver for the daily puzzle game Clues By Sam (very fun game; https://cluesbysam.com/). Repo is https://github.com/DylanSp/clues-by-sam-solver. It uses Playwright to read clues and submit guesses; I've got it working for all 50 puzzles in puzzle pack 1.
DylanSp··on A Tale of Two AI Failures: Debugging a Simple Bug with LLMs
Echoing the others who say they can't understand the bug/difference; only thing I can think of is that the input string needed the escape sequence for a newline in it? So the correct code would be written as

    "POST" + "\\n" + ...
DylanSp··on Stealing from Google
Thanks for the explanation - I was deeply confused by this article's premise. I've never worked with Next.js or Astro, so I didn't have the background.
DylanSp··on American Airlines flying empty Airbus A321neo across the Atlantic 20 times
To be slightly more specific - training pilots that can train/certify other pilots.
DylanSp··on First thoughts on o3 pro
Not gender-related; the correct form for the possessive is "its" without an apostrophe, not "it's".
DylanSp··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
I'm working on an app for easily conducting and organizing evals for LLM-powered applications. The core idea is making it easy for domain experts to review examples of interactions and tests with synthetic data, as well as tracking an application's evaluated performance over time as changes get made.
DylanSp··on A simple search engine from scratch
Works now (I noticed the same issue).
DylanSp··on 3,200% CPU Utilization
It's not a perfect situation, but C# has some dedicated collection classes for concurrent use - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.collecti.... There's still some footguns possible, but knowing "I should use these collections instead of the regular versions" is less error-prone than needing to take/release locks at every single use site.
DylanSp··on It is not a compiler error (2017)
This is definitely a big factor. I've found one compiler bug, but it was in a feature that had been added all of two months earlier (optional chaining in Typescript 3.7).
DylanSp··on Half-Life
The same author has full articles on Jedi Knight [1] and X-Wing/TIE Fighter. [2]. If you go through his archives [3], he's also written a lot about LucasArts' adventure games; I think the first posts that talk about them are the three "A New Force in Games" posts.

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2024/04/jedi-knight-plus-notes-on-an-... [2] https://www.filfre.net/2021/02/the-second-coming-of-star-war... [3] https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/

DylanSp··on Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
Take a look at the links and sources mentioned in his retrospective on the Sparta series: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-r.... Devereaux mentions some different approaches that modern historians take towards Sparta, particularly Steven Hodkinson's arguments that Sparta was more typical and less unusual compared to the other Greek poleis; following up on that work would probably be a useful counterpoint.
DylanSp··on A minimax chess engine in regular expressions
The bug with a-file moves has been fixed: https://github.com/carlini/regex-chess/issues/1.
DylanSp··on Indexing Code at Scale with Glean
It sounds like the indexing time/complexity is increased a lot by the amount of detailed data they're storing. They mention determining which `using` statement is used to resolve each symbol reference in C++ source, to enable dead code detection; that's going to require some sophisticated analysis.
DylanSp··on What would it take to add refinement types to Rust?
Haskell's Ord typeclass is for ordering; it just represents types that have a total order, it doesn't represent ranges.
DylanSp··on Four limitations of Rust's borrow checker
Case 1 is definitely addressed by the Polonius-related work. There's a post [1] on the official Rust blog from 2023 about that, and this post [2] from Niko Matsakis' blog in June 2024 mentions that they were making progress on it, though the timeline has stretched out.

[1]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/10/06/polonius-u...

[2]: https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2024/06/02/the...

DylanSp··on Bit-twiddling optimizations in Zed's Rope
It's outlined in their previous post on the Rope/SumTree data structure they use, which this article links to: https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-rope-sumtree.
DylanSp··on Speeding up the Rust edit-build-run cycle
Looks like he's been continuing to work on it.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/davidlattimore/wild

List of his blog posts, a couple of which are about wild: https://davidlattimore.github.io/

DylanSp··on Jepsen: Bufstream 0.1
Looks like it was an offhand tweet from 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20220805112242/https://twitter.c.... I got that from a comment on the first Antithesis post on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39376195.
DylanSp··on Starship's Sixth Flight Test
My guess would be that it would take too much extra design work. Making the current upper stage reusable is necessary for the HLS contract anyways, and they've got a lot of work to do already on refining the heat shield & fin protection, enabling landing, and working on propellant transfer.
DylanSp··on WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill
It wasn't a financial cost, but the biggest single performance improvement I've seen firsthand came from optimizing a SQL query. One of our Professional Services people had written a query that did repeated self-joins on a fairly large table, which took ~15 minutes to run. A DBA-turned-dev on our team rewrote it using MSSQL's PIVOT operator, and the query started executing in less than a second.
DylanSp··on Starship's Sixth Flight Test
Nitpick about history: the LM was definitely not one of the easiest parts of Apollo. It was the long pole in the schedule for a good while; part of why Apollo 8 was flown as a lunar orbit mission was because the LM wasn't going to be ready for testing in Earth orbit until at least early '69, and NASA wanted to test the CSM beyond LEO anyways.
DylanSp··on Starship's Sixth Flight Test
If the upper stage wasn't designed to be reusable, it'd probably have a lot less structural dry mass - no heat shield, no fins, possibly different geometry (depending on how much volume they wanted). It might also be possible to drop the sea-level Raptor engines and just use the more efficient vacuum Raptors. I don't think you'd get an order-of-magnitude difference, but it'd be significant, especially for higher-energy trajectories than LEO.
DylanSp··on Fuzzing between the lines in popular barcode software
That's the repo Trail of Bits was working with; the PR they ended up submitting is at https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/294.
DylanSp··on The Return of Stealth Mountain
This is on Bluesky, not Twitter.
DylanSp··on Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem
Question about multi-tenancy - do you recommend starting with a single-tenant approach, or are there off-the-shelf options for multi-tenancy that you'd recommend using, instead of building it from scratch?
DylanSp··on What happens when you make a move in lichess.org?
I was hoping for that too, that's the kind of interesting architectural question I wanted this article to answer.
DylanSp··on How Discord stores trillions of messages (2023)
The partition key included the channel ID, and they were still having problems with hot partitions even with that fine-grained sharing.
DylanSp··on SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS
Separate from everything else, I'm glad the first crewed launch from SLC-40 went smoothly. Being able to use that pad for Crew Dragon launches provides some helpful flexibility for important Falcon Heavy launches at LC-39A.
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