Hacker News: stlava

New comment by stlava in "Reconciling Kubernetes cost estimates with CUR / FOCUS billing data"

stlava — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 03:30:14 +0000

My colleague worked on Lumina which solves a related problem of tracking compute cost with discounts and spot pricing: https://github.com/Nextdoor/lumina

New comment by stlava in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

stlava — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:49:08 +0000

Those who hire a crisis management team rarely win in the court of public opinion. BAM just continues to dig a hole when they could instead facilitate fixing the situation regardless of if they think they are a party to this or not.

New comment by stlava in "Golang's big miss on memory arenas"

stlava — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:55:36 +0000

At the end of the day there has to be a tradeoff between ease of use and performance. Having spent a lot of time optimizing high throughput services in go, it always felt like I was fighting the language. And that's because I was... sure they could add arenas but that just feels like what it is, a patch over the fact you're working alongside a GC.

New comment by stlava in "Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public"

stlava — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:20:49 +0000

The movie seems like a fluff piece when you find out what has transpired at DeepMind subsequently with slowing down publishing material to “selling out to product” which the founder was hell bent against in the documentary.

New comment by stlava in "Making regular GPS ultra-precise"

stlava — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 02:10:14 +0000

I had some experience with RTK and sensor fusion about 13 years ago on a college project. At the time the only people that were using RTK in real world applications were tractor companies because it kind of matters that you're precise when seed drilling. I'm not sure how far RTK has come but it had pit falls back then like base station drift when the set of satellites it saw changed due to them going over the horizon.

Tractors don't go _that_ fast but I'm not sure I'd rely on it in an actual car for anything but slightly better GPS.

New comment by stlava in "Claude Code is a slot machine"

stlava — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 19:23:21 +0000

My worry is we're going to have a generation of engineers that have not built up the necessary critical thinking/pattern matching skills needed to weigh tradeoffs and bring in context to ask the right questions and interpret the answers.

Sure we can segment this into code generation models and code review models but are engineers really going to want to be questioned by a code review tool on "what are you trying to do?" or are they just going to merge and pull the slot lever again?

New comment by stlava in "Adobe Project Indigo is a new photo app from former Pixel camera engineers"

stlava — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 01:39:22 +0000

I’m impressed they managed to make an app that makes me not want to use it or my phone to take photos! After I used it for about 5 mins I resolved to dust off my older DSLR and use it instead.

New comment by stlava in "It's the end of observability as we know it (and I feel fine)"

stlava — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 02:00:42 +0000

I feel that if you need an LLM to help pivot between existing data it just means the operability tool has gaps in user functionality. This is by far my biggest gripe with DataDog today. All the data is there but going from database query to front end traces should be easy but is not.

Sure we can use an LLM but I can for now click around faster (if those breadcrumbs exist) than it can reason.

Also the LLM would only point to a direction and I’m still going to have to use the UI to confirm.

New comment by stlava in "Home Battery versus Generator"

stlava — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 18:00:54 +0000

We've discussed getting backup power periodically since moving (most of our neighbors have something). After the big bomb cyclone that hit the NPW this became a priority and I did a very similar tradeoff matrix.

Here were some of my consideration points against a generator (I had a list for batteries too):

1. the previous owners electrified the house so having a tank just for a generator didn't make sense

2. per 1, a small tank wouldn't last very long and if we're out of power for multiple days gas delivery is unlikely to be happening anyway.

3. tank + generator didn't have a practical placement location for us

4. smaller portable generators didn't make sense from a maintenance perspective since they didn't auto test.

5. what happens if it fails a self test right before a storm?

6. we get intermittent power cuts / fluctuations / outages throughout the year and the generator + ATS wouldn't protect sensitive electronics well

Edit: ATS + batteries can play nice together then I might look at doing a small portable as aux backup

Scaling Nextdoor's Datastores

stlava — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 16:40:06 +0000

Article URL: https://engblog.nextdoor.com/scaling-nextdoors-datastores-part-1-234d0cf67665

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43437830

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by stlava in "WASM will replace containers"

stlava — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 03:20:03 +0000

> In the year 2030, no one will remember Kubernetes.

I highly doubt that. Maybe there will be an evolution to k8s but fundamentally it solves a whole host of challenges around defining the environment an application runs in.

New comment by stlava in "Show HN: Pg_replicate – Build Postgres replication applications in Rust"

stlava — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 22:38:38 +0000

Nice! I'm one of the authors of pg-bifrost which is in the same space. Have you thought about / have solved sharding consumption across multiple slots / multi consumers to increase throughput? This is on my radar but not something I've investigated yet.

The issue we've ran into is some team at work decides to re-write an entire table and things get backed up until they stop updating rows.

New comment by stlava in "Error handling in Go web apps shouldn't be so awkward"

stlava — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 02:58:27 +0000

Sounds like the author is missing an interface to abstract the DB backend.

New comment by stlava in "Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Redis"

stlava — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 23:32:26 +0000

My team manages a handful of clusters at work and I wrote on an internal redis client proxy (it's on my todo list to opensource). A few things I tell other teams to set them up for success (we use Elasticache):

- Connection pooling / pipelining and circuit breaking is a must at scale. The clients are a lot better than they used to be but it's important developers understand the behavior of the client library they are using. Someone suggested using Envoy as sidecar proxy, I personally wouldn't after our experience with it with redis but it's an easy option. - Avoid changing the cluster topology if the CPU load is over 40%. This is primarily in case of unplanned failures during a change. - If something goes wrong shed load application side as quick as possible because Redis won't recover if it's being hammered. You'll need to either have feature flags of be able to scale down your application. - Having replicas won't protect you from data loss so don't treat it as a source of truth. Also, don't rely on consistency in clustered mode. - Remember Redis is single threaded so an 8xl isn't going to be super useful with all those unused cores.

Things we have alarms on by default: - Engine utilization - Anomalies in replication lag - Network throughput (relative to throughput of the underlying EC2 instance) - Bytes used for cache - Swap usage (this is the oh shit alarm)

New comment by stlava in "Uber Plans to Advertise to You at Every Stage of Your Ride, Using Your Own Data"

stlava — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 23:09:42 +0000

Right, so basically taxi cabs but personalized ads. GG on marginally progressing the wheel.

Dollar Shave Club offline since Oct 21st

stlava — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 15:43:59 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/dollarshaveclub/status/1583602130086043648

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33345435

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by stlava in "What’s New in Go 1.19?"

stlava — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 02:39:06 +0000

I wrote and operate a high throughput go service with somewhat tight memory requirements. It became impracticable to try tuning the memory footprint to avoid OOMs while balancing gc pauses with just the GOGC flag. I'm happy to say that I started using the soft memory limit shortly it landed and it's been a game changer for us.

New comment by stlava in "Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?"

stlava — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 15:43:05 +0000

If data storage isn't your startup's job then I would negotiate heavily on the AWS contract.

New comment by stlava in "San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses"

stlava — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 21:43:18 +0000

I doubt the city will see a penny from this. There's nothing in place to do an audit to figure out who should be taxed.

New comment by stlava in "Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in France"

stlava — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 21:45:16 +0000

That didn't take long...