Hacker News: masterj

New comment by masterj in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

masterj — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:45:24 +0000

This is true, but it varies a lot based on local culture. "Let me buzz 'em / roll coal to teach 'em a lesson"

but you're not really going to see that in, say, Seattle

New comment by masterj in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

masterj — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:06:28 +0000

I’m sorry this happened to you. However nothing in my reply implies cutting your children off from the world. Helping them avoid the harms of algorithmic feeds until they have developed the maturity to navigate them helps them be more connected to the world, not less.

With all due respect I think you are reading more there due to your own experiences, which sound like abuse, not parenting.

New comment by masterj in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

masterj — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:30:48 +0000

Protecting your kids from dopamine-drip algorithms and the effects of social media and short-form video during their most formative years and gradually letting them take over as they mature sounds like… parenting.

New comment by masterj in "The real cost of owning a home"

masterj — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:19:31 +0000

I learned very fast after purchasing my home that hiring out to a contractor made so much more sense. They can get done in a day what would take me a month+ of weekends.

New comment by masterj in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

masterj — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:51:28 +0000

pg seems to think we would be scandalized by this math, when all I feel is “so?”.

The language politicians use to sell to a general public does not have any correlation to their understanding of the mechanics. The people proposing this policy entirely understand the ramifications. That is the point of the policy.

The average person is already subject to something like a wealth tax through property taxes, in addition to also needing to pay taxes on their income. Join the club pal.

New comment by masterj in "The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it"

masterj — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:23:05 +0000

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that when people talk about the Death of SaaS, they are not talking about $20/month consumer apps. They are talking about six-figure+ enterprise deals that are the source of so much profit for SaaS companies.

New comment by masterj in "We gave terabytes of CI logs to an LLM"

masterj — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:23:17 +0000

> There's a very non-trivial step in deciding that a particular subset and schema of log messages deserves to be in its own columnar data table.

IIUC this is addressed with the ClickHouse JSON type which can promote individual fields in unstructured data into its own column: https://clickhouse.com/blog/a-new-powerful-json-data-type-fo...

Parquet is getting a VARIANT data type which can do the same thing (called "shredding") but in a standards-based way: https://parquet.apache.org/blog/2026/02/27/variant-type-in-a...

New comment by masterj in "How I estimate work"

masterj — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:15:57 +0000

When there are huge unknowns, such as in the case of a remodel where who knows what you might find once the drywall is removed, then yes. I happily worked with a contractor on a basement renovation with no estimate for this exact reason.

If it’s something where they have fewer unknowns and more control and lots of experience building the same thing, then I would expect an estimate: building a deck, re-roofing a house, etc

New comment by masterj in "How I estimate work"

masterj — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:03:17 +0000

They miss estimates all the time though? It’s an observable fact

There is a bridge in my town that is finally nearing completion, hopefully, this year. It was estimated to be completed 2 years ago.

This changes when it’s a project that has fewer unknowns, where they’ve built the same thing several times before. The same is true in software.

New comment by masterj in "AI is a horse (2024)"

masterj — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:38:58 +0000

People have definitely used ebikes for bikepacking as well. Not sure about BMX.

New comment by masterj in "10 years of personal finances in plain text files"

masterj — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 19:41:35 +0000

I dunno. Insights from Monarch have easily saved me many times the annual cost. Other tools could as well of course, but the ease-of-use makes it easy to maintain

New comment by masterj in "100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite"

masterj — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:18:16 +0000

I suspect that for a large number of orgs accepting over-provisioning would be significantly cheaper than the headcount required for a more sophisticated approach while allowing faster movement due to lower overall complexity

New comment by masterj in "µcad: New open source programming language that can generate 2D sketches and 3D"

masterj — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 17:58:29 +0000

Thank you for this link! I've been wondering if it is possible these days to replace Fusion for my workflow, and this is exactly what I need to see

New comment by masterj in "The time has finally come for geothermal energy"

masterj — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 18:51:37 +0000

Modern geothermal is dispatchable. It's a really good compliment to wind and solar https://climateinstitute.ca/safe-bets-wild-cards/advanced-ge...

New comment by masterj in "OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel"

masterj — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 15:53:50 +0000

Why don’t you try that, convert the output to OTLP and then write about it?

New comment by masterj in "Rivian's TM-B electric bike"

masterj — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 21:11:47 +0000

Given it can output 180Nm I expect this thing can get up whatever hill you point it at

New comment by masterj in "Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server"

masterj — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 21:01:20 +0000

Title seems slightly exaggerated since by my reading there was no actual $3000 / month bill? Still a great use-case

This seems like a good idea to have plentiful dev environments and avoid a bad pricing model. If your production instance is still on Heroku, you might still want a staging environment on Heroku since a Hetzner server and your production instance might have subtle differences.

New comment by masterj in "Migrating from AWS to Hetzner"

masterj — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 18:52:28 +0000

> tap is a data-intensive SaaS that needs to be able to execute complex queries over gigabytes of data in seconds.

> minimum resource requirements for good performance to be around 2x CPUs and 4 GiB RAM

This is less compute than I regularly carry in my pocket? And significantly less than a Raspberry Pi? Why is Fargate that expensive?

New comment by masterj in "Cloudflare Sandbox SDK"

masterj — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 22:46:49 +0000

Cloudflare has Outbound Workers for exactly this use-case: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-for-platforms/w...

If these aren't enabled for containers / sandboxes yet, I bet they will be soon

New comment by masterj in "Litestream v0.5.0"

masterj — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 17:33:28 +0000

> I bet you could get very very far on a single box,

With single instances topping out at 20+ TBs of RAM and hundreds of cores, I think this is likely very under-explored as an option

Even more if you combine this with cell-based architecture, splitting on users / tenants instead of splitting the service itself.