Hacker News: bigdubs

New comment by bigdubs in "San Francisco, AI capital of the world, is an economic laggard"

bigdubs — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 05:40:07 +0000

Straight into landlord's pockets.

New comment by bigdubs in "Apple needs a Snow Sequoia"

bigdubs — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 22:51:47 +0000

Adding to this, a solution might be enabling continuous releases and leaning into release channels could help in terms of getting more out to users.

In practice it's a challenge because the OS bundles a lot of separate things into releases, namely Safari changes are tied to OS changes which are tied to Apple Pay features which are tied to so on and so on.

It would require a lot of feature flagging and extra complexity which may reduce complexity.

Another way is to start un-bundling releases and fundamentally re-thinking how the dependency graph is structured.

New comment by bigdubs in "Sigma BF Camera"

bigdubs — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 21:06:09 +0000

IMHO SD cards fail much more often than the USB-C connector would, what's the worry? If the camera mounts as a mass storage device it's one fewer thing to go wrong.

New comment by bigdubs in "Constraints in Go"

bigdubs — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 15:56:26 +0000

That's not a random limitation, there are very specific reasons[1] you cannot easily add generic methods as struct receiver functions.

[1] https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/refs/heads/master/des...

New comment by bigdubs in "Apple found in breach of EU competition rules"

bigdubs — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 15:20:19 +0000

People assuming this is a competitive posture exclusively are missing the point.

The app store isn't just about making more money, it's about enforcing privacy and security guidelines for apps through the review process and through checks for unauthorized api usage.

Apple's product is privacy; they view privacy as a premium feature worth paying for, and 3rd party app stores that are the wild west for privacy are antithetical to this.

New comment by bigdubs in "Multi-Array Queue"

bigdubs — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 19:48:35 +0000

Many ring-buffer implementations grow the backing storage array transparently on enqueue but do so in place, discarding the old arrays; what's the advantage of keeping the previous arrays? Naively I'd say it would reduce GC churn because you wouldn't have to free the old arrays, but I'm curious what the impact of that is in benchmarks.

Separately; the simulator is cool and very helpful!

New comment by bigdubs in "Lobsters"

bigdubs — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 17:20:03 +0000

Quantity may have a quality all its own in warfare but for comments having the invite tree and accountability is pretty nice!

I'd rather have (2) really insightful comments than 300 trying to promote themselves.

New comment by bigdubs in "DuckDB – An in-process SQL OLAP database management system"

bigdubs — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 18:03:21 +0000

Shockingly fast and nice and having the intermediate files be immutable is super nice.

New comment by bigdubs in "DuckDB – An in-process SQL OLAP database management system"

bigdubs — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 18:02:56 +0000

We query them directly in most cases with the httpfs plugin, but for hot paths we fetch them and cache them on disk locally.

New comment by bigdubs in "DuckDB – An in-process SQL OLAP database management system"

bigdubs — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 17:07:32 +0000

We use DuckDB extensively where I work (https://watershed.com), the primary way we're using it is to query Parquet formatted files stored in GCS, and we have some machinery to make that doable on demand for reporting and analysis "online" queries.

New comment by bigdubs in "The Winamp Skin Museum is powered by a SQLite3 database with 1.2GB of metadata"

bigdubs — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 22:34:23 +0000

Tailscale has some server components (account management etc.) that are powered with SQLite.

Can read more here: https://tailscale.com/blog/database-for-2022/

New comment by bigdubs in "Choose Boring Technology (2015)"

bigdubs — Mon, 30 May 2022 15:16:03 +0000

What one engineer can operate confidently doesn't necessarily extend to the rest of the team, who will have to support that system if that engineer leaves or has to work on other projects.

The lowest common denominator on a team is boring.

New comment by bigdubs in "How Go mitigates supply chain attacks"

bigdubs — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 17:50:33 +0000

Yes Node.js ships with what is effectively a very thin standard library for some low level things like interacting with the file system, the process model, some security features like TLS.

New comment by bigdubs in "How Go mitigates supply chain attacks"

bigdubs — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 17:19:30 +0000

There is a deeper strategy here with go vs. node; having a standard library maintained by professionals.

I would rather build on a common set of libraries secured by people who are paid full-time to maintain them, and maybe have slightly worse ergonomics, than have a community of libraries that come and go and have inconsistent quality.

This standard library approach yields fewer dependencies, fewer changes over time, and better consistency between projects.

New comment by bigdubs in "Breaking Through Scaling Barriers with Bigtable"

bigdubs — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 17:46:00 +0000

CockroachDB targets a different workload, namely, lots of reads and writes of individual records, versus returning large chunks of even larger tables.

So it might help with inserts but would struggle with larger queries.

New comment by bigdubs in "If the US Market for SWEs is on fire why isn’t Europe’s, or India’s?"

bigdubs — Sun, 06 Mar 2022 04:40:46 +0000

I would maybe consider it the other way; these companies are wildly profitable with huge margins, why don't the employees capture _more_ of the value they create?

New comment by bigdubs in "Go 1.18 RC1 is out"

bigdubs — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 01:38:38 +0000

So far in the betas the generics support has been really great, some issues with inferring the types of functions but otherwise going to be a welcome addition to the language.

New comment by bigdubs in "Coral, a Cobra fork with nearly all its features, but only 4 dependencies"

bigdubs — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 22:26:14 +0000

4 ... of its 5 dependencies. It's just missing Viper. We should do a better job with the title here.

See: - [0] https://github.com/muesli/coral/blob/master/go.mod - [1] https://github.com/spf13/cobra/blob/master/go.mod

New comment by bigdubs in "OpenGOAL: Port of Jak and Daxter, written in GOAL, a custom Lisp by Naughty Dog"

bigdubs — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 23:51:38 +0000

The ars technica extended interview with Andy Gavin is a great watch (mentions lisp from his time at MIT) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSHj5UKSylk

New comment by bigdubs in "Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"

bigdubs — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 07:40:23 +0000

This is not a good comparison because big mining farms are not equivalent to people playing video games at home.