Hacker News: millipede

New comment by millipede in "OpenJDK: Panama"

millipede — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:28:23 +0000

What other language does it better?

New comment by millipede in "Are two heads better than one?"

millipede — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:41:15 +0000

Why not unconditionally trust Bob?

New comment by millipede in "90M people. 118 hours of silence. One nation erased from the internet"

millipede — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:23:51 +0000

Events like this show that the Internet is pretty heavily centralized. The original DARPA Internet was supposed to be resilient to stuff like this, but it's clear that the old Internet, and the new Internet, are not the same. We as Internet engineers really need to be better here, and design hardware and software to be ready to handle any errors, even unlikely ones like a state actor breaking things.

It's like installing smoke alarms; no one thinks they need them until they do.

New comment by millipede in "Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1"

millipede — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:48:11 +0000

Right, I think the lazy thing implies that it would happen post "commit" being returned to the client, but it doesn't need to be. The commit just needs to be wait for "an" fsync call, not its own.

New comment by millipede in "Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1"

millipede — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:12:39 +0000

I always wondered why the fsync has to be lazy. It seems like the fsync's can be bundled up together, and the notification messages held for a few millis while the write completes. Similar to TCP corking. There doesn't need to be one fsync per consensus.

New comment by millipede in "Comparing Integers and Doubles"

millipede — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 20:52:11 +0000

Both ints and floats represent real, rational values, but every operation in no way matches math. Associative? No. Commutative? No. Partially Ordered? No. Weakly Ordered? No. Symmetric? No. Reflexive? No. Antisymmetric? No. Nothing.

The only reasonable way to compare rationals is the decimal expansion of the string.

New comment by millipede in "J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange"

millipede — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 20:14:13 +0000

> Ctrl-F "convertible"

> 0 of 0 matches

Some analysis.

New comment by millipede in "TCP Client Self-Connect (2013)"

millipede — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 06:14:39 +0000

Intuitively it doesn't sound like it would work. The program doesn't call listen() or accept() on the socket.

New comment by millipede in "The death of partying in the USA"

millipede — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 18:24:36 +0000

I've been throwing moderately large parties the past 2 years (12-40 people) and the lack of partying is definitely noticeable. Most people don't reciprocate, making it disheartening to keep doing it. I wanted to build friendships out of it, and hopefully get invited to more parties myself, but so far it hasn't happened. It's a decent amount of set up (cleaning, buying food, coordinating), and a lot of clean up after too. The ROI isn't where I want it.

I kind of wonder if people have just forgot what to do after the party is over. I had hoped it would be "that was so fun, we should host one", but instead it just kinda fades away in their minds.

New comment by millipede in "Bots are overwhelming websites with their hunger for AI data"

millipede — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 22:50:03 +0000

Information is valuable; we just weren't charging for it. AI is just bringing the market for knowledge back into equilibrium.

New comment by millipede in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

millipede — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 07:34:40 +0000

"AI is Amazing" - People who barely write any code.

New comment by millipede in "Why did U.S. wages stagnate for 20 years?"

millipede — Mon, 19 May 2025 18:59:05 +0000

There's a great graph showing the wages stagnating compared to GDP growth. It looks like wage's haven't gone up. But, when adding back in employer provided health coverage and other benefits, the graphs align again. It just wasn't in dollars. TFA briefly mentions it but I think it should be front and center.

New comment by millipede in "Too Much Go Misdirection"

millipede — Mon, 19 May 2025 17:15:41 +0000

Type inspection is the flaw of Go's interface system. Try to make a type that delegates to another object, and the type inspection breaks. It's especially noticeable with the net/http types, which would be great to intercept, but then breaks things like Flusher or Hijacker.

New comment by millipede in "Clojure: Realtime collaborative web apps without ClojureScript"

millipede — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 06:41:33 +0000

Not with HTTP/2

New comment by millipede in "Powers of 2 with all even digits"

millipede — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:54:21 +0000

Unbelievable, they actually missed one: 2^(log(22)/log(2)) has all even digits!

New comment by millipede in "Iterated Log Coding"

millipede — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 16:39:09 +0000

Neat, looks like it would work well for values clustered around 0.5, and which hang more closely around 0 and 1.

New comment by millipede in "Show HN: Super Snowflake Maker"

millipede — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 18:08:49 +0000

Hm, cool idea but ran into a glitch. Cutting 3 elongated ovals, end to end and forming a triangle, didn't remove the center piece.

New comment by millipede in "Google, the search engine that's forgotten how to search"

millipede — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 02:28:58 +0000

This is exactly right. I've stopped publishing to my blog because I know my words will be slurped up and sausaged out into ChatGPT or Gemini. And, without people writing about technical subjects, or talking about current events, or other thoughtful discourse, Google has no future in Search nor ads.

In the future, maybe OpenAI or Google or Perplexity will pay for people to write about interesting subjects because doing it for free online is no longer rewarding.

New comment by millipede in "Keyset cursors, not offsets, for Postgres pagination"

millipede — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 01:17:38 +0000

Cursors are generally better, but they don't give any hint about how much more is in front of the cursor. I don't think there is a O(log n) algorithm to keep track of what position a given item is in a collection (k'th item out of n), which still keeps the other CRUD operations at O(log n). This would be useful to split a large, dynamically changing result set into smaller parts that can be scanned through using a cursor.

New comment by millipede in "Netflix's Distributed Counter Abstraction"

millipede — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 21:37:18 +0000

> EVCache

EVCache is a disaster. The code base has no concept of a threading model. The code is almost completely untested* too. I was on call at least 2 time when EVcache blew up on us. I tried root causing it and the code is a rats nest. Avoid!

* https://github.com/Netflix/EVCache