Hacker News: abelanger

New comment by abelanger in "Distributed Ray Tracer"

abelanger — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 22:54:01 +0000

(I work on Hatchet)

This is really neat! Especially the global illumination that passes ray data between nodes, much fancier than what we've done here. You could imagine each component as an actor that receives messages via async channels (though perhaps it's more deterministic than that?).

I think bursting on serverless for massively parallelizable problems is a really interesting use-case. We were partially inspired for this demo by one of our users doing energy simulations at massive scale, who built a library called Scythe for this purpose: https://github.com/szvsw/scythe

New comment by abelanger in "Distributed Ray Tracer"

abelanger — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 22:34:15 +0000

I'm not sure if "pass" is the right word, but it does _something_: https://imgur.com/a/WSYUh89

New comment by abelanger in "Distributed Ray Tracer"

abelanger — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 22:25:31 +0000

Some more resources on signed distance fields (SDFs), which I didn't know about until this demo:

- https://iquilezles.org/articles/distfunctions/

- The 2D version: https://iquilezles.org/articles/distfunctions2d/ (discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46380054)

- How Zed uses (used?) SDFs to render their editor: https://zed.dev/blog/videogame (discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35078464)

Building Durable Streams on Postgres

abelanger — Tue, 10 Nov 2026 19:42:56 +0000

Article URL: https://hatchet.run/blog/durable-streams

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50445284

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by abelanger in "Bufo pulls the andon cord"

abelanger — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:52:57 +0000

Whoops sorry, I'll need to size this down but: https://gist.github.com/abelanger5/c513ef259b1b03fe2e5a27b96...

Going to create a PR into https://github.com/knobiknows/all-the-bufo later today.

Bufo pulls the andon cord

abelanger — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:36:27 +0000

Article URL: https://hatchet.run/blog/andon-cord

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49332754

Points: 16

# Comments: 2

New comment by abelanger in "Incident with Github.com"

abelanger — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:12:42 +0000

If you really need to merge and deploy, I've been having some luck getting things moving with the gh cli:

    gh pr review  --approve
    gh pr merge  --squash --delete-branch

Might not help your deploy process if webhooks are degrading, but at least it can keep your remote in sync with local changes, if you need to deploy from local.

New comment by abelanger in "Clues by Sam"

abelanger — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:23:31 +0000

My wife and I have been playing this game every day for the past few weeks or so. Some of the daily levels are incredibly satisfying.

We have very different ways of approaching the harder problems; some of the clues are easier for someone with a formal CS/engineering background, but others just require a better memory of the different constraints, and she's much better at building a tagging system around those constraints.

Previously launched here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43923843

Clues by Sam

abelanger — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:16:04 +0000

Article URL: https://cluesbysam.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319773

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?

abelanger — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:13:06 +0000

Article URL: https://brandur.org/fragments/postgres-without-pgbouncer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277952

Points: 165

# Comments: 113

Am I the problem? Interviewing another team to find out

abelanger — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:36:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2026/am-i-the-problem/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49266856

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Why tech companies are bad (2019)

abelanger — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:57:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.alexcrompton.com/blog/why-tech-companies-are-bad

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49247284

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Concurrency vs. Throughput: why more parallelism can make databases slower

abelanger — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:28:13 +0000

Article URL: https://planetscale.com/blog/concurrency-vs-throughput-vitess-mysql

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214499

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Coding agents supercharge Murphy's Law

abelanger — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:45:56 +0000

Article URL: https://hatchet.run/blog/murphys-law

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212253

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by abelanger in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2026)"

abelanger — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:00:48 +0000

Hatchet | Product Engineer | NYC or SF or REMOTE (US and EU) | https://hatchet.run

Hey HN! I'm Alexander, one of the founders of Hatchet. Hatchet is an open-source platform for running background jobs at scale.

We're hiring product engineers who are excited to build the next class of engineering primitives, starting with queues, background tasks and durable execution. We started in early 2024 after launching our distributed task queue (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39643136).

Hatchet is currently used by thousands of engineers for all kinds of workloads: log ingestion pipelines, code review agents, video encoding, GPU scheduling, etc. Our target customer is fast-growing startups who have a strong need for background jobs system. These days, that tends to be AI companies, though we're general-purpose and not exclusively targeted for AI workloads.

Stack: Postgres, Go, Typescript, React, Kubernetes

Applying: I'm trying something different this time. `ssh hatchet-jobs.com`

Note that we're fully open-source, which you can check out here: https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet (and if you have thoughts / opinions / questions about the codebase, please include those in your note!)

Implementing PaxosLease in Python with HTTP Flask

abelanger — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:04:30 +0000

Article URL: https://bytepawn.com/paxoslease-python.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127314

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

A Treatise on Restaurant Design

abelanger — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:11:04 +0000

Article URL: https://substack.com/@haterade/p-196473733

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114325

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Building Online Communities

abelanger — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:05:12 +0000

Article URL: http://hintjens.com/blog:117

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100116

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The First Idempotency Key

abelanger — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:04:51 +0000

Article URL: https://hatchet.run/blog/first-idempotency-key

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083207

Points: 36

# Comments: 9

New comment by abelanger in "The startup's Postgres survival guide"

abelanger — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:20:12 +0000

> I do wish the guide was expanded a bit with lots of specific examples and details... a lot of it is hand-wavy blurbs.

I appreciate the feedback; I'm usually someone who tends to go into way too much detail, so this was difficult to write - I tried to focus on the "mental model" of understanding Postgres rather than very nuanced specifics. I tried to link out to my favorite articles on a number of subjects, and the Postgres manual is quite good.

Some external links from the article:

- https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/database-no...

- https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/benefits-of-a-descend...

- https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ParallelChange.html

- https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/tuning-autovacuum-pos...

Some internal links on where I've gone into our own use-cases in more detail:

- https://hatchet.run/blog/multi-tenant-queues (PG-backed queues)

- https://hatchet.run/blog/postgres-partitioning (PG partitioning)

(edit: formatting)