Hacker News: harshaw

New comment by harshaw in "Worlds more habitable than Earth?"

harshaw — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:17:48 +0000

one thing to point out: with a planet that is 20-30% larger than the earth the rocket equation makes it almost it impossible to get out of the atmosphere with chemical rocket technology. So even if you could visit, we could probably only have drop ships or rovers. coming back out of the gravity well without space elevators or stuff would be very hard. It also means that life on those planets would be hard for them to establish a space faring society.

New comment by harshaw in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

harshaw — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:15:27 +0000

A bunch of people are commenting that this could lead to grid-death spiral where people opt out of the grid because they can just use solar + batteries. Maybe, but I doubt in Vermont. Vermont is really hard for solar because of tree cover and clouds (according to my conversations with a solar installer). Secondly, in this setup you have buy your own power plant (solar + batteries), which likely for most folks, is a pretty big expense. Green Mountain power subsidizing the cost of buying the Tesla power walls is a big deal for me because I use this setup for a cabin / second home and want to keep my costs relatively low. I can't do solar because I on the side of a mountain and lots of trees.

New comment by harshaw in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

harshaw — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 02:17:26 +0000

I couldn't read the article because of paywall issues. I have a Tesla powerwall that I pay $50 / month to lease from green mountain power. I have piece of mind for power in a rural area - the power company get peaker benefits. Seems like a great deal. I wish we had this in Massachusetts. Mad river valley area.

New comment by harshaw in "AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran"

harshaw — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:30:28 +0000

Ex AWS. AWS had one zone specific products. If those were in the affected AZ that data is lost. AWS has multiple multi-AZ products. S3 and EFS are good examples. If you loose an AZ for an extended periodic of time, the dataplane of those services will migrate shards around until you get back to your durability goals.

New comment by harshaw in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

harshaw — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:57:35 +0000

if you use these things to generate design docs / text, it should be good news if it is actually better at prose as advertised. Some people like sol for prose better the anthropic models.

New comment by harshaw in "Samsung's Processing-in-Memory (PIM)"

harshaw — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 11:01:16 +0000

This is somewhat orthogonal to the article, but the whole bubble on AI data centers seems to presume that the need for compute is so massive that it far exceeds the expected optimizations we would expect with at scale inference (PIM, ASICs, etc). I would expect that there is a set of optimizations like this one (or variations) that would someone negate the buildout. But it's not really discussed.

New comment by harshaw in "The Teaser Period: Why the AI Boom Is Hitting a Reset Wall"

harshaw — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 16:28:25 +0000

Some other commentators said this was AI slop. I don't have enough expertise to say if it really is, but it sure has the "claudish" cadence of AI generated text that makes it hard to take it seriously. The authoritative and strong statements, the use of phrasing with colons and dashes, the use of bold, etc.

New comment by harshaw in "Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive"

harshaw — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:57:38 +0000

I've heard it's writing style referred to as "Claudish". I agree that it is very hard to read and creates work for me.

New comment by harshaw in "Googlebook"

harshaw — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:02:56 +0000

I really wanted to stay in the google chromebook / googlebook echo system. But the hardware was expensive for what you get. Apple announced the macbook neo and I picked one up. Great hardware. can run light weight mac software. I don't run much beyond chrome and wahoo SYSTM (bike trainer app). It's really solid hardware and cost $600 or so.

I use gemini extensively (and claude). But - do I need this integrated in my laptop? Don't quite see it. And it's hard to beat Apple on hardware now.

New comment by harshaw in "S3 Files"

harshaw — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:29:10 +0000

this post will probably never be read but.. I was on the team that was trying to make the marriage of S3 and EFS work a year ago. it's a pretty hard problem. At one point we proposed this solution (which seems like a caching layer) but it got shot down for a more complex system that would have attempted to rebuild EFS on faster S3 blob storage. I left before this engineering monstrosity made significant progress, and it clearly died at some point.

Looks like they went back to a simpler solution they could deliver but with some obvious warts. good to see something get launched but the sausage making her was brutal.

The reality is that if you read https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2026/04/s3-files-and-th..., it sounds like the great minds at S3 figured out that a caching layer was the way to go. We (EFS) fucking proposed that years ago. But we had to deal with Seattle and the S3 braintrust who didn't want to do that. I know we wrote a PRFAQ that was close to this concept probably four years ago. The political story is that EFS was taking over by S3 and the EFS folks didn't have the agency or political backing to build a more workable solution. So we wasted a shit ton of time tackling something that was never going to work and many of the tenured EFS engineers left.

New comment by harshaw in "MacBook Neo"

harshaw — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:15:34 +0000

somewhat off topic, but I really am not sure that adding chromebooks to every school has made education better. hard to block youtube when they bring these home (I know you can, but the average person can't).

New comment by harshaw in "Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk"

harshaw — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 21:51:10 +0000

If you don't want to go through your insurance company you can check out an app we built called RoadClub. You get points for safe driving behavior - and you can get the hard brake alerts. Is it a bit annoying? yes. You can't just drive agressively - you need to give space to slow down. I still struggle with it.

New comment by harshaw in "Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk"

harshaw — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:39:17 +0000

Nice research. This is fairly well known in insurance circles. Most auto insurers that do telematics consider hard braking the strongest indicator of risk. One of the things that we do at work (Cambridge Mobile Telematics) is build tools to deal with this risk. We have apps that monitor driving and we play a tone to indicate that a hard braking event was detected. Simply letting people know that they had a hard braking event is an effective mechanism for behavior change (other companies have similar tech)

New comment by harshaw in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

harshaw — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:03 +0000

I am confused about what Tesla is doing. They have effectively two automobile products now with one failed product (cybertruck). reading various articles about this doesn't make it more clear. Do they not want to be a car company?

New comment by harshaw in "AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'"

harshaw — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 21:13:12 +0000

Full disclosure: I am pretty sour on the current Amazon/AWS leadership as I think, well, they couldn't lead a company out of a paper bag (former manager at AWS). Is there data that Amazon/AWS is still hiring junior devs? I've heard it's very hard to get into student programs these days but I don't have the data. My grumpy position would be Garmin saying one thing and doing another.

New comment by harshaw in "AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is"

harshaw — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:04:08 +0000

Why? I look at this. I want engineers to use the tools on the stuff that AI is good at so we can do more high value work.

New comment by harshaw in "Reproducing the AWS Outage Race Condition with a Model Checker"

harshaw — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 13:12:00 +0000

If I were to summarize how we attacked this when I was on AWS (different team)

formal methods. Some of this started a long time ago so not sure if it was TLA, TLA+, or something else. (I am a useless manager type)

fake clients / servers to make testing possible

strict invariants

A simulator to fuzz/fault the entire system. We didn't get this until later in the life of the service but flushed out race condition bugs that would have taken years to do.

We never got to replaying customer traffic patterns which was a pet idea of mine but probably the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.

New comment by harshaw in "Casey Muratori: I can always tell a good programmer in an interview"

harshaw — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 13:35:51 +0000

i'll bite. Please give me an example of questions that are scientifically validated.

New comment by harshaw in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

harshaw — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 17:11:56 +0000

not quite true - there are some regions that have a different set of AWS users / credentials. I can't remember what this is called off the top of my head.

New comment by harshaw in "U.S. Is Losing Race to Return to Moon"

harshaw — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 10:31:20 +0000

I think this is an astonishingly dumb take. Regardless of what you think of Musk, SpaceX is building a fundamentally important reusable lift technology that can be the underpinning of some many future developments. Who cares if China gets to the moon first? This is how NASA historically gets into a mess with its launch system - political pressure, conflated goals and requirements (see the Space Shuttle - does it launch people?, military payloads?, oh goodie - let's do it all). If anything I wish NASA would do more to make sure we have a decent starship competitor which its hard to see blue origin being anytime soon (but I am not an expert on this topic)