Hacker News: jtwaleson

New comment by jtwaleson in "GitLab Is Down"

jtwaleson — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 07:40:16 +0000

Another one after yesterday's outage, I'm wondering if Gitlab.com is now also buckling under the strain like Github has been for the last year or so.

New comment by jtwaleson in "Python 3.15"

jtwaleson — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:23:53 +0000

It would be great to have less languages and ecosystems rather than more. However, I think that none of these programming systems have hit a peak yet. There's a lot of innovation still to be done, and in that sense, id rather see more divergence and less consolidation.

New comment by jtwaleson in "Python 3.15"

jtwaleson — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:20:24 +0000

That's just ridiculous. Not sure if you're serious, but if so, please make a serious attempt at this argument.

Just Play Factorio

jtwaleson — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 14:11:08 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.waleson.com/2026/10/just-play-factorio.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49944421

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by jtwaleson in "Solving Factorio Quality"

jtwaleson — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 19:55:38 +0000

Imho it's wildly ignorant to call the current SotA coding agents a slot machine. They are extremely powerful tools.

My point was: I play Factorio for fun and it reminds of me of what programming was like before AI coding. In Factorio, all the automations you build are proper abstractions that you yourself actually designed.

New comment by jtwaleson in "Solving Factorio Quality"

jtwaleson — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:19:25 +0000

For pre AI software engineering yes.

New comment by jtwaleson in "MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta"

jtwaleson — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:29:36 +0000

There are many many instances where the CEO is not an employee, but they operate via their own legal entity. To be honest I don't know how this works at larger companies.

New comment by jtwaleson in "Geothermal heat map of US hot springs"

jtwaleson — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:53:52 +0000

A couple years back I drove from Vegas to Yosemite. Due to a road closure we had to take a 4 hour detour. We had this colourful van from Escape Campervans, and every night looked at freecampsites.net to find a free place to sleep. Nice adventures.

That night around 8pm we drove to a random pick, called Willy's Hot Springs, very tired and hungry. We had no idea what it was and had never been to a hot springs. After confirming we could stay there, we drove for dinner and a beer at Mammoth. When we got back, we were curious and went along the wooden path to see the hot springs.

It was around midnight, there was no moon and 0 light pollution. It was magical. You sit in the cold night in natural hot water, in the middle of pretty barren country. There's all the stars and the milky way. Then all of a sudden it got pretty bright. The moon rose over the horizon. It was the first and only moonrise I've ever seen.

This was the most magical night in nature I've ever experienced. A friend of mine said "oh, Willy's Hot Springs, I've been there too, it was kind of mid." I think we experience the world in different ways.

New comment by jtwaleson in "Grok 4.7"

jtwaleson — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:27:32 +0000

yes

New comment by jtwaleson in "Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing"

jtwaleson — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:03:29 +0000

I think it's because people are building agentic flows, reducing the amount of developer seats needed. It's the first step towards usage based pricing.

New comment by jtwaleson in "EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'"

jtwaleson — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 08:42:32 +0000

I was young and naive

New comment by jtwaleson in "EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'"

jtwaleson — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:58:31 +0000

At one point, 20 years back, I was joking that The Netherlands should quit the EU and join the USA as the 51st state. Lot less appealing in the current political climate, but for technology it'd be great. My point was that the constitution of the US is based on ideas, and the country could be open to any territory, independent of location, whereas all of Europe's countries are based on more on historical artifacts.

Funny that the opposite approach is now considered with Canada. I can see it though.

New comment by jtwaleson in "Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B"

jtwaleson — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:02:51 +0000

It's a best-in-class real time collaboration board. It's also a decent general purpose diagramming tool, but if you're using it for creating software architecture diagrams or product flows, there are better tools for that.

New comment by jtwaleson in "Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B"

jtwaleson — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:48:50 +0000

I have some friends there. Morale in the company was very very low. There were multiple rounds of lay-offs and management went AI crazy. They were desperate to live up to their extreme valuation from 2022. "We have to be the future of work" etc. Now the exit was 10x lower than their max valuation.

Great whiteboarding tool though.

New comment by jtwaleson in "Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)"

jtwaleson — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 16:23:35 +0000

Can someone in Microsoft confirm my suspicion that this thread is still going and nothing was fixed?

New comment by jtwaleson in "Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX"

jtwaleson — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 09:31:57 +0000

Ingesting the whole codebase in their cloud and then maintaining indexes of where everything lives and what already exists. Not sure if that's where they are going but that's what I feel looking at some of the beta functionality and announcements.

For the forges, what the sibling said.

New comment by jtwaleson in "Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX"

jtwaleson — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:42:14 +0000

The tide is turning though. I was using the old non agent view in cursor every day for about a year when I built my startup with it. Then Claude Code blew it out of the water. But since two month or so I much prefer Codex and Cursor with the agent view.

However, what I see cooking at Cursor is way more promising than the others. Things like full system understanding, their own forge, multi-repo support. I'd put them as way more visionary in the Gartner magic Quadrant ;)

New comment by jtwaleson in "PostgreSQL for Everything"

jtwaleson — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:29:59 +0000

At Comper we have a very hot key-value store for annotating git data. We maintain a parallel git-blame data structure so we can do incremental "git blame -w -M -C -C". Typically a very expensive operation, but if you make it incremental, you can make it very cheap when new commits need to be analyzed. However, building the git blame tree is still pretty intensive for large repos.

We currently use rocksdb with storage on the same node, and hit rocksdb 1000s of times per second during our analysis. About 20% writes, 80% reads. The issue is that we need to start scaling horizontally, for burstable workers and zero-downtime deployment. So we're thinking to offload to an external kv service instead of a local rocksdb.

TiKV seems a good replacement, about 3-4x slower, but very scalable. Reading this article, I think a separate postgres cluster with unlogged tables might be a good idea. If anyone has some experience to share, let me know!

Carrier Pidge – iOS messaging that travels at 100mph

jtwaleson — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 10:15:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/applications/rogue-ios-developer-creates-app-that-simulates-messages-sent-by-carrier-pigeon-messages-only-travel-at-100mph-la-to-nyc-correspondence-takes-22-hours-to-deliver-virtual-birds-can-get-distracted-or-even-lost

Hacker News: jtwaleson

New comment by jtwaleson in "GitLab Is Down"

New comment by jtwaleson in "Python 3.15"

New comment by jtwaleson in "Python 3.15"

Just Play Factorio

New comment by jtwaleson in "Solving Factorio Quality"

New comment by jtwaleson in "Solving Factorio Quality"

New comment by jtwaleson in "MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta"

New comment by jtwaleson in "Geothermal heat map of US hot springs"

New comment by jtwaleson in "Grok 4.7"

New comment by jtwaleson in "Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing"

New comment by jtwaleson in "EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'"

New comment by jtwaleson in "EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'"

New comment by jtwaleson in "Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B"

New comment by jtwaleson in "Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B"

New comment by jtwaleson in "Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)"

New comment by jtwaleson in "Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX"

New comment by jtwaleson in "Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX"

New comment by jtwaleson in "PostgreSQL for Everything"

Carrier Pidge – iOS messaging that travels at 100mph

New comment by jtwaleson in "Gemini 3.7 Flash"