Hacker News: jread

Donut Lab Solid-State Battery: Fast Charge Test [video]

jread — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:59:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2QU_LpkSPs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129572

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jread in "A scammer's blueprint: How cybercriminals plot to rob a target in a week"

jread — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:15:01 +0000

My mother-in-law fell for a love scam last year. Luckily we caught it early and no money was lost, but I was surprised how difficult it was to convince her it was a scam despite the obvious signs and family and friends all telling her it was. The scammer claimed to be the actor Jack Wagner (popular on Hallmark channel and soap operas). Out of desperation we looked him up on cameo and paid him for a video message telling her it wasn't him texting her, and that finally snapped her out of it.

New comment by jread in "Go ahead, self-host Postgres"

jread — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 21:45:07 +0000

Ah, good to know, I hadn't seen that V2 update. Looks like a min 5m inactivity to auto-pause (i.e., scale to 0), and any connection attempt (valid or not) resumes the DB.

New comment by jread in "Go ahead, self-host Postgres"

jread — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 19:42:31 +0000

This was true for RDS serverless v1 which scaled to 0 but is no longer offered. V2 requires a minimum 0.5 ACU hourly commit ($40+ /mo).

New comment by jread in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

jread — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:51:57 +0000

As part of my CS grad research, I launched a website reporting on public cloud availability and performance.

https://cloudlooking.glass/#show=uptime

New comment by jread in "Replacing EBS and Rethinking Postgres Storage from First Principles"

jread — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 01:18:37 +0000

Yes, we've been testing volume attachments every 5m since start of the year, and have experienced 100-150 attachment failures per volume type in that time frame during multiple events (most recently last week):

https://cloudlooking.glass/dashboard/#aws.ebs.us-east-1--cp-...

Another interesting bit, is last March AWS changed something in the control plane which both triggered a multi-day LSE, and ultimately increased attachment times from 2-3s to 10-20s (also visible in the graphs).

New comment by jread in "Replacing EBS and Rethinking Postgres Storage from First Principles"

jread — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 18:49:45 +0000

I'm working on graduate research evaluating AWS control and data plane performance.

EBS volume attachment is typically ~11s for GP2/GP3 and ~20-25s for other types.

1ms read / 5ms write latencies seem high for 4k blocks. IO1/IO2 is typically ~0.5ms RW, and GP2/GP3 ~0.6ms read and ~0.94ms write.

References: https://cloudlooking.glass/matrix/#aws.ebs.us-east-1--cp--at... https://cloudlooking.glass/matrix/#aws.ebs.*--dp--rand-*&aws...

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

jread — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 21:08:53 +0000

Lambda create-function control plane operations are still failing with InternalError for us - other services have recovered (Lambda, SNS, SQS, EFS, EBS, and CloudFront). Cloud availability is the subject of my CS grad research, I wrote a quick post summarizing the event timeline and blast radius as I've observed it from testing in multiple AWS test accounts: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/analyzing-aws-us-east-1-outag...

New comment by jread in "Show HN: I built an alternative status page for public clouds"

jread — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 22:38:57 +0000

For networking, the site only reports uptime % for zonal, regional, cross-region or cross-cloud tests. It excludes last mile network tests as those fail frequently due to many hops and endpoint unreliability (we use Ripe Atlas and Globalping.io endpoints which are not always reliable even with redundant probes per test).

New comment by jread in "Show HN: I built an alternative status page for public clouds"

jread — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 22:27:11 +0000

For data and control plane I can determine the issue from the API request/response logs (i.e., network timeout, 5xx, etc.). Network tests are trickier and we don't have a great way to validate failure cause each of those events (i.e., we don't capture a traceroute on failure), other than to evaluate results from multiple endpoint combinations (e.g., AWS us-east-1 to us-west-1 fails while us-east-2 to us-west-1 succeeds).

New comment by jread in "Show HN: I built an alternative status page for public clouds"

jread — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 21:01:59 +0000

Happy to answer any questions also.

Show HN: I built an alternative status page for public clouds

jread — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 21:00:31 +0000

I created Cloud Looking Glass as a CS grad research project to build a better status page for public cloud platforms — independent and based on what users actually experience (in my experience, cloud providers tend to underreport events on public status pages).

I modeled it as a time series problem: all tests are repeated every 5 minutes from three unrelated cloud accounts per platform (currently ~1,000 tests/min). The system provides full data plane, control plane, and networking coverage for AWS us-east-1, plus network testing across 25 other providers. Full coverage for GCP and Azure is coming soon.

It also has a cloud looking glass for real-time zonal, regional, cross-region, cross-cloud, and last-mile network testing (ping, tcping, traceroute, MTR, etc.).

Would love feedback, suggestions, or advice.

https://cloudlooking.glass#show=uptime

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905640

Points: 9

# Comments: 4

New comment by jread in "Apple M3 Ultra"

jread — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 15:53:18 +0000

$8549 with 1TB storage

New comment by jread in "Why we use our own hardware"

jread — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 18:21:58 +0000

There is lot of statistical and empirical data on this topic - MTBF estimates from vendors (typically 100k - 1m+ hours), Backblaze and Google drive failure data (~1-2% annual failure rate), IEEE and others. With N+1 redundancy (backup servers/RAID + spare drives) and proper design and change control processes, operational failures should be very rare.

With cloud hardware issues are just the start - yes you MUST "plan for failure", leveraging load balancers, auto scaling, cloudwatch, and dozens of other proprietary dials and knobs. However, you must also consider control plane, quotas, capacity, IAM, spend, and other non-hardware breaking points.

You're autoscaling isn't working - is the AZ out of capacity, did you hit a quota limit, run out of IPv4s, or was an AMI inadvertently removed? Your instance is unable to write to S3 - is the metadata service being flakey (for your IAM role), or is it due to an IAM role / S3 policy change? Your Lambda function is failing - did it hit a timeout, or exhaust the (512MB) temp storage? Need help diagnosing an issue - what is your paid support tier - submit a ticket and we'll get back to you sometime in the 24 hours.

New comment by jread in "Why we use our own hardware"

jread — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 22:50:47 +0000

> Any usecase that requires interacting with a service is automatically excluded

This isn't correct. Many applications consist of a mix of static and dynamic content. Even dynamic content is often cacheable for a time. All of this can be served by a CDN (using TTLs) which is a much simpler and more cost effective solution than multi-region cloud infra, with the same performance benefits.

New comment by jread in "Why we use our own hardware"

jread — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 22:32:23 +0000

> Hardware can fail for all kinds of reasons

Complex cloud infra can also fail for all kinds of reasons, and they are often harder to troubleshoot than a hardware failure. My experience with server grade hardware in a reliable colo with a good uplink is it's generally an extremely reliable combination.

New comment by jread in "Why we use our own hardware"

jread — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 21:53:48 +0000

If have a global user base, depending on your workload, a simple CDN in front of your hardware can often go a long ways with minimal cost and complexity.

New comment by jread in "Ask HN: What's the simplest static website generator?"

jread — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 13:55:46 +0000

Material for MkDocs is great for documentation centric websites.

New comment by jread in "BigQuery prices increasing by more than 100% for many users"

jread — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 15:18:21 +0000

Athena and Redshift Spectrum are the best alternatives on the AWS side.

New comment by jread in "Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow"

jread — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 17:53:53 +0000

As someone who spent 5 years attempting to get through zoning including a purely subjective “design review committee” in one of these affluent cities, I applaud this. While I agree with the desire to preserve the character and uniqueness one’s town, that pendulum has swung so far over driven by older, established nimbies who got theirs decades ago, or their offspring who inherited both homes and excessively low prop 13 tax rates locked in decades ago. The wealth disparity this whole system has created is staggering.