Hacker News: nick0garvey

New comment by nick0garvey in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

nick0garvey — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:13:04 +0000

Awesome. If you are not in touch with Maker Nexus (based out of Sunnyvale) already, please reach out! Would love to put you in touch with the administrators there on what they learned about successfully running a non-profit maker space.

New comment by nick0garvey in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2026)"

nick0garvey — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:15:54 +0000

The final Greenhouse link doesn't work in this listing

New comment by nick0garvey in "How exchanges turn order books into distributed logs"

nick0garvey — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 16:22:59 +0000

> Pipelined replication: the sequencer assigns a sequence number immediately and ships the event to replicas in parallel. Matching doesn't wait for the replicas to acknowledge.

How is this avoiding data loss if the lead sequencer goes down after acking but without the replica receiving the write?

New comment by nick0garvey in "Where's Firefox going next?"

nick0garvey — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 01:34:52 +0000

It says "PAID ONLY BY A RELATED FOR-PROFIT", which looks to be the Mozilla Corporation. Donations are not directly paying the CEO, although I agree more of the profits from the Corporation could flow into the non-profit.

New comment by nick0garvey in "Ask HN: What's your go-to message queue in 2025?"

nick0garvey — Sun, 18 May 2025 20:31:39 +0000

Hold the lock and write a row with timestamp at the time you read.

That row indicates you are the one processing the data and no one else should. When reading, abort the read if someone else wrote that row first.

When you are finished processing, hold the lock and update the row you added before to indicate processing is complete.

The timestamp can be used to timeout the request.

New comment by nick0garvey in "Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (2022)"

nick0garvey — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 19:49:01 +0000

I'm not quite following. His argument appears to be: The replication system requires a backwards seek, Postgres does not support that operation, things break when that operation is attempted.

I don't understand why replication would need a backwards seek - are you saying it doesn't and he is mistaken on that?

New comment by nick0garvey in "The Languages of English, Math, and Programming"

nick0garvey — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 03:40:54 +0000

I took a Udacity class by Norvig [1] and my abilities as a programmer clearly were improved afterward.

His code here demonstrates why. It is both shorter and much easier to understand than anything the LLMs generated. It is not always as efficient as the LLMs (who often skip the third loop by calculating the last factor), but it is definitely the code I would prefer to work with in most situations.

[1] https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--...

New comment by nick0garvey in "Amusing Ourselves to Death (2009)"

nick0garvey — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 13:22:24 +0000

Morphy, one of the greatest players of all time, is famous for this.

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

New comment by nick0garvey in "Show HN: Kaskade – A text user interface for Kafka"

nick0garvey — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 23:28:01 +0000

There is also the deleteRecords API specifically for this. It's easier than the retention shrink -> increase dance, as it is a single API call and retention does not kick in immediately. The log segment must roll for retention to apply, either due to size or time.

https://kafka.apache.org/11/javadoc/org/apache/kafka/clients...

New comment by nick0garvey in "Special-use domain 'home.arpa.' (2018)"

nick0garvey — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 21:51:00 +0000

I use this for everything at my house. I haven't add any issues.

New comment by nick0garvey in "NetworkX – Network Analysis in Python"

nick0garvey — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 05:36:48 +0000

I use NetworkX to build the graphs and Gephi to visualize them. No need to pick a single tool.

New comment by nick0garvey in "Advent of Code 2023 is nigh"

nick0garvey — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 17:50:18 +0000

I also started to write a finite state machine for part 2 but found it too tedious to craft by hand. How did you do it?

New comment by nick0garvey in "Luiz André Barroso has died"

nick0garvey — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 20:48:23 +0000

His book "The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines" was immensely valuable to me as I moved into datacenter management as a new-grad. RIP.

https://research.google/pubs/pub41606/

New comment by nick0garvey in "Meta reveals serverless platform processing trillions of function calls a day"

nick0garvey — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 06:44:56 +0000

This isn't unreasonable. ML workloads benefit from more computational time per request. Lower QPS = better results.

New comment by nick0garvey in "Prophet: Automatic Forecasting Procedure"

nick0garvey — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 18:59:36 +0000

Can someone explain why the "no free lunch theorem" does not cause problems here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem

New comment by nick0garvey in "Ask HN: How to Focus Again?"

nick0garvey — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 16:56:10 +0000

A lot of people in this thread point at motivation or mental health issues. The issue is likely not so complicated.

You have forgotten how to focus. We live in a world where we are constantly distracted. This is forced on us. The apps we use compete over our attention, our workplace expects quick replies over Slack, our free time is always accompanied by a smart phone pushing us notifications.

These effects are getting stronger. Technology evolves new attention taking techniques. Our remote work culture expects faster replies as you are, in theory, always at your desk.

You can address this focus deficiency, but it isn't easy. Put your phone always on Do Not Disturb. Use site blocking extensions to limit time wasters (yes, even Hacker News). Stop being so responsive at work.

The first few weeks will hurt. You won't instantly be able to focus, and you will feel less productive due to the lower response time. But after some time, you will be able to do work others cannot. You can complete the big work you are struggling to right now. Relearn how to focus.

New comment by nick0garvey in "California Forever"

nick0garvey — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 03:07:20 +0000

If Solano county votes this down, it dies. They need to sell it this way.

New comment by nick0garvey in "Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding"

nick0garvey — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 16:55:31 +0000

They show the benchmarks in the original post, a few pages down

New comment by nick0garvey in "Bypassing Readout Protection in Nordic Semiconductor Microcontrollers"

nick0garvey — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 17:41:11 +0000

Most of the attacks I see on Nordic devices are power based attacks, where cutting the power for a brief instant causes protection instructions not to run.

This one is entirely different, and attacks the initialization code directly. This code has no restrictions on its ability to access memory, allowing a full dump.

Great method.

New comment by nick0garvey in "OPNsense: Open-source security platform"

nick0garvey — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 03:19:24 +0000

You say "don't suggest to buy some old Dell Optiplex from eBay" but I did exactly this.

I spent $43.97 (which included shipping) for the Optiplex, added a 2 port NIC for $16.37, and it's been running my house great since then.