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maxmcd

1,938 karma · joined September 7, 2011

maxmcd.com

gmail: max.t.mcdonnell

github.com/maxmcd

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maxmcd··on Smaller, faster, safer: running Kimi and GLM at scale
I'm not sure how accurate this is, but there is pricing here: https://openrouter.ai/provider/cloudflare
maxmcd··on RX – a new random-access JSON alternative
Those care about quickly sending compact messages over the network, but most of them do not create a sparse in-memory representation that you can read on the fly. Especially in javascript.

This lib keeps the compact representation at runtime and lets you read it without putting all the entities on the heap.

Cool!

maxmcd··on Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”
They're implementing MVCC
maxmcd··on JuiceFS is a distributed POSIX file system built on top of Redis and S3
does having to maintain the slatedb as a consistent singleton (even with write fencing) make this as operationally tricky as a third party db?
maxmcd··on X-Clacks-Overhead
Is this possibly an intentional reference to GNU Linux, or unrelated?
maxmcd··on A super fast website using Cloudflare workers
TCP performance gets quite poor over long distances. CDNs are very helpful if you're trying to make your site work well far away from your servers.
maxmcd··on Netflix Open Content
Quite surprising. It does seem like you can get an https download with

    aws s3 cp --no-sign-request s3://download.opencontent.netflix.com/sparks/creative-commons-attribution-4-intl-public-license.txt .
Which is hitting the bucket path route at: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com/sp...

"aws s3 ls" similarly requests: https://s3.amazonaws.com/download.opencontent.netflix.com?li...

maxmcd··on Biscuit is a specialized PostgreSQL index for fast pattern matching LIKE queries
I found some more info here: https://biscuit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/benchmark_roaring.h...
maxmcd··on How to think about durable execution
I think a lot of the original temporal/cadence authors were motivated by working on event-driven systems with retries. They exhibited complex failure scenarios that they could not reasonably account for without slapping on more supervisor systems. Durable executions allow you to have a consistent viewpoint to think about failures.

I agree determinism/idempotency and the complexities of these systems are a tough pill to swallow. Certainly need to be suited to the task.

maxmcd··on How to think about durable execution
Great article for demystifying durable execution: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/11/3/absurd-workflows/
maxmcd··on GotaTun – Mullvad's WireGuard Implementation in Rust
I believe you are making use of gVisor’s userspace TCP implementation. I’m not sure if there is something similar in Rust that would be so easy to set up like this.
maxmcd··on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
"Reply in the tone of Wikipedia" has worked pretty well for me
maxmcd··on Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1
> > You can force an fsync after each messsage [sic] with always, this will slow down the throughput to a few hundred msg/s.

Is the performance warning in the NATS possible to improve on? Couldn't you still run fsync on an interval and queue up a certain number of writes to be flushed at once? I could imagine latency suffering, but batches throughput could be preserved to some extent?

maxmcd··on Flow: Actor-based language for C++, used by FoundationDB
Maybe this? https://forums.foundationdb.org/t/swift-or-c-20-coroutine-wh...
maxmcd··on 100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite
Oh nice, yes I think your threads should be able to perform reads concurrently when the write lock is not held. Would make sure you are in WAL mode as well, since I think that will improve your concurrency.
maxmcd··on 100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite
This will block threads while waiting for other threads to write. That might work great for your threading model but I usually end up putting the writer in one thread and then other threads send writes to the writer thread.
maxmcd··on How/why to sweep async tasks under a Postgres table
Just that row should be locked since it's: "for update skip locked".

I agree the concurrency limitation is kind of rough, but it's kind of elegant because you don't have to implement some kind of timeout/retry thing. You're certainly still exposed to the possibility of double-sending, so yes, probably much nicer to update the row to "processing" and re-process those rows on a timeout.

maxmcd··on This week in 1988, Robert Morris unleashed his eponymous worm
I went here next: https://www.youtube.com/@CMUDatabaseGroup
maxmcd··on A sharded DuckDB on 63 nodes runs 1T row aggregation challenge in 5 sec
Are there any open sourced sharded query planners like this? Something that can aggregate queries across many duckdb/sqlite dbs?
maxmcd··on Linus Learns Analog Circuits
There are a few different styles: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/16925
maxmcd··on Spiral
Do they mention transactions anywhere? Maybe it will be OLAP?
maxmcd··on UK Electricity Generation Map
I think this is the comparable view: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live
maxmcd··on Show HN: My first Go project, a useless animated bunny sign for your terminal
zero deps, nice instructions, how nice
maxmcd··on Cloudflare Radar: AI Insights
Such a cool idea. I have https://chess.maxmcd.com/ and (before blocking most of them) many bots played thousands of moves deep. I remember bingbot was very active.
maxmcd··on Standard Thermal: Energy Storage 500x Cheaper Than Batteries
Does this become much trickier because they're trying to heat to 600c?
maxmcd··on Benchmarks for Golang SQLite Drivers
This library is wild https://github.com/cvilsmeier/sqinn

Sqlite over stdin, to a subprocess, and it's fast!

maxmcd··on We shouldn't have needed lockfiles
The //indirect dependencies I believe are just there to track dependencies that are not in the project, or to help with caching: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/36460

In go 1.17 they were added so that project loading did not require downloading the go.mod of every dependency in the graph.

maxmcd··on We shouldn't have needed lockfiles
For what it's worth I think Go's MVS somewhat meets the desire here. It does not require lockfiles, but also doesn't allow use of multiple different minor/patch versions of a library: https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs

I believe Zig is also considering adopting it.

If there are any dependencies with the same major version the algorithm simply picks the newest one of them all (but not the newest in the package registry), so you don't need a lockfile to track version decisions.

Go's go.sum contains checksums to validate content, but is not required for version selection decisions.

maxmcd··on Twenty Eighth International Obfuscated C Code Contest
Was quite confused by this one: https://github.com/ioccc-src/winner/blob/master/2024/cable2/...
maxmcd··on Show HN: WebGPU enables local LLM in the browser – demo site with AI chat
Looks like this is a wrapper around: https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm

Which has a full web demo: https://chat.webllm.ai/

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