For people who are very pro these tools and trying to have a rational/calm conversation about practical use of AI, this response is likely very annoying. For people who are very anti these tools and trying to protect their way of life, the pro (or even tempered) reaction to wanting to use these tools effectively likely comes off as callous/idiotic/dangerous.

It's a heated technology and movement in general.

The problem still needs to be solved (queue working/being up/being built around), but I am ok with the solution that might not be the best engineering solution but still delivers on the product requirements and extends the team's happiness (these systems need to be owned). These were not lazy or incompetent engineers.

> It is so rare that a new moving part beats other factors

Fair! I will restate that we were growing very fast, so that's probably an outlier environmental factor that I am potentially overly discounting. If that's not the case (likely for most startups), then maybe this is less of a problem.

In practice, this eventually ended up being very awkward because extending the functionality (since we had "built" it) and had to work around internal pg semantics (we should have just moved off much sooner). It also did not scale well. We ended up getting a ton of disk contention on our RDS instance in non-obvious ways, and the vacuum runs on that table was a nightmare. Additionally, it was hard to get other engineers to really debug and take ownership of the system because they automatically viewed a queue (very easy to understand) implemented in a foreign way (off pg internals) as something "scary". It was emotional, not rational, but we are emotional beings, and I do not blame them. These were good engineers with a lot of other things on their plates.

Obviously, this is all hand-wavy without discussing the internal schema, indeces, etc. that we had set up, but my main takeaway with core technology from this experience was to always reach for the dumb, expected, simple thing. Even if it adds another moving piece in the infra stack. Unless I need very strong data consistency guarantees, it's always better to use something like SQS, Redis queues, etc. where the understanding is that it is just a queue (or at least the API contract suggests simplicity), and then everything needs to work around it.

The fewer mechanistic responsibilities per core data store, the better in my experience.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49032013

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

I know this is dramatic but I genuinely fear a future where this is the default state of all writing and I still need to get information important to me.

I have never colo'd my laptop, but I do work off my Windows laptop from my Mac via Parsec (remote viewing software for gaming) and by flipping system settings so my Windows machine never turns off when connected to the power bank and lid is closed. There are obviously hiccups (if internet goes out, if Windows decides to restart from an update, etc.), but it mostly just works and I think I've only had 2 instances in the past 3 months where it's gone offline. I use Tailscale on top to provide a universal mouse server for my 3d mouse, and I'm able to magically CAD from my Mac.

Highly recommend if you need to use one OS/machine for some specific software (especially if it's beefy/heavy) but prefer using another as your daily driver.

It would be really cool to see a visualization of redundancy measures/utilization over the course of the trip to get a more tangible feel for its importance. I'm hoping a bunch of interesting data is made public after this mission!

> King plans to use the system — which occupies one-fifth of floor space than Eve does — to model how genes, proteins and small molecules interact in cells. Part of that will involve taking around 10,000 mass-spectrometry measurements each day.

The throughput here is astounding, especially when driven by researchers who really know how to chart a path. I feel every time a critical feedback loop is made both faster and cheaper, it makes everyone participating better. I wonder whether we will see many more "whiz kid" scientific researchers than we have today.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47295479

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but if the answer is “yes” to at least 1 or 2, then I think the equation flips quite a bit. This is what I’m seeing in the world right now, and it’s disconcerting:

1. Ukraine and Russia have been in a skirmish that has been drawn out much longer than I would guess most people would have guessed. This has created a divide in political allegiance within the United States and Europe.

2. We captured the leader of Venezuela. Cuba is now scared they are next.

3. We just bombed Iran and killed their supreme leader.

4. China and the US are, of course, in a massive economic race for world power supremacy. The tensions have been steadily rising, and they are now feeling the pressure of oil exports from Iran grinding to a halt.

5. The past couple days Macron has been trying to quell tension between Israel and Lebanon.

I really do not hope we are not headed into war. I hope the fact that we all have nukes and rely on each others’ supply chains deters one. But man does it feel like the odds are increasing in favor of one, and man does that seem to throw a wrench in this whole thing with Anthropic vs. OpenAI.

People have no idea what’s actually going on inside, but I guess it’s simpler to just be upset and take sides. There are people associated with DOGE (Sam included) who are tirelessly doing unsexy and thankless work while not being sensational like Trump or Elon. But they still get trampled on by people who simply want to be upset and ignorant.

What do we actually know?

1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that conference".

2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not gated behind a service with API limits and costs?

3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct. We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly that's the future. Wake up!

But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little action.