Hacker News: tybit

New comment by tybit in "Gemma 4 on iPhone"

tybit — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:59:12 +0000

At least Anthropic claims that they are profitable on a per model basis. But since both revenue and training costs are growing exponentially, and they need to pay for model N training today, and only get revenue for model N-1 today, the offset makes it look worse than it is.

Obviously that doesn’t help them turn a profit, until they can stop growing training costs exponentially.

So it’s really a race to see whether growth in revenue or training costs decelerates first.

New comment by tybit in "Anti-aging injection regrows knee cartilage and prevents arthritis"

tybit — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 07:39:46 +0000

Yes, but it’s a common misconception that impact is a bad thing.

The body, including bones, muscles, tendons and joints, adapt to stress. Many people do too little, not too much, as they get older.

There’s a limit to that recovery of course, and balancing it with stress is not always simple.

New comment by tybit in "Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1"

tybit — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 11:12:38 +0000

I also think fsync before acking writes is a better default. That aside, if you were to choose async for batching writes, their default value surprises me. 2 minutes seems like an eternity. Would you not get very good batching for throughout even at something like 2 seconds too? Still not safe, but safer.

New comment by tybit in "Ecosia: The greenest AI is here"

tybit — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:11:27 +0000

Yes, the greenest browser is one that doesn’t use AI. They aren’t claiming they’ve built that though, just the greenest AI.

New comment by tybit in "Comparing AWS Lambda ARM64 vs. x86_64 Performance Across Runtimes in Late 2025"

tybit — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 10:54:38 +0000

It’s interesting that the author chose to use SHA256 hashing for the CPU intensive workload. Given they run on hardware acceleration using AES NI, I wonder how generally applicable it is. Still interesting either way though, especially since there were reports of earlier Graviton (pre v3) instances having mediocre AES NI performance.

New comment by tybit in "The 'S&P 493' reveals a different U.S. economy"

tybit — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 10:32:14 +0000

Yeah, investing in the top companies leads to higher returns for most periods when looking short term.

Over longer periods, the top companies by market cap tend to change though. https://www.investmentnews.com/equities/only-one-of-the-worl...

So if you want to invest in the top companies, you either need to think they won’t change anymore, or you need to find when to buy and sell. Index funds solve this problem for you, albeit with slightly lower returns in the short term.

New comment by tybit in "Knowing where your engineer salary comes from"

tybit — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 12:29:16 +0000

> At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company

If you look at what it actually takes to get promoted at most tech companies I’d say this isn’t generally true at many big tech companies.

Being on a very lucrative part of the product may not get you as much “impact” on your promotion packet as if you are working on a platform/infra touching the whole org. Even if that platform isn’t generating the company much money even indirectly.

New comment by tybit in "DELETEs Are Difficult"

tybit — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 11:17:50 +0000

Runtimes with garbage collectors typically optimize for allocation, not deletion.

New comment by tybit in "PostgreSQL internals: Things to know about update statements"

tybit — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 07:51:09 +0000

JOOQ handled this nicely.

https://www.jooq.org/doc/latest/manual/sql-execution/crud-wi...

New comment by tybit in "The growing pains of database architecture"

tybit — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 11:30:34 +0000

CockroachDB is presumably what they’re referring to in:

> For Postgres-compatible NewSQL, we would’ve had one of the largest single-cluster footprints for cloud-managed distributed Postgres. We didn’t want to bear the burden of being the first customer to hit certain scaling issues

I find their claim a bit hard to believe.

New comment by tybit in "Information about a recent security incident at Mailchimp"

tybit — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 11:19:41 +0000

While they don’t specify it sounds like they don’t even require 2FA to access their systems?

New comment by tybit in "API Mismatch: Why bolting SQL onto noSQL is a bad idea"

tybit — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 10:51:56 +0000

Tangential to the authors point, but it’s funny to note many new SQL databases(e.g CockroachDB, TiDB, MyRocks) are written on top of RocksDB, a “NoSQL” key value store.

New comment by tybit in "Cache invalidation really is one of the hardest problems in computer science"

tybit — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 11:35:56 +0000

When it comes to cache invalidation worse performance isn’t the primary concern in most cases, correctness is.

New comment by tybit in "My Overemployment Story"

tybit — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 04:48:12 +0000

It’s usually a safe bet that the state will preference companies over both employees and taxation unfortunately.

New comment by tybit in "I'm all-in on server-side SQLite"

tybit — Tue, 10 May 2022 03:49:55 +0000

I think this architecture would be really powerful paired with the actor model to shard databases to nodes.

New comment by tybit in "Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions"

tybit — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 12:28:55 +0000

At big tech companies I’ve seen and heard about, the answer is crypto shredding. Encrypt all PII at rest with a per user data key. GDPR deletion requests can then delete the data key. This isn’t perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction IMO. Unfortunately I don’t see it being feasible for a typical company anytime soon.

New comment by tybit in "DynamoDB 10 years later"

tybit — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 12:19:55 +0000

For anyone else expecting this to be a paper given the domain name, it’s not. It’s a non technical interview with a couple of the original papers authors. Not bad, just not as exciting as I imagine a paper detailing what they’ve learnt from a distributed systems perspective etc operating Dynamo then DynamoDB for so long now.

New comment by tybit in "Why infrastructure engineers prefer MySQL"

tybit — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 06:08:05 +0000

This would be an interesting article to flesh out. I.e is there evidence that MySQL is more reliable in those ways?

I always prefer reliability over features even though I’m a product engineer so if he’s right it’d be good to know. Either way, I’m stuck with the MySQL that the infrastructure engineers at work have provided us with.

New comment by tybit in "In Defense of Async: Function Colors Are Rusty"

tybit — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 05:46:21 +0000

I think there’s a good argument that async is decent for performance critical languages, e.g C++ and Rust, and for languages looking to model effects, e.g Haskell and arguably Rust. I don’t see a good reason for it in mainstream languages like Java, JavaScript and C#.

I think Java’s approach with Loom is going to be a big win over C# there, as someone that just wants to get stuff done and is a fan of both.

New comment by tybit in "The Container Throttling Problem"

tybit — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 12:54:07 +0000

I realise that the Twitter is using Mesos, but for those of us on Kubernetes does guaranteed QoS solve this? https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/qua...