Hacker News: Misdicorl

New comment by Misdicorl in "Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems"

Misdicorl — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 19:03:20 +0000

Your place of last resort with kafka is simply to replay the message back to the same kafka topic since you know it's up. In a simple single consumer setup just throw a retry count on the message and increment it to get monitoring/alerting/etc. Multi consumer? Put an enqueue source tag on it and only process the messages tagged for you. This won't scale to infinity but it scales really really far for really really cheap

New comment by Misdicorl in "Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees"

Misdicorl — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 15:57:59 +0000

One way to measure this that isn't moral judgements is the ecological depth of an environment. If one part of the system is destroyed (e.g. a blight on plant A) how devastating to the rest of the system will that be?

One of the hallmarks of human engineered environments is how shallow and fragile they are. Changes, like the reintroduction of wolves, are "good" because they give us deeper and more resilient environments

New comment by Misdicorl in "Even Tesla's Insurance Arm Is Getting Wrecked"

Misdicorl — Sat, 10 May 2025 19:38:12 +0000

The story I've heard is that general motors down fall began when they stopped writing loans for other car manufacturers. They used to under write basically every car loan in the US.

I've never looked into how truthful it is, but it smacks of idiotic/arrogant executive tropes so well I almost don't want to discover it's false

New comment by Misdicorl in "Performance optimization is hard because it's fundamentally a brute-force task"

Misdicorl — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:19:01 +0000

I'll throw my hat in the ring for "disagree". Few kinds of work have such clear and unambiguous results as optimization work (its now X% faster!). Few kinds of work have such incredible and detailed tools to guide your hand in finding where to invest your effort (look at this hot loop!).

The fact that sometimes optimization work is tricky or requires some pre-thinking, or is even gasp counter-intuitive is such a hilarious way to say "this is hard". That's just table stakes starting points for so-so-so much work.

Edit: Heck, even deciding whether to prioritize optimization work or feature work is usually a harder problem than the actual optimization work itself.

New comment by Misdicorl in "ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation"

Misdicorl — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 18:43:18 +0000

Sometimes the vibes are wrong, and things go haywire. This is why zero tolerance policies have to be instituted in schools. That doesnt mean the general idea is wrong. Strict adherence to written law will always fail justice. The world is too nuanced and too fractal to handle every edge case well.

New comment by Misdicorl in "Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining"

Misdicorl — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 18:31:28 +0000

Would be really interesting to see what it does with clearly wrong EXIF data

New comment by Misdicorl in "What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?"

Misdicorl — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 21:30:29 +0000

Yeah I'd say kafka is not a great technology if your median and 99ths (or 999ths if volume is large enough) are wildly different which sounds like your situation. I use kafka in contexts where 99ths going awry usually aren't key dependent so I don't have the issues you see.

I tend to prefer other queueing mechanisms in those cases, although I still work hard to make 99ths and medians align as it can still cause issues (especially for monitoring)

New comment by Misdicorl in "What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?"

Misdicorl — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 16:43:05 +0000

Follow on: If you're using kafka to publish messages to multiple consumers, this is even worse as now you're infecting every consumer with data processing issues from every other consumer. Bad juju

New comment by Misdicorl in "What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch?"

Misdicorl — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 16:34:42 +0000

I suppose it depends on your message volume. To me, processing 100k messages and then getting a page however long later as the broker (or whatever) falls apart sounds much worse than head of line blocking and seeing the problem directly in my consumer. If I need to not do head of line blocking, I can build whatever failsafe mechanisms I need for the problematic data and defer to some other queueing system (typically, just add an attempt counter and replay the message to the same kafka topic and then if attempts > X, send it off to wherever)

I'd rather debug a worker problem than an infra scaling problem every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

New comment by Misdicorl in "I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)"

Misdicorl — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:03:54 +0000

And now imagine how easy dealing with email spam would be if the marginal fiscal cost was not 0 like physical spam. All the technology and tools available and less than 1% of the viable spam surface area

New comment by Misdicorl in "I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)"

Misdicorl — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 14:52:08 +0000

> the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.

This is a good starting point, but if you have no barriers then you get abuse problems which is why email is terrible. I remember being horrified in the 90s about attempts to charge 1 cent per email. Now I long for a world where that actually happened.

New comment by Misdicorl in "JEP draft: Prepare to make final mean final"

Misdicorl — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 21:46:22 +0000

It wouldn't, but it might preclude using (future) optimizations that forgo those de-optimization hooks?

New comment by Misdicorl in "JEP draft: Prepare to make final mean final"

Misdicorl — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 21:26:43 +0000

I suppose serializing the JVM state itself to avoid the cold start problem might take advantage of this?

New comment by Misdicorl in "Physics is unreasonably good at creating new math"

Misdicorl — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 18:07:02 +0000

The past decade is a difficult framing to ask the question in. Notable breakthrough results are usually understood in hindsight and a decade just isn't a lot of time for that context and understanding to develop. Science also doesn't necessarily develop in this way with consistent progress every X timespan. Usually you get lots and lots of breakthroughs all at once as an important paradigm is shattered and a new one is installed. Then observations with tiny differences slowly pile up and a very blurry/messy picture of the problems with the new paradigm takes shape. But none of those things feels like a breakthrough, especially to a layman.

That said: I'll submit the first detection of gravitational waves as two black holes merged together in 2020 as meeting the bar of "notable breakthrough in the last decade".

New comment by Misdicorl in "The 4-chan Go programmer"

Misdicorl — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 20:17:03 +0000

Ignoring inexperience/incompetence as a reason (which, admittedly, is a likely root cause) domain fuzziness is often a good explanation here. If you aren't extremely familiar with a domain and know the shape of solution you need a-priori all those levels of indirection allow you to keep lots of work "online" while (replacing, refactoring, experimenting) with a particular layer. The intent should be to "find" the right shape with all the indirection in place and then rewrite with a single correct shape without all the indirection. Of course, the rewrite never actually happens =)

New comment by Misdicorl in "What is the longest known sequence that repeats in Pi? (homelab)"

Misdicorl — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 19:12:06 +0000

You didn't understand the original claim which is that because Pi has an infinite decimal representation, every subsequence of it has a repeat

New comment by Misdicorl in "What is the longest known sequence that repeats in Pi? (homelab)"

Misdicorl — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 18:47:13 +0000

This isn't true as you can build an infinite sequence that never repeats. An example sequence in binary is (the number of 0s between each 1 increases by 1 every time)

01001000100001...

New comment by Misdicorl in "This is a teenager"

Misdicorl — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 01:35:42 +0000

The goal can't be to solve every desperation case. But if the program wouldn't allow individuals living in dangerous and exploitative situations to confidently leave them (financially) Id argue the program was a failure

New comment by Misdicorl in "This is a teenager"

Misdicorl — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 21:18:37 +0000

True. It would be nice to decouple it from children and expand its scope of economic impact dramatically.

New comment by Misdicorl in "This is a teenager"

Misdicorl — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 20:46:46 +0000

$1000/month is $12,000/year. Thats far far below poverty levels. It needs to be enough that people can choose to supplement in order to engage with luxury consumption. If people are forced to supplement to just survive, then we need to maintain the minimum wage and a whole host of other weird baggage.