Hacker News: noahl

New comment by noahl in "Colossus for Rapid Storage"

noahl — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 18:25:13 +0000

There are some semantic differences compared to POSIX filesystems. A couple big ones:

  - You can only append to an object, and each object can only have one writer at the time. This is useful for distributed systems - you could have one process adding records to the end of a log, and readers pulling new records from the end.
  - It's also possible to "finalize" an object, meaning that it can't be appended to any more.

(I work on Rapid storage.)

New comment by noahl in "Colossus for Rapid Storage"

noahl — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 17:29:42 +0000

Slight nit: "zonal" doesn't necessarily mean "not replicated", it means that the replicas could all be within the same zone. That means they can share more points of failure. (I don't know if there's an official definition of zonal.)

NB: I am on the rapid storage team.

New comment by noahl in "Colossus for Rapid Storage"

noahl — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:35:31 +0000

There's now another blog post about Rapid storage specifically: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer... . (That wasn't up yet when the original post was made.)

New comment by noahl in "Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs"

noahl — Sun, 14 May 2023 01:40:07 +0000

No, not for GCP stuff.

I don't know of a single GCP product that's been shut down, although I could be missing something. But their track record for GCP is, I think, what you would want a cloud provider's record to be.

(I should mention that I work for GCP. But this is just based on my own memory.)

New comment by noahl in "Discovering Azure's unannounced breaking change with Cosmos DB"

noahl — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 14:10:34 +0000

Got it, thank you! CockroachDB is the only one I know offhand that does what you're looking for. Another comment mentioned Vitess, which might also work.

It seems like there are a lot of options for large scale analytics, but I don't know a lot for high throughout geo-redundant transaction processing.

New comment by noahl in "Discovering Azure's unannounced breaking change with Cosmos DB"

noahl — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 03:05:49 +0000

Spanner offers that on GCP, and I believe CockroachDB offers something similar cross-cloud.

Do you have any specific requirements for which cloud provider you use, or any particular interface you really need?

New comment by noahl in "Show HN: I made a simple platform to buy/sell side projects"

noahl — Sat, 16 Jul 2022 14:41:39 +0000

The solution is posting this marketplace on a forum full of people who might like to buy and sell side projects

New comment by noahl in "Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together"

noahl — Wed, 19 May 2021 04:55:03 +0000

I mean to be fair Google has also tried very, very hard to improve home internet access for people, to the point of setting up their own ISP and running municipal fiber networks. That's a pretty big try, and I really wish it had taken off beyond the places where Google Fiber operates.

(NB: I work at Google, but this comment has nothing to do with my work.)

New comment by noahl in "Improving large monorepo performance on GitHub"

noahl — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 17:14:37 +0000

Microsoft/windows is hosted on Azure DevOps, and they have also blogged about what they've done to improve its performance!

Here's a recent post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/introducing-scalar/

Google Cloud Risk Protection Program

noahl — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 15:38:17 +0000

Article URL: https://cloudblog.withgoogle.com/products/identity-security/google-cloud-risk-protection-program-now-in-preview/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26329741

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by noahl in "Cargill open-sources Splinter, its ‘blockchain-like’ supply chain software"

noahl — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 16:55:49 +0000

Interestingly, there was an ancient Greek / Roman equivalent: amphora (pottery vases) with bumps that fit into standard cargo racks in ships.

The first picture in the Wikipedia article is what I mean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphora .

New comment by noahl in "The opioid effects of gluten exorphins: asymptomatic celiac disease (2015)"

noahl — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 13:51:04 +0000

Someone close to me has Celiac disease, and getting an official diagnosis will let you do more than just eliminate gluten. For one thing, you could participate in one of the multiple ongoing drug trials for Celiac that are looking for participants.

The Celiac foundation has a list of them if you're interested, but you'll need a Celiac diagnosis to be eligible.

New comment by noahl in "Std::visit is everything wrong with modern C++ (2017)"

noahl — Sat, 05 Dec 2020 19:23:12 +0000

I'd be curious to know what the libraries are that allow this sort of database engine design. Are there any open source examples?

New comment by noahl in "I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API"

noahl — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 03:16:24 +0000

Imagine if Barnes and Noble had done it, and you could drive to one of their stores to quietly sip a drink and peruse the new machines they had provisioned recently.

New comment by noahl in "Microsoft Has a Large Presence at This Year's X.org Conference"

noahl — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 12:57:01 +0000

I think Microsoft's strategy (I work there, but I don't have any special knowledge of this) is to be the best possible platform for development in general, not just machine learning. That's why they bought GitHub, and it's also why they have WSL, remote debugging on Linux, etc. I expect they will go wherever they think developers want to be to achieve that goal.

I can see this hurting traditional Linux graphics systems and development tooling, but I think the main dynamic driving this is not proprietary-vs-open, it's Microsoft's ability to coordinate large numbers of developers, because they have a massively more united org than random hobbyists.

If you combined all of the efforts of all of the people working on Linux tools for the past 20 years and got them working on the same thing, it would probably be an amazing stack, and Microsoft would probably just support it. Instead, the open source efforts have been scattered among a lot of different ideas, which means there hasn't been a single windowing toolkit, IDE, or whatever for people to rally around and all contribute to. And as a result, Microsoft can show up, get a few hundred people pulling in the same direction, and have the market-leading product not through any dirty tricks, but just by putting in more coordinated effort than anyone else.

Can Brian Hall fix what ails Google Cloud?

noahl — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 12:55:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.platformonomics.com/2020/07/can-brian-hall-fix-what-ails-google-cloud/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24008133

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by noahl in "Why are CEOs failing software engineers?"

noahl — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 18:44:24 +0000

Can you give some examples of the mindset of construction and manufacturing businesses? It would be interesting to me, and I think to other people here too.

New comment by noahl in "Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode"

noahl — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 13:02:42 +0000

I have a suspicion, which I have never verified, that the things that make emacs great are basically the things that made Lisp Machines great back when those were a thing - that emacs is best viewed as a Lisp Machine embedded in a modern operating system.

I never used a real Lisp Machine, but I'd love if someone who did can confirm this.

New comment by noahl in "Microsoft's GitHub account allegedly hacked, 500GB stolen"

noahl — Thu, 07 May 2020 17:22:40 +0000

It was released, and was used for the Windows repo. Search "vfs for git" - it's open source.

Then macOS removed kernel extensions, so they came up with a different approach and released that too. Search "scalar" to see it.

New comment by noahl in "Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s (2015)"

noahl — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 19:06:48 +0000

I wonder if anyone uses greenhouses as carbon capture for traditional power plants, rather than running their own mini-power plant mostly for the CO2 output.