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bgentryon River: A fast, robust job queue for Go and Postgres

Yes, there's a note in the readme to that effect although I don't think they bear much resemblance anymore. que-go was an experiment I hacked up on a plane ride 9 years ago and thought was worth sharing. I was never happy with its technical design: holding a transaction for the duration of a job severely limits available use cases and worsens bloat issues. It was also never something I intended to continue developing alongside my other priorities at the time and I should have made that clearer in the project's readme from the start.

bgentryon River: A fast, robust job queue for Go and Postgres

I don't think these approaches are necessarily mutually exclusive. There are some great things that can be layered on top of the foundation we've built, including workflows. The best part about doing this is that you can maintain full transactionality within a single primary data store and not introduce another 3rd party or external service into your availability equation.

bgentryon River: A fast, robust job queue for Go and Postgres

Hi Parker, I'm genuinely sorry it comes across as though we lifted this stuff directly from Oban. I do mean it when I say that Oban has been a huge inspiration, particularly around its technical design and clean UX.

Some of what you've mentioned are cases where we surveyed a variety of our favorite job engines and concluded that we thought Oban's way was superior, whereas others we cycled through a few different implementations before ultimately apparently landing in a similar place. I'm not quite sure what to say on the spelling of "cancelled" though, I've always written it that way and can't help but read "canceled" like "concealed" in my head :)

As I think I mentioned when we first chatted years ago this has been a hobby interest of mine for many years so when a new database queue library pops up I tend to go see how it works. We've been in a bit of a mad dash trying to get this ready for release and didn't even think about crediting the projects that inspired us, but I'll sync with Brandur and make sure we can figure out the right way to do that.

I really appreciate you raising your concerns here and would love to talk further if you'd like. I just sent you an email to reconnect.

bgentryon River: A fast, robust job queue for Go and Postgres

You've found an underdocumented feature, but in fact River does already do what you're asking for! Check out `ScheduledAt` on the `InsertOpts`: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/riverqueue/river#InsertOpts

I'll try to work this into the higher level docs website later today with an example :)

bgentryon River: A fast, robust job queue for Go and Postgres

The UI isn't quite ready for outside consumption yet but it is being worked on. I would love to hear more about what you'd like to see in it if you want to share.

bgentryon River: A fast, robust job queue for Go and Postgres

2015, even :) https://brandur.org/postgres-queues

bgentryon River: A fast, robust job queue for Go and Postgres

Oban is fantastic and has been a huge source of inspiration for us, showing what is possible in this space. In fact I think during my time at Distru we were one of Parker's first customers with Oban Web / Pro :)

We've also had a lot of experience with with other libraries like Que ( https://github.com/que-rb/que ) and Sidekiq (https://sidekiq.org/) which have certainly influenced us over the years.

bgentryon River: A fast, robust job queue for Go and Postgres

Hi HN, I'm one of the authors of River along with Brandur. We've been working on this library for a few months and thought it was about time we get it out into the world.

Transactional job queues have been a recurring theme throughout my career as a backend and distributed systems engineer at Heroku, Opendoor, and Mux. Despite the problems with non-transactional queues being well understood I keep encountering these same problems. I wrote a bit about them here in our docs: https://riverqueue.com/docs/transactional-enqueueing

Ultimately I want to help engineers be able to focus their time on building a reliable product, not chasing down distributed systems edge cases. I think most people underestimate just how far you can get with this model—most systems will never outgrow the scaling constraints and the rest are generally better off not worrying about these problems until they truly need to.

Please check out the website and docs for more info. We have a lot more coming but first we want to iron out the API design with the community and get some feedback on what features people are most excited for. https://riverqueue.com/

bgentryon My Love Letter to Rails (and Ruby) – Or, Why RoR Isn't Dead Yet

Unfortunately the Elixir ecosystem is a harsh dose of reality: only a handful of good 3rd party libraries that are well maintained outside of Phoenix, Ecto, and Oban. I say this as somebody who’s spent several years full time in Elixir on and off since 2017, including in my current role. A strong Elixir ecosystem has unfortunately never materialized.

bgentryon How do we save water: Stop growing alfalfa in Imperial County

Or just charge a fair rate for all water resources in the state, one that is representative of its scarcity and cost, without massively subsidizing inefficient agricultural use in the process.

The alfalfa situation would correct itself if the water being used was fairly priced and not heavily subsidized.

bgentryon Hacker mods an M1 Mac mini to receive power over Ethernet instead of AC

The actual source referenced by the article appears to be this tweet thread: https://twitter.com/Merocle/status/1686093369322176512

bgentryon US CDC sets first federal target for ventilation of indoor air to lower risk

Which is fine for filtering particulates, but does nothing to resolve the issues of CO2 buildup, natural gas appliance fumes, formaldehyde from composite wood products or other off-gassing, etc. For proper indoor air quality you need both filtration and fresh air intake.

bgentryon Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say

I've had this exact situation happen on numerous occasions. It's always people turning into a parking lot ahead of me, in a situation where they will absolutely be out of the way long before I reach them, but also I'm actively shifting to the side to go clearly around them anyway. In none of the situations was there any chance of an accident even if the turning car stopped suddenly instead of completing its turn. And this has happened to me on multiple different vehicles.

Each time it happens my immediate reaction is "what the hell is wrong with my car" before I see the "BRAKE" on the dash or heads up display and realize this happened yet again. I'm surprised I haven't been rear ended on account of it yet.

bgentryon Passage by 1Password: Add passkey support to your app or website

Your iOS device passcode also gives root access to your entire iCloud account, including the ability to reset your account password. This was highlighted a couple months ago by the Wall Street Journal in relation to a recent wave of thefts & account takeovers which were exploiting this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-iphone-security-theft-pas...

It seems we all need to treat our iOS device passcodes with as much importance & sensitivity as the password to our password manager—essentially root on your digital life.

bgentryon Stanford’s war against its own students

The standards should be high in any situation where you can significantly harm a person's life trajectory, even if not in a criminal court. Getting kicked out of Stanford for cheating could definitely derail a person's life.

bgentryon Stanford’s war against its own students

But the stakes seem very low: we're talking about procedural due process protecting the rights of fraternities to host parties with alcohol.

No? The quote is in reference to a lawyer defending students accused of cheating on an exam and facing an administrative process with no presumption of innocence or right to a proper defense. A process which could permanently destroy their college education and career prospects.

bgentryon Stanford’s war against its own students

There's quite a bit more in the story, such as this from an alumni attorney helping students anonymously accused of cheating on an exam:

The students knew Ottilie ran his own law practice and reached out for his counsel. Ottilie agreed to take the students’ case pro bono and worked with two other alumni lawyers on their defense—recreating seating charts and finding over a dozen witnesses who were willing to testify to their innocence.

Ottilie said he turned up at multiple hearings for the students only to be told by university officials he was not allowed to speak on their behalf, but could advise them from behind the scenes.

After five months of a judicial process that Ottilie describes as “biased against the students,” all three of his clients were acquitted of the charges. But the experience exposed a deep flaw in the university’s treatment of its student body, Ottilie told me.

“In the process of working with those students, we discovered that Stanford. . . was denying them of their procedural due process rights at literally every step of the process,” he said.

bgentryon Ask HN: How is the SVB situation affecting your startup?

They're #18 on the US list you linked, I saw other articles saying they were #16 so it probably just depends on the date assets were measured.

bgentryon Who owns private home security footage, and who can get access to it?

I also have only HSV cameras or Ubiquiti ones for this reason. Everything I care about is stored on-site or in the cloud with end-to-end encryption, no privacy or surveillance state enablement concerns.

There's a great HomeBridge plugin which enables HomeKit Secure Video on my UniFi Protect cameras: https://github.com/hjdhjd/homebridge-unifi-protect

bgentryon Startup Decoupling and Reckoning

Yeah, this works great for public/free Substacks. Unfortunately Substack doesn't offer any way to get a private RSS feed for subscribers, except for podcasts. So you end up with the truncated public versions of articles in the public RSS feed and have to click through and sign in to read the full one.

bgentryon Clark Foam’s demise, 10 years later (2015)

Likewise. Spent my whole childhood in the Laguna Niguel area, didn’t know what Clark Foam was back then but always passed it on Crown Valley. Sad to see that it’s become just another bland condo complex but that is the way of South Orange County.

bgentryon The strange and awful path of productivity in the US construction sector

From https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-air-conditioning :

> By the late 1960s, most new homes had central air conditioning

So the addition of central HVAC likely isn't a big factor, because most new homes in the US already had it 50 years ago.

bgentryon Banning Gas Stoves Is a Terrible Idea

The ventilation retrofit is likely much cheaper for any home that already has central HVAC. I would know this because I did that exact upgrade on my home and spent <$2500 to have a professional install a high end oversized ERV to replace the inefficient ventilator that was installed per code. If you don't have central HVAC, of course it's much more difficult, but most US homes from the past 40+ years have central HVAC.

An induction stove, on the other hand, would require me to rip open a bunch of walls to run a new 220V line from my outdoor electrical panel (the garage subpanel doesn't have sufficient 220V running to it), remove or shut off the existing gas line, and install a many-thousand dollar cooktop to come close to the cooking quality I get from my modern gas range.

bgentryon Banning Gas Stoves Is a Terrible Idea

Again, that problem is better and more cheaply solved with adequate ventilation. And quality household ventilation not only removes natural gas byproducts in the air, it also removes CO2 buildup, dust, cleaning chemicals / VOCs, respiratory viruses, etc. Many benefits for much less cost than a gas -> induction stove retrofit.

bgentryon Banning Gas Stoves Is a Terrible Idea

I'd get behind an incentive in the form of natural gas prices that accurately reflect its externalities. Even add a requirement that new homes have spare/dedicated 220V wiring in places where gas appliances exist (dirt cheap to do at build time, makes retrofitting much easier).

Beyond that, let the markets do their work. If induction cooktops are actually better or win the cost/benefit tradeoff, customers will want them and builders will want to install them. There's very little to gain by forcing them on people.

As noted by the article, there are much also bigger & more impactful targets if your goal is actually to reduce carbon emissions: most notably industrial usage, but also furnaces and water heaters.

bgentryon Banning Gas Stoves Is a Terrible Idea

Key quotes:

> This means that of the 3.2% of US carbon footprint that is composed of residential gas, only 4.1% of that—about .13% of the total US carbon footprint—is made up of residential gas cooking.

> It would be hard to find, if you looked, another one-eighth of one percent of the US carbon footprint with more impact on the lifestyle of the public.

> In addition, though, the asthma effect of gas stoves can be ameliorated with more ventilation, which is a much better and more cost-effective way to solve the problem! And as we have discussed here before, ventilation has other important health benefits.

If indoor air quality and asthma are the primary concerns here (since the tiny contribution to carbon emissions isn't) those are better addressed through ventilation. It would be far cheaper and more effective to mandate energy-efficient ventilation in new homes than to outlaw gas stoves. And cheaper for retrofits too, at least those with central HVAC.

bgentryon I measured the pollution from my gas stove

Yes, Austin is quite humid relative to most of the US, though not quite as humid as along the gulf coast (i.e. Houston or New Orleans).

The ERV was easy to tap into our existing central air system (which is where the crappy ventilator was connected) but if you don't have central air then it's going to be challenging to ensure quality air throughout your home.

bgentryon I measured the pollution from my gas stove

I have a new house (built in 2020) and it did come with an inefficient, underpowered mechanical ventilation intake that just pulled outside air directly into the home. Given the house is in Austin, Texas where the weather outside rarely matches the conditions inside, this results in a lot of cooling or heating loss, as well as losing the humidity conditioning of the indoor air. It's no wonder that I regularly hear locals advising folks to simply turn off the mechanical ventilator; bringing in hot, humid summer air or cold, dry winter air is not good, even if the fresh air is.

That's why shortly after moving in, I had the garbage ventilator replaced with an ERV. Based on my research I selected a Renewaire EV-Premium L, a variable speed unit which does up to 280 CFM. That's a ton of fresh air, even for a 4300 sqft house. But importantly it preserves some of the temperature and humidity when exchanging the air, so it's a lot more efficient than a plain mechanical ventilator.

I have it wired into my Ecobee thermostat. It runs at its configurable low speed 24/7, and the Ecobee puts it in boost mode (full output) for 10-15 minutes per hour.

This setup did cost some money of course, but the $2000 cost was pretty minor in the context of a new home. With this setup, we never see a buildup of CO2, VOCs, etc indoors. Definitely worth it when we're both working from home and spending most of our time there. And although we have a gas cooktop, I never see any indoor air quality issues so long as we're running the hood while cooking.

I hope indoor air quality becomes a bigger priority for homes, offices, and schools. The building codes in this area haven't yet caught up to the need for improved ventilation to account for how much better sealed up modern buildings are.

bgentryon Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

Looks like the household average is ~1000 kWh/month, with summer months being a lot higher.

https://austinenergy.com/about/reports-and-data-library/data...

bgentryon Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

I'm in the Austin suburbs on Pedernales Electric Coop (not Austin Energy as in the city proper). In 2022 they switched away from net metering to a scheme that pays just over 50% of the cost for power returned to the grid. So I now pay $0.090337/kWh for power consumed from the grid, and am credited only $0.05377/kWh for power returned to the grid.

https://www.pec.coop/your-service/distributed-generation/int...

This has changed the payback equation quite a bit. I'm now incentivized to do everything I can to use the power I generate rather than returning it to the grid, whether running more A/C during daylight, running laundry during the day, or storing it on my Powerwalls for using off hours.

Although the payback equation doesn't really make sense anymore, we're still happy with our decision to install solar + powerwalls because we can run the A/C as much as we want without feeling guilty, and also get a solid backup in case of major storm events like the 2021 winter storms. We both work from home and have an infant so keeping the house comfortable is important.