Hacker News: sastraxi

New comment by sastraxi in "What if database branching was easy?"

sastraxi — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:07:45 +0000

Thanks for sharing your workflow. My question is about why two databases on the same server would need two separate postgres instances.

New comment by sastraxi in "What if database branching was easy?"

sastraxi — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:06:16 +0000

Yeah, that's the one. My use case is largely for local development, so the active connections thing isn't a limiter for me.

New comment by sastraxi in "What if database branching was easy?"

sastraxi — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:04:55 +0000

Yes, that's what I'm referring to.

You're still making the assumption in this comment: why does my 2nd (cloned) database need a separate postgres instance? One postgres server can host multiple databases.

New comment by sastraxi in "What if database branching was easy?"

sastraxi — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:04:50 +0000

I’ve done experiments using BTRFS and ZFS for local Postgres copy-on-write. You don’t need anything but vanilla pg and a supported file system to do it anymore; just clone the database using a template and a newish version of Postgres.

Looking at Xata’s technical deep dive, the site claims that we need an additional Postgres instance per replica and proposes a network file system to work around that. But I don’t really understand why that’s needed. Can someone explain to me my misunderstanding here?

New comment by sastraxi in "Reliable Software in the LLM Era"

sastraxi — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:31:04 +0000

Yeah, I understand it's hard to find the balance here. I'd imagine you feel the need to ship at the same time as writing about it. For me, the post you shared in your reply as well as in the OP have been expanded to be about 3-4x as long as they need to be, and I'm going to assume you're using AI to generate them due to the writing style. My feedback is to consider writing shorter posts, but doing it by hand -- your prose style here is friendly, engaging and direct. I wish that your articles were the same.

TL;DR: I feel like my time is being wasted when I read AI-written articles, so I stop reading. Do with my anecdote what you will!

New comment by sastraxi in "Reliable Software in the LLM Era"

sastraxi — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:45:54 +0000

The idea is interesting, but have some more respect for your potential readers and actually write the post. There’s so much AI sales drivel here it’s hard to see what’s interesting about your product. I’m more interested in the choices behind your design decisions than being told “trust me, it’ll work”.

New comment by sastraxi in "There is an AI code review bubble"

sastraxi — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:48:01 +0000

Contrary to some of the other anecdotes in this thread, I've found automated code review to discover some tricky stuff that humans missed. We use https://www.cubic.dev/

New comment by sastraxi in "Show HN: Just Fucking Use Cloudflare – A satirical guide to the CF stack"

sastraxi — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 22:55:37 +0000

I find their SQL database’s latency to be absolutely unusable, though I haven’t tried in a few months. Otherwise I agree, great free tiers for what I’ve used it for.

New comment by sastraxi in "The JJ VCS workshop: A zero-to-hero speedrun"

sastraxi — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 03:40:33 +0000

Looks good! I might have missed it but it would be helpful to have a link to the jujutsu home page in your README.md.

New comment by sastraxi in "Making Postgres slower"

sastraxi — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 23:31:36 +0000

Great writing style and articulation of thought! That was a fun read

New comment by sastraxi in "Show HN: FastOpenAPI – automated docs for many Python frameworks"

sastraxi — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 16:09:19 +0000

DRF-spectacular is an okay choice here, you have to manage consistency with return types yourself but the docs and customization options are well done.

New comment by sastraxi in "Rails Is Good Enough"

sastraxi — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 16:19:04 +0000

Can anyone recommend a guide for full stack devs that have mastered other stacks (e.g. django) and want to learn how to use rails correctly?

New comment by sastraxi in "Dreamix: Video Diffusion Models Are General Video Editors"

sastraxi — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 07:36:46 +0000

Perhaps this is the answer to the question “how do we combat the epidemic of loneliness?” —- once the internet truly cannot be trusted, we’ll be forced to once again connect offline (where, at least for now, deepfakes are not possible).

New comment by sastraxi in "Ask HN: Looking for advice on my situation at work?"

sastraxi — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 14:50:25 +0000

I’d prioritize finding someone else in the company that can give you another viewpoint on the situation. These types of situations make us feel isolated, so see if you can find a way to be “seen”, even if it’s by someone who has no way to help you professionally.

The get the heck out of there and find somewhere that is willing to treat you with more respect.

New comment by sastraxi in "GitHub Sunsetting Subversion Support"

sastraxi — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 20:52:19 +0000

The "ongoing maintenance cost of software" can also be the additional complexity in the mental model of developers that have to deal with nearby parts of the codebase. Even if no maintenance is needed for a specific feature, it doesn't always make sense to keep around.

There's also knock-on effects, e.g. an offering like this could attract the type of user that would add a lot of additional support burden for the value that the company _and_ the user gets out of the feature.

New comment by sastraxi in "Roger Linn on Swing, Groove and the Magic of the MPC's Timing (2013)"

sastraxi — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 21:26:55 +0000

Agreed re: there being randomness with each hit in a live performance. I wonder, though, if the distribution of one hit is in fact independent of the previous -- perhaps the inner feedback loop of "am I falling behind / speeding up" in a musician causes the next distribution to be skewed differently or centered at a different instant.

In which case I can understand the thought process of it being uninteresting, in a way. And you're absolutely right that when the randomness is applied into a short loop and repeated it falls into a strange uncanny valley (at least to my ears).

Perhaps another aspect of this is that the randomness, added based on e.g. a seed to the whole track, would be hard to control as an artist. I know when I apply randomness to MIDI I tend to go back with a fine-toothed comb and re-distribute hits that don't go where my mind wants them to.

New comment by sastraxi in "FogBugz new owners attempting to auto-upgrade all free plans to paid"

sastraxi — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 14:37:36 +0000

At this point I'm just worried about debt collectors / credit score type stuff. What an absurd and unethical move by the new owners.

New comment by sastraxi in "Ask HN: I burned out but I don't want to let my team down"

sastraxi — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 16:40:31 +0000

I'm going through something similar and was able to negotiate some time off with my employer. In my experience, there's no way to push through burnout, and you're not going to be doing anyone you work with any favours by trying to "be there" through it.

New comment by sastraxi in "Open Golf: A cross-platform minigolf game written in C"

sastraxi — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 15:43:05 +0000

I'd love to hear more about the lightmapping interpolation for moving objects. I wonder what kinds of efficiencies the author had to find to make it performant.

New comment by sastraxi in "Strava abruptly ends 3rd party data sync to Apple Health"

sastraxi — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 23:43:31 +0000

Really impressive site, thanks for sharing it! Bonus: I'm just used to sites not having data / support for Canada; this was a pleasant surprise.

UX observation: clicking to create a start and end was relatively intuitive, but it took a while to find "Close route" to reset it (and be able to click for start / end points once more).