Hacker News: luhn

New comment by luhn in "Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track"

luhn — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 22:14:19 +0000

I assume Blueberry is a nod to the machine being a Raspberry Pi.

New comment by luhn in "Colon cancer now leading cause of cancer deaths under 50 in US"

luhn — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:24:52 +0000

I can't make sense of your comment, but whatever you're trying to get at is wrong: Table sugar is sucrose. Corn syrup is mostly glucose and contains no fructose. HFCS is commonly produced at 42% and 55% fructose formulations. I don't think HFCS is meaningfully more or less harmful than any other sugar, but chemically there's a significant difference.

New comment by luhn in "California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years"

luhn — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:05:43 +0000

It's not quite that dire. Statewide 69% normal to date. Snowpack peaks March-April, so still have a ways to go in the season. https://snow.water.ca.gov

But yeah, snowmelt plays a huge role in supplying water into the summer, so just looking at precipitation totals isn't the full picture.

New comment by luhn in "GPT-5.2"

luhn — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 22:09:05 +0000

That's hilarious and right on brand for Google that they spend millions developing cutting-edge technology and fumble the ball making a chat app.

New comment by luhn in "Cloudflare outage should not have happened"

luhn — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 17:54:35 +0000

"Workaround: If we wait long enough, the earth will eventually be consumed by the sun."

https://xkcd.com/1822/

New comment by luhn in "A $1k AWS mistake"

luhn — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:53:14 +0000

8kbit/min, you mean.

New comment by luhn in "Tell HN: Azure outage"

luhn — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:23:11 +0000

They had a pretty massive one earlier this year. https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...

This isn't GCP's fault, but the outage ended up taking down Cloudflare too, so in total impact I think that takes the cake.

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

luhn — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 20:56:34 +0000

us-west-1 is the one outlier. us-east-1, us-east-2, and us-west-2 are all priced the same.

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

luhn — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 18:22:47 +0000

Case in point is recent-ish Google Cloud downtime, which ended up taking down Cloudflare and half the internet with it.

New comment by luhn in "Building the heap: racking 30 petabytes of hard drives for pretraining"

luhn — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 21:55:00 +0000

> IIRC the wisdom of the time cloud started becoming popular was to always be on-prem and use cloud to scale up when demand spiked.

I've heard that before but was never able to make sense of it. Overflowing into the cloud seems like a nightmare to manage, wouldn't overbuilding on-prem be cheaper than paying your infra team to straddle two environments?

New comment by luhn in "How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs"

luhn — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 19:47:21 +0000

Maybe they ask the NSA for a copy.

New comment by luhn in "How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs"

luhn — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 19:27:45 +0000

Do you have any sources for that? I'm really curious about Glacier's infrastructure and AWS has been notoriously tight-lipped about it. I haven't found anything better than informed speculation.

New comment by luhn in "Replace PostgreSQL with Git for your next project"

luhn — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 16:08:02 +0000

That's exactly what they're doing, it's just driving engagement for their sales:

> While Git makes an interesting database alternative for specific use cases, your production applications deserve better. Upsun provides managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, and other database services

New comment by luhn in "Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube"

luhn — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 19:10:55 +0000

Yeah, anybody can make a half-baked CDN, but Google has PoPs inside ISPs across the world [1] and competing with that is essentially impossible.

[1] https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en

New comment by luhn in "The key to a successful egg drop experiment? Drop it on its side"

luhn — Thu, 29 May 2025 20:31:29 +0000

Yeah, tight packing is simple and very effective. I had a successful drop with nothing but corn starch packing peanuts shoved into a cardboard box.

New comment by luhn in "Migrating to Postgres"

luhn — Thu, 15 May 2025 15:47:55 +0000

Like most ALTER TABLE subcommands, you need an exclusive lock on the table while the catalog is updated. But no table scan or rewrite is required, so that lock is sub-second and can usually be done without disrupting a live application.

New comment by luhn in "Migrating to Postgres"

luhn — Thu, 15 May 2025 01:43:07 +0000

The improvements to migrations have been the biggest boon for running even modestly-sized Postgres DBs. It wasn't that long ago that you couldn't add a column with a default value without rewriting the whole table, or adding NOT NULL without an exclusive lock while the whole table was scanned. That becomes unfeasible pretty quickly.

New comment by luhn in "Migrating to Postgres"

luhn — Thu, 15 May 2025 01:31:24 +0000

You don't need to optimize anything beyond appropriate indices, Postgres can handle tables of that size out of the box without breaking a sweat.

New comment by luhn in "Migrating to Postgres"

luhn — Thu, 15 May 2025 01:19:54 +0000

> By Jan 2024, our largest table had roughly 100 million rows.

I did a double take at this. At the onset of the article, the fact they're using a distributed database and the mention of a "mid 6 figure" DB bill made me assume they have some obscenely large database that's far beyond what a single node could do. They don't detail the Postgres setup that replaced it, so I assume it's a pretty standard single primary and a 100 million row table is well within the abilities of that—I have a 150 million row table happily plugging along on a 2vCPU+16GB instance. Apples and oranges, perhaps, but people shouldn't underestimate what a single modern server can do.

New comment by luhn in "Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4"

luhn — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 04:53:00 +0000

A synchronous replica via WAL shipping is a well-worn feature of Postgres. I’d expect RDS to be using that feature behind the scenes and would be extremely surprised if that has consistency bugs.

Two replicas in a “semi synchronous” configuration, as AWS calls it, is to my knowledge not available in base Postgres. AWS must be using some bespoke replication strategy, which would have different bugs than synchronous replication and is less battle-tested.

But as nobody except AWS knows the implementation details of RDS, this is all idle speculation that doesn’t mean much.