Hacker News: kelvich

New comment by kelvich in "Exe.dev"

kelvich — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 18:44:59 +0000

This thread seems to reflect how the HN audience has shifted — less commenters know what `ssh example.com` does and more commenters concerned about privacy policy.

New comment by kelvich in "Exe.dev"

kelvich — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 18:29:34 +0000

> I'm not going to SSH to a random server.

Opening a random website likely exposes you to more risk.

New comment by kelvich in "Neon Serverless Postgres is generally available"

kelvich — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 15:11:51 +0000

To provide more context, our original plan was to launch the GA on March 22nd. However, we decided to move the date to April 15th because a few projects required additional time to complete. Last week we saw Supabase announcement but we didn't know what is that about and decided to not to move our date again.

Fork() takes more than a second! how so?

kelvich — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 19:12:32 +0000

Article URL: https://neon.tech/blog/posix_spawn-close_range-fixed-cold-starts

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471628

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by kelvich in "20x faster than pgvector: HNSW index in Postgres with pg_embedding"

kelvich — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 20:55:47 +0000

Thank you, point taken.

The blog post does mention memory limitations, but we could elaborate more on the fact that the index is entirely in-memory and clarify the user-visible consequences of this fact. We'll edit the post for better clarity.

New comment by kelvich in "HTTP vs. WebSockets: Which one is the fastest for Postgres queries at the edge?"

kelvich — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 16:55:54 +0000

Yes, exploring http/3 is on the roadmap. One of the learnings for us was the fact that v8 is quite good with caching open TCP connection; For consecutive queries the same TCP+TLS session is being reused. Even when queries are sent from unrelated V8 isolates.

New comment by kelvich in "Scaling serverless Postgres: How we implement autoscaling"

kelvich — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 15:49:30 +0000

There is a second network interface attached to each pod and that interfaces are connected to vxlan-based overlay network. So during the migration VM can keep the same ip address (APR will take care of traffic finding it's destination). That is simplest approach but has it's own downsides when overlay network grows big and painful to set up with some cloud SNI.

Few other options are:

* use some SDN instead of vxlan

* use QUICK instead of TCP in the internal network -- with QUICK we can change endpoint IP addresses on live connection

New comment by kelvich in "Quicker serverless Postgres connections"

kelvich — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 20:00:40 +0000

Main idea was one branch per pull request to better test migrations on a fresh data. But one branch per dev or branch per dev per pr will also work.

New comment by kelvich in "Quicker serverless Postgres connections"

kelvich — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 16:29:04 +0000

> The article ends with the statement that you are pretty much done here for now. Would optimizing your TLS termination not maybe offer some more ways to speed this up? Or is that also already fully optimized?

No, we don't do early termination yet, but it makes sense to try it out too. Here we mostly concentrated on how far we can get in terms of reducing number of round-trips.

> I did not realize before that your approach with Websockets actually meant that there was no application/client side pooling of connections. What made you choose this approach over an HTTP API (as for example PlanetScale did) anyway?

To keep compatibility with current code using postgres.js.

New comment by kelvich in "Pgvector: Open-source vector similarity search for Postgres"

kelvich — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:03:00 +0000

Feel free to try it out on https://neon.tech/

New comment by kelvich in "Edge-compatible Serverless Driver for Postgres"

kelvich — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 21:03:35 +0000

Gotcha. I drew my conclusion based on the mentioned package.json. Now wonder why did you decide to go with rust for query engine? Do you compile it into wasm?

New comment by kelvich in "Edge-compatible Serverless Driver for Postgres"

kelvich — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 19:55:23 +0000

https://github.com/prisma/prisma/blob/main/packages/client/p...

New comment by kelvich in "Edge-compatible Serverless Driver for Postgres"

kelvich — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 19:06:17 +0000

Another angle here is compatibility. With our current driver one can use ordinary node-postgres package, as we can substitute TCP-related calls with WebSocket calls during the build time. With that it possible to use all the packages that do require node-postgres like Prisma, Zapatos, etc.

New comment by kelvich in "Edge-compatible Serverless Driver for Postgres"

kelvich — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 18:59:53 +0000

Right, that is one of the use cases. Auth is tricky part in that setup -- in the browser user may change the query in arbitrary way. But there are some workarounds like obtaining JWT from 3rd party service and checking it via Row-Level Security policy in Postgres.

New comment by kelvich in "Time travel in Postgres. Bisect to the last valid transaction"

kelvich — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 19:56:49 +0000

It is possible to create branch retroactively

Postgres over WebSockets for Cloudflare Workers

kelvich — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 18:36:29 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.cloudflare.com/neon-postgres-database-from-workers/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643464

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by kelvich in "Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960)"

kelvich — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 14:18:16 +0000

And some other projects that DARPA worked on: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/space-age/the-bunny-t...

New comment by kelvich in "Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960)"

kelvich — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 14:10:14 +0000

Licklider is one the main persons behind the ARPANET. The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberger has a lot of context on his time in DARPA. Few things that I found particularly notable:

* Licklider was conscious about not having too much funding compared to other DARPA projects so that in case of a budget cut, there would a more obvious candidates for the slash.

* Initially, universities pushed back on ARPANET because they were afraid that remote access might lead to more candidates for their mainframe time

New comment by kelvich in "Why use Paxos instead of Raft?"

kelvich — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 19:26:40 +0000

Postgres tracks maximal LSN among the evicted pages and passes it to the pageserver in the page request. If the pageserver hasn't received that LSN, it will wait for it to arrive.

New comment by kelvich in "Why use Paxos instead of Raft?"

kelvich — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 18:02:54 +0000

Currently, we deploy three safekeepers, one in each AZ. We need to collect more stats on failure rates, and maybe we will go to 6 (3 AZs with two nodes in each) as Aurora does.