Hacker News: maherbeg

New comment by maherbeg in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

maherbeg — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:29:06 +0000

We actually have one of these between our group of friends and their kids and it's awesome. The kids call each other to chat and setup play dates or to go run around in the street. Our kids will call back home to let us know they made it to the other persons house, or let us know they're coming back home too.

The tactility is incredible, and it's so just so cute to watch them chat away (5 year olds!)

New comment by maherbeg in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

maherbeg — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:38:50 +0000

Honestly, they can keep waiting for another year or two for on-device models at the size they're looking for to be powerful enough.

New comment by maherbeg in "Show HN: PgDog – Scale Postgres without changing the app"

maherbeg — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:11:20 +0000

The way we solved it is by checking the lsn on the primary, and then waiting for the replica to catch up to that lsn before doing reads on the replica in various scenarios.

New comment by maherbeg in "Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users"

maherbeg — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:53:23 +0000

This is really tough in a large organization with features that cross across product domains.

New comment by maherbeg in "Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users"

maherbeg — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:50:26 +0000

Yeah, you'll definitely want to set things like `max_standby_streaming_delay` and friends to ensure things are bound correctly.

New comment by maherbeg in "Replacing Protobuf with Rust"

maherbeg — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:46:43 +0000

Gotta say, I love using PGDog. It has some fantastic built in features, and I'm looking forward to testing out the improved query parser. Lev and the team are heroes.

At the scale we were using PGDog, enabling the previous form of the query parser was extremely expensive (we would have had to 16x our pgdog fleet size).

New comment by maherbeg in "Personal thoughts/notes from working on Zootopia 2"

maherbeg — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:20:13 +0000

I totally agree. I love watching a small set of animated films over the holidays in time order to really see the technical progress. It's especially fun to go from something nostalgic I loved as a kid, to something I can really see the technical underpinnings of today.

New comment by maherbeg in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

maherbeg — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:33:56 +0000

Both accessibility, and application security are easier to build rules + improved models for because they have pretty solid constraints and outcomes. UX on the other hand is definitely more challenging given how much of it isn't quite codified into simple rules.

I didn't write off an entire field of research, but rather want to highlight that these aren't intractable problems for AI research, and that we can actually start codifying many of these things today using the skills framework to close up edges in the model training. It may not be 100% but it's not 0%.

New comment by maherbeg in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

maherbeg — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:01:08 +0000

That may be true now, but think about how far we've come in a year alone! This is really impressive, and even if the models don't improve, someone will build skills to attack these specific scenarios.

Over time, I imagine even cloud providers, app stores etc can start doing automated security scanning for these types of failure modes, or give a more restricted version of the experience to ensure safety too.

New comment by maherbeg in "Novo Nordisk launches Wegovy weight-loss pill in US, triggering price war"

maherbeg — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:29:55 +0000

I wouldn't be surprised if this paves the way for differing insurance rates on health markers given how magical glp-1s seem to be, and how much of modern disease is based on lifestyle factors.

New comment by maherbeg in "Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free"

maherbeg — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 22:38:01 +0000

a lot of the gen1 users will likely swap over to it though. They basically have dropped improvements for gen1 autonomy which is rug-pullish :(

New comment by maherbeg in "Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig"

maherbeg — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 18:04:24 +0000

One other thing I think it misses, is how easy it is to navigate a massive code base because everything looks the same. In a large team, this is crucial and I value the legibility over cleverness (I really dislike meta programming).

Really the only thing I found difficult is finding the concrete implementation of an interface when the interface is defined close to where it is, and when interfaces are duplicated everywhere.

New comment by maherbeg in "OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030"

maherbeg — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 15:59:14 +0000

I don't see a world where there is such a catastrophic failure, unless someone comes up with a significantly more efficient architecture.

We're barely scratching the surface of the utility of LLMs with today's models. They aren't more pervasive because of their costs today, but what happens if they drop another order of magnitude with the current capabilities?

New comment by maherbeg in "Claude Opus 4.5"

maherbeg — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 21:50:55 +0000

Ok, the victorian lock puzzle game is pretty damn cool way to showcase the capabilities of these models. I kinda want to start building similar puzzle games for models to solve.

New comment by maherbeg in "A race condition in Aurora RDS"

maherbeg — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:41:29 +0000

Yeah I agree, this seems like a pretty critical feature to the Aurora product itself. We saw a similar behavior recently where we had a connection pooler in between which indicates something wrong with how they propagate DNS changes during the failover. wtf aws

New comment by maherbeg in "Helm 4.0"

maherbeg — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 15:28:31 +0000

Yeah, this setup is both nice and insane. If you don't need much extra customization it's great. But I have a setup where I needed both postBuild and postRenderer's + actual kustomization layering and it was awful trying to figure out the order of execution to get the right final output.

In hindsight it would have been much faster to write the resources myself.

New comment by maherbeg in "Radiant Computer"

maherbeg — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 16:13:20 +0000

Love ambitious projects like this!

I wonder why the Unix standard doesn't start dropping old syscalls and standards? Does it have to be strictly backwards compatible?

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

maherbeg — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 14:35:34 +0000

This has a similar flavor to xata.io's SimplyBlock based storage system * https://xata.io/blog/xata-postgres-with-data-branching-and-p... * https://www.simplyblock.io/

It's a great way to mix copy on write and effectively logical splitting of physical nodes. It's something I've wanted to build at a previous role.

New comment by maherbeg in "Claude Code on the web"

maherbeg — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 15:08:10 +0000

I don't want unlimited writes. I basically want to unlock nearly everything but approve writes in some scenarios.

New comment by maherbeg in "Claude Code on the web"

maherbeg — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 21:51:07 +0000

lol yeah, but mostly just want to allow more types of reads for getting context, and primarily for test running / linting etc. I shouldn't have to approve every invocation of `pytest` or `bazel test`.