Hacker News: stemchar

New comment by stemchar in "The worst job interview I ever had"

stemchar — Wed, 27 May 2026 09:50:38 +0000

I probably would've done the same. "I don't remember what the function is called" would've been fine-ish, but reaching for a regex is just insane.

New comment by stemchar in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

stemchar — Thu, 21 May 2026 03:36:42 +0000

This doesn't sound correct. Source?

New comment by stemchar in "Sqldef: Idempotent schema management tool for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite"

stemchar — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 02:51:16 +0000

> Personally I've always called this style "declarative schema management" since the input declares the desired state, and the tool figures out how to transition the database to that state.

Personally I've called it a mistake, since there's no way a tool can infer what happened based on that information.

New comment by stemchar in "Sqldef: Idempotent schema management tool for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite"

stemchar — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 02:48:39 +0000

I renamed a column and it added a new one.

New comment by stemchar in "Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users"

stemchar — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 10:07:55 +0000

> If you use streaming replication (ie. WAL shipping over the replication connection), a single replica getting really far behind can eventually cause the primary to block writes. Some time back I commented on the behaviour: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45758543

I'd like to know more, since I don't understand how this could happen. When you say "block", what do you mean exactly?