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__s

5,734 karma · joined September 12, 2015

https://serprex.github.io https://etg.dek.im
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__s··on Branchless Rust: Making a Filter 4x Faster by Removing an If
I just scrolled through & read the code snippets. Interesting enough solution at end
__s··on Pareto Front
Trouble with fonts is sometimes monospace good, sometimes monodpace bad

Anyways I'll namedrop Iosevka as perfect monospace font for working on 13" laptop

__s··on Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal
One group I followed switched to LinkedIn
__s··on Why is it all in the kernel?
It doesn't, it just loses your session
__s··on SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?
Haha, I was reading your comment as praise for Greg until the end
__s··on Our position on open-weights models
Seemed to've worked out pretty well for Uber
__s··on Kimi K3 exploited the latest Redis server
Yep. For managed postgres our threat model is to assume vm is compromised. It's paid off, just earlier this year there was RCE fix in PG 18.4
__s··on Why do you suck at juggling now?
Every year I just say I want to improve my work life balance & work out more

Doesn't happen, but hey at least I'm being honest about what I'd like to improve

__s··on Codex Micro
Or just order any macropad
__s··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
I find it irritating with humans. "last but not the least" always distracts me as I then consider maybe the last item _is_ the least. & what is with everyone saying they want to "double click" into meeting items
__s··on We scaled PgBouncer to 4x throughput
you encode information in the token, this was a motivation for postgres to remove 32 byte cap on tokens: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/508d0505-8b7a-4864-a68...

See from slide 26 https://www.pgevents.ca/events/pgconfdev2024/sessions/sessio... Jelte's a pgbouncer maintainer, video of a talk on this by him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-nCHcZ6vQU

__s··on We scaled PgBouncer to 4x throughput
Yes, https://www.pgbouncer.org/config.html#section-peers
__s··on We scaled PgBouncer to 4x throughput
SO_REUSEPORT[1] pretty much does all we want in kernelspace vs unnecessary userspace hop inbetween. These all run on same VM

1: https://lwn.net/Articles/542629

__s··on The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
If it weren't for those bone spurs maybe that war wouldn't be so forgotten
__s··on Why Vancouver is always a stand-in for San Francisco in movies and TV shows (2021)
B-roll
__s··on Better Auth is joining Vercel
Silent execution of tremor was a pain in the ass trying to upgrade to nextjs 15 / react 19: https://github.com/tremorlabs/tremor/issues/148
__s··on Why low-latency Java still requires discipline?
Yes. & in the end my experience has been that you can write low latency code with gc, but only by expending more effort than it'd take to use manual memory management
__s··on Fable 5 On Vending-Bench: Misbehaving, With Plausible Deniability
Fable's spatial reasoning is much better. Over the weekend I had opus looking into a blank textbox issue[1] which it was spinning on for a few minutes, switching to fable immediately fixed

But yeah opus often the better workhorse given price gap

1: tying up loose ends testing https://github.com/HarbourMasters/Shipwright/pull/5838 (fix: https://github.com/HarbourMasters/Shipwright/pull/5838/chang...)

__s··on The Fear of Dying Before You Become Yourself
I've experienced the opposite: wishing I were dead so life wouldn't go on with me falling into just another glum existence. That at the emotionally present moment I snapshot it, preventing inevitable dullness that time moves on

Unfortunately here I am, life moves on, now I'm just wasting away on HN

__s··on I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain–until I met him
Haha I'll be lucky if I can gather 2m & still have sacrificed much work life balance just because my type of stupid is an obsession
__s··on PostgreSQL and the OOM killer: Why we use strict memory overcommit
> I have yet to see a program that silently handles allocation failures and doesn't crash

Postgres handles allocation failures

__s··on Half-Baked Product
Sai is https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=saisrirampur

Maybe we were saved by being acquired before hiring sales. Sai knew the problem & understood customers. He'd sometimes oversell a bit, but managed it: kept pulse of capacity for new development, would ask about how hard requested features were, would feel out customer intent & guide customer adapt to what was already there

When we had our pepepizza moment, there was an understanding that it wasn't going to work, took learnings of what would be involved there, but kept focus on improving what we already had

For kafka connector we had a design partner, I got to work with them directly. They wanted 30 microsecond message processing, so didn't want json. Original ask was flatbuffers. I decided to put message formatting into a scripting layer using gopher-lua. Spent a weekend getting flatbuffers working with lua (it was buggy, opened half a dozen PRs to flatbuffers repo which got ignored). It was clearly awful having to manage flatbuffer schema files & update scripts every time schema changed. But I had alternative already made: msgpack. Throughput needed work but addressed that by creating pool of lua interpreters

Overall I overworked myself (put my hands out of commission & spent months relearning how to type on split ergo colemak-dh), but I enjoyed the work. Team was very open with each other & when performance is your selling point there's an understanding that engineering quality needs to be maintained. Sure there were parts of the system I hated, & sometimes I'd try chip away at those

Hopefully that helps, hard to say the difference, but I really feel in my work that when customer has problem I'm part of conversation. Most recently there was talk of customer wanting cold data offloaded from postgres which is what inspired https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/298 where we get Postgres to do most the work

Raised problems trying to mix C++ into postgres extension, decided fix was to write clickhouse-c library to replace clickhouse-cpp, there was some doubt on team about value, but demonstrated value (https://github.com/ClickHouse/pg_clickhouse/pull/254) & I appreciate my colleagues not being afraid to change their mind

There's a level of trust where instead of being assigning tasks on a board I instead work on what I think is important based on information available. Nobody was asking for wal-rus, but I know my fleet

ClickHouse Cloud similarly took route of taking its time hiring sales. Better to have a small sales team that can work directly with engineering on quality leads than overwhelming everyone so that sales becomes the enemy. Guess the difference is agency. When engineering is involved in making commitments they're invested in delivering & there's push back so sales doesn't start hallucinating features

__s··on Half-Baked Product
I did at peerdb
__s··on Looking Ahead to Postgres 19
You don't need to be charitable, Snowflake laid off technical writers citing AI to replace them: https://snowflake.help/snowflake-layoffs-2026-technical-writ...
__s··on Looking Ahead to Postgres 19
& ClickHouse has managed Postgres in open beta (which I work on)
__s··on Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development
I'm on 128GB ram strix halo, bought framework desktop for a few thousand CAD back when everyone was calling framework desktop overpriced
__s··on WAL-RUS: a Rust Rewrite of WAL-G for PostgreSQL Backups
If you're running pg yourself I recommend pgbackrest. It doesn't run as a daemon, & it forks multiple processes for concurrency. But it's simple to run as archive_command & is light on resources outside concurrency

wal-g/wal-rus have higher throughput

__s··on WAL-RUS: a Rust Rewrite of WAL-G for PostgreSQL Backups
tbf it took 4 years since PG15 support was added for me to fix remote BASE_BACKUP support & wal-g base backups being inconsistent on PG15+ (parameter typo had pg_backup_stop return before wal archived far enough for consistency)

https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g/pull/2262

but yes, this is young project, so fair take

__s··on WAL-RUS: a Rust Rewrite of WAL-G for PostgreSQL Backups
indeed, wal-g actually started as a port of wal-e which was Python: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/08/18/introducing-wal-g-...

wal-g was a much larger improvement over wal-e. we're optimizing the margins here

__s··on What If a Man Practised Shooting a Million Times? Shot 90172, Football Progress [video]
in reality no, for the sake of the analogy, yes
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