Hacker News: adrianco

New comment by adrianco in "Sirius DB"

adrianco — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 18:22:54 +0000

I’ve talked to the authors of this, it’s a very interesting project. GPU memory space used to be the limitation but the latest generations of GPUs have enormous shared memory capacity and need something like SiriusDB to manipulate and prepare data in-place before the AI algorithms get to work.

New comment by adrianco in "The Netflix Simian Army (2011)"

adrianco — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:37:47 +0000

I distilled these ideas over subsequent years into several talks on “Failing Over without Falling Over”. Investing anything in resilience without testing that it actually works is a waste of resources. Thats the underlying lesson. https://github.com/adrianco/slides/blob/master/FailingWithou...

New comment by adrianco in "Microservices should form a polytree"

adrianco — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 20:07:57 +0000

All sounds like a good plan, but there’s no easy way to enforce the lack of cycles. I’ve seen helper functions that call a service to look something up, called from a library that is running on the service itself. So a service calls itself. There was probably four or five different developers code abstractions stacked in that loop.

New comment by adrianco in "Peter Thiel sells off all Nvidia stock, stirring bubble fears"

adrianco — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 22:07:58 +0000

It’s a bubble. Buy low and sell high. Right now, holding cash is the safe option. You can predict that the bubble will burst, but not when. However with the US being run by someone who is poking everything with sharp implements I think it bursts sooner.

New comment by adrianco in "California homeowners to fund half of high-risk insurer's $1B 'bailout'"

adrianco — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 05:03:33 +0000

Its hard to understand why so many California houses are built of wood. After a fire all that’s left is a few chimneys. However I happen to live in California in a house made of concrete bricks and we don’t get a higher valuation per square foot or a discount for our fire insurance. There should be more incentives to build fireproof houses.

New comment by adrianco in "US regulator rejects bid to boost nuclear power to Amazon data center"

adrianco — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 19:36:31 +0000

I think there are two things that change. One is that Amazon would be controlling output scheduling of part of the the power station rather than the grid operator. The other is that this would be behind the meter for Amazon like rooftop solar, so would be accounted for differently in the annual report.

New comment by adrianco in "AI Flame Graphs"

adrianco — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 10:44:46 +0000

This is super interesting and useful. I tried reading the code to understand how GPU workloads worked last year and it was easy to get lost in all the options and pluggable layers.

New comment by adrianco in "Amazon employees: 'I'd rather go back to school than work in an office again'"

adrianco — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 20:44:54 +0000

Someone came up with the name for this: “Disagree and commute”.

New comment by adrianco in "Boar's Head plant posed an 'imminent threat' years before listeria outbreak"

adrianco — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 15:14:10 +0000

I wonder if the other Boars Head plants also have issues. Avoid the entire brand? What brands have better hygiene?

New comment by adrianco in "Elasticsearch is open source, again"

adrianco — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 06:57:03 +0000

AWS tends to optimize for whatever its customers want, rather than what its partner ecosystem wants. However we did spend some time trying to help open source partners figure out how best to work with AWS and to leverage the marketplace etc. to be successful by leveraging the platform rather than fighting with it. Mongo is a good example of how that can work.

New comment by adrianco in "Elasticsearch is open source, again"

adrianco — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 06:48:08 +0000

There were several proposals made to Elastic at the time, but their attitude was that they controlled the project and didn’t want AWS to make big contributions to the open source distribution that would reduce their differentiation. They were also mixing licenses in the code base and deliberately making it hard for AWS to use.

I was also assisting in the deal with Grafana, which I thought was a good deal on both sides, setting up a framework for AWS and Grafana to work together over a longer timeframe. Ash Manzani who negotiated the deal for AWS later joined Grafana to run Corp Dev for them.

New comment by adrianco in "Elasticsearch is open source, again"

adrianco — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 06:29:09 +0000

AWS at the time had AGPL on its list of licenses that couldn’t be used. There were other clouds in China especially ignoring the AGPL provisions and I think SSPL was used to try and be more explicit.

New comment by adrianco in "Elasticsearch is open source, again"

adrianco — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 07:26:39 +0000

Here’s the initial AWS response to the license change that they made in 2018, which I helped write. At the time we didn’t think a new license made sense, as AGPL is sufficient to block AWS from using the code, but the core of the issue was that AWS wanted to contribute security features to the open source project and Elastic wanted to keep security as an enterprise feature, so rejected all the approaches AWS made at the time. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-...

New comment by adrianco in "Show HN: A simple app for downloading YouTube transcripts in bulk"

adrianco — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 20:26:05 +0000

I tried to do this a few months ago (for videos not shorts) and found that YouTube will only let you download transcripts for your own uploads. You have to authenticate to the API. Also the transcripts aren’t that great. I ended up downloading the video and running whisper on it.

New comment by adrianco in "Jepsen: Datomic Pro 1.0.7075"

adrianco — Wed, 15 May 2024 20:26:34 +0000

I was a fly on the wall as this work was being done and it was super interesting to see the discussions. I was also surprised that Jepsen didn’t find critical bugs. Clarifying the docs and unusual (intentional) behaviors was a very useful outcome. It was a very worthwhile confidence building exercise given that we’re running a bank on Datomic…

New comment by adrianco in "AWS CEO to Step Down"

adrianco — Tue, 14 May 2024 17:33:29 +0000

Not a big surprise. Garman has been working up to this for a while. It will be interesting to see how the VPs reshuffle and whether anyone else who thought they might get the CEO job leaves in a huff…

New comment by adrianco in "Google Cloud accidentally deletes customer's account"

adrianco — Fri, 10 May 2024 04:39:01 +0000

When we migrated Netflix to AWS in 2009-2011 we setup a separate archive account on AWS for backups and also made an extra copy on GCP as our “off prem” equivalent. We also did a weekly restore from archive to refresh the test account data and make sure backups were working. I’ve documented that pattern many times, some people have even implemented it…

New comment by adrianco in "AWS building 414 exaflops AI computer exclusively for Nvidia's internal research"

adrianco — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 14:07:18 +0000

This is a water-cooled system, so AWS is going to have to figure out a new datacenter architecture to install and run it. It’s a big investment and commitment from AWS and I expect that part of the deal was that NVIDIA would be a guaranteed customer at scale for the system, in return for things like AWS getting preferential early access to the technology.

New comment by adrianco in "Nissan drops app support for the original Leaf"

adrianco — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 01:07:19 +0000

I use OVMS on my 2010 Tesla Roadster and it’s likely a good option for people who don’t mind a bit of DIY to get it installed and to buy a SIM card. It supports most of the functionality of the car so I assume it can do that on a Leaf as well. Leaf is on the supported car list.

New comment by adrianco in "What Adrian Did Next – Part 2 – Sun Microsystems (2022)"

adrianco — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 05:07:30 +0000

Thanks! That’s cool. I’m glad I found time to write down what I remembered and the names of many of the people I met along the way. I have notes but haven’t had time to tell the story of the Netflix years yet…