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rrwright

136 karma · joined June 1, 2019

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rrwright··on Large integer precision error in Bash command output rendering
I agree with what I think you meant: it is not a bug in Claude. However "javascript on the backend" is exactly what Claude Code is! It's a node.js implementation of automation components that feed and pull from the Claude model.

I have a VERY hard time believing that they only use JSON serialization between the model and the TUI. If they're seriealizing JSON between agents, tools, or other components, then this problem is going to continue to persist for a very long time.

rrwright··on Large integer precision error in Bash command output rendering
This symptom was affecting display of numbers in the TUI, but the real bug/design flaw is using jq or JSON as a transport mechanism between components or between tools. JSON's number range is famously poor and it even architecture-dependent. So if you use jq or JSON to connect components or tools, you will have this same problem silently occurring elsewhere without visibility in the UI.

This is a bigger deal than it seems like! A confidence-inducing fix would include a blog post describing a top-to-bottom audit of jq/JSON used as a transport layer between tools and components. Not just a patch to the most visible problem.

rrwright··on Large integer precision error in Bash command output rendering
Good catch on the guidelines. But that github issue title obviously misses the point. The whole point is that it's a silent error in Claude Code.
rrwright··on Hacker News rewrites post without consent?
I posted a link to an important Claude Code bug here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45910257 with the original title of "Claude Code Introduces Off-by-One Errors"

It made it to the front page at about #11. Then apparently the editors renamed it to the (less interesting/more convoluted) title of the page it linked to. I didn't cause or approve that change. Why does HN rewrite my post? Is it because it was negative to Claude Code?

Original: https://pasteboard.co/xTjaRmnkhRRo.png

HN edited it to: https://pasteboard.co/rDPINchmufIF.png

rrwright··on Large integer precision error in Bash command output rendering
Why did Hacker News rename the title of this post? It was originally: "Claude Code Introduces Off-by-One Errors"

Original: https://pasteboard.co/xTjaRmnkhRRo.png

Unilaterally Edited: https://pasteboard.co/rDPINchmufIF.png

rrwright··on Large integer precision error in Bash command output rendering
Try it yourself: `echo '348555896224571969'`
rrwright··on Ask HN: Which niche online businesses would you love to own?
This question sounds like it was asked by a private equity investor looking to sample the tech zeitgeist before buying up and destroying some beloved tool.
rrwright··on A software epiphany
Completely agree. I had to turn on iOS reader mode to tolerate it. But then it was very worthwhile.
rrwright··on Teddy Roosevelt pursues the boat thieves (2015)
+1 to this.

That book has a few sections describing policy arguments on the floor of the New York Senate which are so well written that they are absolutely riveting! It sounds ridiculous to say that political arguments (from 100+ years ago) could keep you on the edge of your seat, but they do. It’s why this book the Pulitzer Prize.

rrwright··on Ask HN: Is 36 too old to (re)start a career in tech?
The irony of that advice from a user with that username is comedic gold! Thank you for that. It made my day.
rrwright··on DBSP: Automatic Incremental View Maintenance for Rich Query Languages [pdf]
https://quine.io does that with a graph and reactive streams under the hood.
rrwright··on Closing in on the “perfect code” (2004)
The article is from 2004.
rrwright··on Understanding Everything
On the topic of “thinking is analogy”, the book “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is an excellent and foundational read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By
rrwright··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2023)
thatDot | REMOTE | https://www.thatdot.com

The project you'd work on: https://quine.io

UI/UX engineers or full-stack engineers with experience designing and building front-end software in React and Typescript.

-or-

Scala engineers with experience designing, building, and optimizing compilers: Mid- and Senior- Levels

thatDot has created the world's first Streaming Graph, called "Quine" to make interpreting high-volume data streams dramatically faster and easier [1]. After 7 years of DARPA-funded research and development with a fantastic team of engineers, it's a game-changing core infrastructure technology. Our products are used by major security companies to do real-time behavioral analysis, monitor and triage their alarms, and automate remediation of security threats.

We're an early-stage venture backed company, and now is a great time to join! We believe strongly that each person should get more from their job than just a paycheck! It should be interesting, provide a chance to learn new things, help advance your career, work with amazing and kind people, and be fun! A person ≠ their opinions. We value individual people who know how to disagree productively with each other so we can all learn. We deliberately cultivate a space where learning new things is the goal.

Non-traditional backgrounds (i.e. non-CS degrees) are strongly encouraged; philosophy majors wanted!

Tools in our stack - NOT REQUIRED if you're willing to learn:

- Scala. We happily use pragmatic functional programming on the JVM.

- Akka. The Actor model is at the heart of what we do.

- Akka Streams. Backpressure is the ideal way to approach streaming data.

- Databases like Cassandra, RocksDB, and more.

- …and the right tool for the job.

If you're interested in learning more, please reach out to: contact@thatDot.com or check out this page: https://www.thatdot.com/company/careers

[1] https://www.thatdot.com/blog/scaling-quine-streaming-graph-t...

rrwright··on ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’
More than a year after my father died, my 6 year old son was inconsolably crying one night as my wife put him to bed. He hadn’t said anything about my father’s death until this night when he realized that it meant some day I would die. He was so sad at the thought and assumed I must be so sad about my father dying, that he was sad for me. I laid in bed with him talking about death and telling him how my father died—of COVID-19. It made my son think of vaccines. We spoke for an hour about how confronting death a little bit at a time throughout life—in stories or our own thoughts—is like a vaccine that helps us with the pain of losing our loved ones and eventually our own death. And for me, laying in bed crying with my six year old son about the death of his grandfather has been one of the best moments of my own life.
rrwright··on Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?
How is it that no one has yet suggested Randy Pausch’s famous “Last Lecture”? (Carnegie Mellon University) It is not a series, but it’s the culmination of a life’s work by an incredible person lost too early.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

The last life lessons you wish to pass to your children...

rrwright··on Ask HN: What Is Going on with Neo4j?
That’s not an optimized benchmark, just a demonstration using a real customer workload. Throughput depends on the workload but goes up to about 20,000 events per second per machine. All this is while simultaneously querying the graph and streaming out 20,000+ events per second. All that includes durable storage.

Price it out against Neptune instead and Quine is much less than 1% of the cost.

rrwright··on Ask HN: What Is Going on with Neo4j?
1,000,000 events per second with https://Quine.io

https://www.thatdot.com/blog/scaling-quine-streaming-graph-t...

Full disclosure: I work on this project.

rrwright··on Show HN: Quine – Streaming Graph and Origin Story
Quine started as a personal project on the side while taking time off before a new job. It was 2014. My first child was 8 months old and finally sleeping through the night. Time to start a new code repo. Quine was born as the union of graph databases + stream processing systems, eventually became the centerpiece of a major DARPA-funded research project, and is now an open source project with a commercial company supporting it.

I’d been bouncing back and forth between software engineer and manager at a few mature enterprise software startups, and so I had first-hand experience of how customer configuration had spiraled out of control. It took an army to deploy the product after closing each sale. Complicated configuration for many product components led to a graph data model. Configuration changes occurred slowly enough that it was feasible to put in a graph database. That was a cool project.

Moving to real-time event streams at another company focused on mobile push notifications, there were challenges similar in complexity, except they occurred at much higher volumes. Graph databases were definitely too slow! —but the problem was still graph shaped. So I worked alongside other engineers trying to "turn the database inside out." We created complicated microservices which ended up covering the same challenges as a database. What if all the parts could be configured together automatically?

Quine was created as an experiment to try to unify a graph data model with a streaming-focused graph computational model. The Actor Model is an old idea (Carl Hewitt, 1973) but a powerful and fundamental abstraction which appears in many surprising ways. It is perfect for this problem.

Every day, all of my spare time was working on Quine. We had a second child and there was even less time, so I'd stay up late coding until I couldn't keep my eyes open. I'd take Saturday daytime to be with my family, and then sneak away in the evening and again all Sunday to keep working. During the sleep-deprived and crying-baby-interruption years, when felt like I wasn't making enough progress, I would get up early to spend 2 hours at a coffee shop before work in order to get some focused time for coding.

By this point, my day job was leading DARPA research programs. One of these was Transparent Computing [1], a program focused on finding Advanced Persistent Threats ("APTs") in enterprise networks. The problem required assembling instrumentation data into a graph, analyzing it on the fly, and finding unusual patterns indicating the attacker's activity. Trying to be good stewards of our research funds, we started with existing graph databases. The program goals quickly exceeded the capabilities of every graph database out there, and I trudged through all the legal paperwork to properly allow the use of my side project on this research program.

Quine was the only way to store and analyze a graph that could keep up with the high volume of data on this project; we had tried everything else. So our team focused on developing Quine in the direction needed by the research. By the end of the project, it was exceeding the research goals (40,000 events per second, ingest+analysis) and it was clear that we had a tiger by the tail.

After the research program concluded, I raised early seed funding and hired a team to help bring Quine to market. In 2022, we realized that goal and Quine was released as open source software. Our team is now fully focused on developing the open source community for Quine and supporting the enterprise version. Our team recently showed linear scaling and tested it well-past 1,000,000 events per second (ingest+analysis). We’re excited about where this headed next! The future of Quine is rooted in the open source project and with many of the most interesting applications coming from the high-volume users we're engaged with now.

[1] https://www.darpa.mil/program/transparent-computing

rrwright··on Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google
“Google is awful for the long tail.”

Exactly right. Big opportunity.

rrwright··on Quine – streaming graph with materialized views
I'm the original creator of this tool. In case it helps, the usage model is:

1. Plug Quine into Kafka or some streaming source of data (blockchain, SSE events, etc. or stream in batch data from CSV/JSON) and write one query to build those into a graph.

2. Set a "standing query" on that graph, which monitors the ever-changing graph for matches to your standing query. Each match triggers a custom action to publish it out to another system, or call back into the graph to make another update.

3. If you need a consistent unchanging view of the graph, you can issue a normal query any time and include a timestamp. You will get results to your query from the graph as it was at that historical moment in time.

The system scales horizontally. We've tested it on a resilient cluster ingesting over 1 million events per second.

rrwright··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)
Thanks for pointing that out, Icathian.
rrwright··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)
thatDot | Remote | Full Time | https://www.thatdot.com

The project you'd work on: https://quine.io

Distributed Systems Engineers: Mid- and Senior- Levels

thatDot has created the world's first Streaming Graph, called "Quine" to make interpreting high-volume data streams dramatically faster and easier [1]. After 7 years of DARPA-funded research and development with a fantastic team of engineers, it's a game-changing core infrastructure technology. Our products are used by major security companies to do real-time behavioral analysis, monitor and triage their alarms, and automate remediation of security threats.

We're an early-stage venture backed company, and now is a great time to join! We believe strongly that each person should get more from their job than just a paycheck! It should be interesting, provide a chance to learn new things, help advance your career, work with amazing and kind people, and be fun! A person ≠ their opinions. We value individual people who know how to disagree productively with each other so we can all learn. We deliberately cultivate a space where learning new things is the goal. Non-traditional backgrounds (i.e. non-CS degrees) are strongly encouraged; philosophy majors wanted!

Tools in our stack - NOT REQUIRED if you're willing to learn:

- Scala. We happily use pragmatic functional programming on the JVM.

- Akka. The Actor model is at the heart of what we do.

- Akka Streams. Backpressure is the ideal way to approach streaming data.

- Databases like Cassandra, RocksDB, and more.

- …and the right tool for the job.

If you're interested in learning more, please reach out to: contact@thatDot.com or check out this page: https://www.thatdot.com/company/careers

[1] https://www.thatdot.com/blog/linear-scaling-to-1-1-trillion-...

rrwright··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2022)
thatDot | Remote | Full Time | https://www.thatdot.com

The project you'd work on: https://quine.io

Distributed Systems Engineers: Mid- and Senior- Levels

thatDot has created the world first Streaming Graph, called "Quine" to make interpreting high-volume data streams dramatically faster and easier [1]. After 7 years of DARPA-funded research and development with a fantastic team of engineers, it's a game-changing core infrastructure technology. Our products are used by major security companies to do real-time behavioral analysis, monitor and triage their alarms, and automate remediation of security threats.

We're an early-stage venture backed company, and now is a great time to join! We believe strongly that each person should get more from their job than just a paycheck! It should be interesting, provide a chance to learn new things, help advance your career, work with amazing and kind people, and be fun! A person ≠ their opinions. We value individual people who know how to disagree productively with each other so we can all learn. We deliberately cultivate a space where learning new things is the goal. Non-traditional backgrounds (i.e. non-CS degrees) are strongly encouraged; philosophy majors wanted!

Tools in our stack - NOT REQUIRED if you're willing to learn:

- Scala. We happily use pragmatic functional programming on the JVM.

- Akka. The Actor model is at the heart of what we do.

- Akka Streams. Backpressure is the ideal way to approach streaming data.

- Databases like Cassandra, RocksDB, and more.

- …and the right tool for the job.

If you're interested in learning more, please reach out to: contact@thatDot.com Or you can apply at: https://www.thatdot.com/company/careers

[1] https://www.thatdot.com/blog/linear-scaling-to-1-1-trillion-...

rrwright··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2022)
thatDot | Remote | Full Time | https://www.thatdot.com

The project you'd work on: https://quine.io

Distributed Systems Engineers: Mid- and Senior- Levels

Director of Engineering

thatDot has created the world first Streaming Graph, called "Quine" to make interpreting high-volume data streams dramatically faster and easier [1]. After 7 years of DARPA-funded research and development with a fantastic team of engineers, it's a game-changing core infrastructure technology. Our products are used by major security companies to do real-time behavioral analysis, monitor and triage their alarms, and automate remediation of security threats.

We're an early-stage venture backed company, and now is a great time to join! We believe strongly that each person should get more from their job than just a paycheck! It should be interesting, provide a chance to learn new things, help advance your career, work with amazing and kind people, and be fun! A person ≠ their opinions. We value individual people who know how to disagree productively with each other so we can all learn. We deliberately cultivate a space where learning new things is the goal. Non-traditional backgrounds (i.e. non-CS degrees) are strongly encouraged; philosophy majors wanted!

Tools in our stack - NOT REQUIRED if you're willing to learn:

- Scala. We happily use pragmatic functional programming on the JVM.

- Akka. The Actor model is at the heart of what we do.

- Akka Streams. Backpressure is the ideal way to approach streaming data.

- Databases like Cassandra, RocksDB, and more.

- …and the right tool for the job.

If you're interested in learning more, please reach out to: contact@thatDot.com

[1] https://www.thatdot.com/blog/linear-scaling-to-1-1-trillion-...

rrwright··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2022)
thatDot | Remote | Full Time | https://www.thatdot.com

The project you'd work on: https://quine.io

Distributed Systems Engineers: Mid- and Senior- Levels

Director of Engineering

thatDot has created the world first Streaming Graph, called "Quine" to make interpreting high-volume data streams dramatically faster and easier [1]. After 7 years of DARPA-funded research and development with a fantastic team of engineers, it's a game-changing core infrastructure technology. Our products are used by major security companies to do real-time behavioral analysis, monitor and triage their alarms, and automate remediation of security threats.

We're an early-stage venture backed company, and now is a great time to join! We believe strongly that each person should get more from their job than just a paycheck! It should be interesting, provide a chance to learn new things, help advance your career, work with amazing and kind people, and be fun! A person ≠ their opinions. We value individual people who know how to disagree productively with each other so we can all learn. We deliberately cultivate a space where learning new things is the goal. Non-traditional backgrounds (i.e. non-CS degrees) are strongly encouraged; philosophy majors wanted!

Tools in our stack - NOT REQUIRED if you're willing to learn:

- Scala. We happily use pragmatic functional programming on the JVM.

- Akka. The Actor model is at the heart of what we do.

- Akka Streams. Backpressure is the ideal way to approach streaming data.

- Databases like Cassandra, RocksDB, and more.

- …and the right tool for the job.

If you're interested in learning more, please reach out to: contact@thatDot.com

[1] https://www.thatdot.com/blog/linear-scaling-to-1-1-trillion-...

rrwright··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2022)
thatDot | Remote | Full Time | https://www.thatdot.com TL;DR: https://that.re/tldr Deeper Tech: https://www.thatdot.com/technology

Distributed Systems Engineers: Mid- and Senior- Levels

thatDot has created the world first Streaming Graph to make interpreting high-volume data streams dramatically faster and easier [1]. After 7 years of DARPA-funded research and development with a fantastic team of engineers, it's a game-changing core infrastructure technology. Our products are used by major security companies to do real-time behavioral analysis, monitor and triage their alarms, and automate remediation of security threats.

We're an early-stage venture backed company, and now is a great time to join! We believe strongly that each person should get more from their job than just a paycheck! It should be interesting, provide a chance to learn new things, help advance your career, work with amazing and kind people, and be fun! A person ≠ their opinions. We value individual people who know how to disagree productively with each other so we can all learn. We deliberately cultivate a space where learning new things is the goal. Non-traditional backgrounds (i.e. non-CS degrees) are strongly encouraged; philosophy majors wanted!

Tools in our stack - NOT REQUIRED if you're willing to learn:

- Scala. We happily use pragmatic functional programming on the JVM.

- Akka. The Actor model is at the heart of what we do.

- Akka Streams. Backpressure is the ideal way to approach streaming data.

- …and the right tool for the job.

If you're interested in learning more, please reach out to: contact@thatDot.com

[1] https://www.thatdot.com/blog/linear-scaling-to-1-1-trillion-...

rrwright··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2022)
thatDot | Remote | Full Time | https://www.thatdot.com TL;DR: https://that.re/tldr Deeper Tech: https://www.thatdot.com/technology

Distributed Systems Engineers: Mid- and Senior- Levels

thatDot has created the world's first Streaming Graph to make interpreting high-volume data streams dramatically faster and easier [1]. After 7 years of DARPA-funded research and development with a fantastic team of engineers, it's a game-changing core infrastructure technology. Our products are used by major security companies to do real-time behavioral analysis, monitor and triage their alarms, and automate remediation of security threats.

We're an early-stage venture backed company, and now is a great time to join! We believe strongly that each person should get more from their job than just a paycheck! It should be interesting, provide a chance to learn new things, help advance your career, work with amazing and kind people, and be fun! A person ≠ their opinions. We value individual people who know how to disagree productively with each other so we can all learn. We deliberately cultivate a space where learning new things is the goal. Non-traditional backgrounds (i.e. non-CS degrees) are strongly encouraged; philosophy majors wanted!

Tools in our stack - NOT REQUIRED if you're willing to learn:

- Scala. We happily use pragmatic functional programming on the JVM.

- Akka. The Actor model is at the heart of what we do.

- Akka Streams. Backpressure is the ideal way to approach streaming data.

- …and the right tool for the job.

If you're interested in learning more, please reach out to: contact@thatDot.com

[1] https://www.thatdot.com/blog/linear-scaling-to-1-1-trillion-...

rrwright··on Ask HN: Have you found something you love to do? If yes how?
For guidance on this topic, I’d recommend the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. I think the relevant part of the book would advise that loving what you do requires sticking with it long enough to develop mastery; and the opposite pattern of bouncing between topics “looking for passion” is a recipe for mediocrity and dissatisfaction (I’m probably overstating his case a bit). But the whole book is great!
rrwright··on Truth as Transcendental: Ontological Foundations
I realize he’s writing from the Thomist tradition, and so his peers let him get away with such things… but assuming platonic essences exists and are simply given to our minds, and then using that to base the argument for how an intellect apprehends “truth”?? That’s begging the question of the worst kind! It made me cringe while listening and occasionally shout back, “But you can’t just assume that!”

In the analytic tradition, I think you’ll find no better explanation for truth than Quine’s explanation of Tarski’s “Convention T” for the semantic theory of truth. Quine’s short book “The Pursuit of Truth” is a somewhat technical, but richly insightful explanation of how truth works, explained by one of the 20th century’s most important logicians. It’s small, but it’s a slow read, and probably fits well to the kind of formal logic that programmers could enjoy.

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