Hacker News: cbrewster

Stripe Just Wants a Number

cbrewster — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:51:19 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.exe.dev/billable-facts

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098312

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

ZeroFS vs. Amazon S3 Files

cbrewster — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 18:15:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.zerofs.net/blog/zerofs-vs-aws-s3-files/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48874297

Points: 92

# Comments: 29

Restate 1.7: End-to-end Flow Control for your Agents and Back ends

cbrewster — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 03:25:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.restate.dev/blog/announcing-restate-1-7

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855405

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Chorus: A fast WAL for object storage

cbrewster — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:40:39 +0000

Article URL: https://rockwotj.com/blog/chorus/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48825008

Points: 5

# Comments: 6

Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

cbrewster — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:58:21 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.gitbutler.com/true-grit

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48466812

Points: 178

# Comments: 306

SlateDB – An embedded database built on object storage

cbrewster — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:20:26 +0000

Article URL: https://slatedb.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48282761

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

We Built a Video Rendering Engine by Lying to the Browser About What Time It Is

cbrewster — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:38:21 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.replit.com/browsers-dont-want-to-be-cameras

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47170163

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Replit's Snapshot Engine: The Tech Making AI Agents Safe

cbrewster — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 21:50:24 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.replit.com/inside-replits-snapshot-engine

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306039

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Replit Storage: The Next Generation

cbrewster — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 00:24:39 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.replit.com/replit-storage-the-next-generation

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37007634

Points: 11

# Comments: 0

New comment by cbrewster in "One Million Database Connections"

cbrewster — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 17:29:14 +0000

Now you need to batch your requests to your intermediate server

New comment by cbrewster in "Short story about my Steam Deck"

cbrewster — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 19:39:32 +0000

You can talk to support about missing the notification about your reservation and they'll still let you put in an order.

New comment by cbrewster in "Will Nix Overtake Docker?"

cbrewster — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 16:53:18 +0000

Fair, but its still a real issue and solved in a similar way: Nix has finer grained reproducibility -- not only at the environment level but also at the derivation level. Being able to pick and choose which dependencies to update while ensuring other packages are left exactly the same is valuable to us.

New comment by cbrewster in "Will Nix Overtake Docker?"

cbrewster — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 04:41:19 +0000

For context, I'm referencing our (legacy) base image for projects on Replit: Polygott (https://github.com/replit/polygott/).

The image contains dependencies needed for 50+ languages. This means repls by default are packed with lots of commonly used tools. However, the image is massive, takes a long time to build, and is difficult to deploy.

Unfortunately, slimming the image down is not really an option: people rely on all the tools we provide out of the box.

New comment by cbrewster in "Will Nix Overtake Docker?"

cbrewster — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 04:30:01 +0000

What happens when you need to update some dependency within that image? Now you have to do an image rebuild. If you're lucky only the top-most layers will be rebuilt and the base layers stay the same, if you're unlucky nearly the whole image is rebuilt. Usually we just want to update some subset of dependencies, but during the rebuild some other dependencies may get updated unintentionally (eg if they aren't pinned to a particular version). For most, this may not be an issue but at Replit, everyone's projects use this base Docker image. Unintended updates can cause breakage for our users.

New comment by cbrewster in "Will Nix Overtake Docker?"

cbrewster — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 04:15:23 +0000

Author here. It's titled this way because Docker seems to come up in a lot of discussions around Nix and is often compared with Nix. Partly because of their overlap in functionality but also because people may not understand the difference between the two. The goal here was to a) highlight the different use-cases between the two tools b) compare the tools in the areas that they overlap and c) show how both tools can be used together.

New comment by cbrewster in "Will Nix Overtake Docker?"

cbrewster — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 03:11:03 +0000

Author here. In our case, we had a large base Docker image called Polygott (https://github.com/replit/polygott) it pulls in dependencies for 50+ different languages from various repositories. We would pin things where possible, but its still very difficult to ensure reproducible builds.

Additionally, docker builds have free access to the network to do anything it would like. Nix goes to great lengths to sandbox builds and limit network access. Anything accessed from a network requires a pinned sha 256 hash to ensure the remote data hasn't changed. (https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix#Sandboxing)

New comment by cbrewster in "Will Nix Overtake Docker?"

cbrewster — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 03:05:41 +0000

Author here. As with most things, its all about the trade-offs. Docker has certainly proved itself and that approach has worked on a massive scale. However, its not a silver bullet. For us at Replit, our Docker approach was causing issues: our base image was large and unmaintainable and we had almost no way of knowing what changed between subsequent builds of the base image.

We've been able to utilize Nix to address both of those issues, and others who may be in a similar scenario might also find Nix to be valuable.

Of course Nix comes with its own set of opinions and complexities but it has been a worthwhile trade-off for us.

New comment by cbrewster in "Will Nix Overtake Docker?"

cbrewster — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 03:00:12 +0000

While you can copy files from different stages, I wouldn't consider this to be the same thing as composing two base images together. Like the example in the post, you can't take the Rust and NodeJS images and tell Docker to magically merge them. You can copy binaries & libraries from one to the other but that seems extremely tedious and error prone.

Whereas Nix makes it rather trivial to compose together the packages you need (eg Rust, NodeJS) in your environment.

New comment by cbrewster in "Replit now supports every programming language in Nix"

cbrewster — Tue, 25 May 2021 22:37:43 +0000

It was more of a silly demonstration showing what's possible and less about being practical. :)

New comment by cbrewster in "Replit now supports every programming language in Nix"

cbrewster — Tue, 25 May 2021 16:03:00 +0000

Yeah, we are really excited about the future Nix will bring for us at Replit. Soon, language version incompatibility will be a thing of the past on Replit.