Hacker News: scottcodie

New comment by scottcodie in "What game engines know about data that databases forgot"

scottcodie — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:10:50 +0000

I'm not sure a game needs transactions. It seems to me that entity streaming concepts are a better fit: reading from an event queue and consistently reconciling the state over time. Like the sorted top-n in the example, if it was a game and the query is generally known, it would be better to just materialize it as a fast rank, which goes beyond the IVM-style materialization they suggested.

New comment by scottcodie in "Wedeo – a Rust Rewrite of FFmpeg"

scottcodie — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:32:53 +0000

Have you taken a look at the various test harnesses for video encoding/decoding, or consider publishing a standalone one yourself? I get a bit-for-bit rewrite can have some advantage but it's hard to know if the AI implementation actually covers all of the edges cases.

New comment by scottcodie in "Testing a cheaper laminar flow hood"

scottcodie — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 05:05:26 +0000

I have a legit laminar flow hood (airclean 600, 32 inch) in my home for plant tissue culture. I gotta say, I thought it was going to be easy street to sterile culture- it was not. Sterile protocol matters so much that I think it would have been just as easy to do what I needed to do in a glove box with all the extra precautions I had to take. It's honestly hard to beat an enclosed container with zero airflow.

New comment by scottcodie in ""You Don't Need Kafka, Just Use Postgres" Considered Harmful"

scottcodie — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 22:23:47 +0000

One thing the other blog post missed and this post misses too is that you don't need Kafka to use Debezium with Postgres. This gives you a pretty seamless onramp to event streaming tools as you scale.

New comment by scottcodie in "Is Postgres read heavy or write heavy?"

scottcodie — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 03:25:27 +0000

I've spent my entire career developing databases (oracle, cassandra, my own database startup). Knowing if your workload is read or write heavy is one of the first questions when evaluating database choice, and is critical for tuning options. I would give this article hate just because it feels partially written by AI and the title needs a possessive 'your' in it, but its core ideas are sound and frame the issue correctly.

New comment by scottcodie in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)"

scottcodie — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 01:53:00 +0000

Stream processing/materialization engine written in rust that can be compiled to wasm.

Graffiti art.

New comment by scottcodie in "Ask HN: I’m an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates"

scottcodie — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 20:09:27 +0000

Is there a definition of a "security update"? Software has an infinite number of bugs and it is cost infeasible to fix them all. If it's years down the road, the engineers that wrote the code may be long gone.

New comment by scottcodie in "The best approach I've seen for hiring junior engineers"

scottcodie — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 05:31:14 +0000

Paying poorly would bias you to candidates who will accept poor wages. Good candidates, even if they are young and inexperienced, can have a high market rate.

New comment by scottcodie in "Payment systems while working at a pizza place"

scottcodie — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 17:39:30 +0000

You could also use a temporal table.

New comment by scottcodie in "I don't need your query language"

scottcodie — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 21:20:50 +0000

SQL in the context of a single query struggles with a composable features. But looking slightly outside the scope of queries with assignment statements and view/materialization dags then you start getting some of that composition back. I think SQRL is an good example of SQL with a bunch of composable feature bolt-ons.

https://www.datasqrl.com/blog/sqrl-high-level-data-language-...

New comment by scottcodie in "Ask HN: How do you think LLMs will affect society medium/long term?"

scottcodie — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 23:14:07 +0000

Most technology advances are not labor replacing but rather labor augmenting. For example, LLMs could make teachers much more productive in the classroom but it would be unlikely to replace teachers entirely.

New comment by scottcodie in "Record-Breaking Egg Profits Prompt Accusation of Price Gouging"

scottcodie — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 18:30:49 +0000

Price gouging is often seen as immoral because it involves high prices without a justifiable reason. It is often considered in absence of welfare analysis, even if the middle class can afford the price increase, it can still be considered price gouging. In a competitive market, prices are based on what the market can bear, not on moral considerations. In such markets, prices must remain low to remain in business. However, high prices without justifiable reasons could be indication of monopolistic behavior from too much consolidation, and should be called out and investigated.

New comment by scottcodie in "Mexico cracks down on solar geoengineering"

scottcodie — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 10:57:59 +0000

Usually you don't consider health insurance to be a moral hazard in this way. However, in healthcare, a moral hazard can occur when people use more healthcare services because the cost for them is low.

New comment by scottcodie in "Excess management is costing the U.S. $3T per year (2016)"

scottcodie — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 23:41:20 +0000

What is the role of an engineering manager exactly? I've been thinking about this question for awhile and I get wildly different answers depending on who I ask. It seems to me that an engineering manager contributes to the intellectual product, attempts to solve communication issues between teams, and fills in gaps for what the team needs. It is amazing to me that there is so much variance for something that should be a well defined role.

New comment by scottcodie in "Tell HN: HP printers force you into agreement"

scottcodie — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 22:48:33 +0000

When a company takes an action solely to limit competition with no consumer benefit, they should be immediately investigated for antitrust behavior.

New comment by scottcodie in "A homework question in someone’s 11th grade statistics class"

scottcodie — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 19:49:35 +0000

The more people you survey, the higher the confidence that the questionnaire is representative of the entire population, or the 'confidence interval'. Since the population was randomly sampled & non-responses don't correlate to the topic questions, you can assume that the 90 students are representative of the entire population with +- some confidence interval.

New comment by scottcodie in "A homework question in someone’s 11th grade statistics class"

scottcodie — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 05:01:44 +0000

The topic for this questionnaire is "student life, academics, athletics", which is an important part of the question when determining if non-responses are important. In this case ChatGPT gets it correct, but explains the reason very poorly.

New comment by scottcodie in "A homework question in someone’s 11th grade statistics class"

scottcodie — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 04:58:17 +0000

Given the topic is "student life, academics, and athletics", would you care about the non-responses? If the topics correlate well to non-responses then you'd have a reason to care about the missing results. The best answer here is D, because there is always attrition when doing surveys and getting 100% responses isn't usually a goal for this type of experiment.

New comment by scottcodie in "A homework question in someone’s 11th grade statistics class"

scottcodie — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 01:19:36 +0000

There is often attrition when doing surveys. If the correct answer is always A then that implies there can be no attrition for completing the survey. Since the list of topics asked don't seem to correlate with non-responses (such as doing a survey about sexual harassment where non-responses may be very important), the correct answer would be likely D, to discard the subpopulation.

New comment by scottcodie in "Twitter engineer: I thought I’d been hacked. It turned out I’d been fired"

scottcodie — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 21:48:49 +0000

Twitter's actions seems like retaliation against the employee for enabling other employees to collect evidence of discrimination. Performance reviews often exist to reduce the companies liability when firing people off, but being fired with good performance reviews can work against them.