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snicker7on Building a Durable Execution Engine with SQLite

Message queues (e.g. SQS) are inappropriate for tracking long-running tasks/workflows. This is due to the operational requirements such as:

- Checking the status of a task (queued, pending, failed, cancelled, completed) - Cancelling a queued task (or pending task if the execution environment supports it) - Re-prioritizing queued tasks - Searching for tasks based off an attribute (e.g. tag)

You really do need a database for this.

snicker7on I could not convince my k8s team to go AWS serverless

We literally had a major us-east-1 incident on AWS today. Only thing we can do is sit on our butts and wait for it to end so that we can clean up. This happens every few months. I am unimpressed with the the "thousands of engineers" argument.

snicker7on New horizons for Julia

It may be worthwhile to understand where dynamic typing is helpful since this gets mentioned a lot. Python and other dynamic languages are increasingly reliant on static type checkers.

snicker7on New horizons for Julia

An interpreter is an optimization barrier relative to native composition.

snicker7on Don't "optimize" conditional moves in shaders with mix()+step()

Imagine being the dev competing game Y and seeing the changelog.

snicker7on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2025)

Not looking to apply, but can I DM you when the E train is late again?

snicker7on A new learning experience on MDN

The Neopets HTML Guide [1] remains the best beginner’s guide to Web development.

[1] https://www.neopets.com/help/html1.phtml

snicker7on Conda: A package management disaster?

I believe the problem is the lack of proper dependency indexing at PyPI. The SAT solvers used by poetry or pdm or uv often have to download multiple versions of the same dependencies to find a solution.

snicker7on Moon

Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics by Arnold is a good introductory book.

snicker7on We built a self-healing system to survive a concurrency bug at Netflix

The point is not to spend time frantically fixing code at 3 AM.

snicker7on Show HN: Inngest 1.0 – Open-source durable workflows on every platform

Why not dual license with AGPL?

snicker7on Netflix's Key-Value Data Abstraction Layer

This API is very similar to DynamoDB, which is basically a hash table of B-trees.

My experience is that this architecture can lead to very chatty applications if you have a rich data model (eg a graph).

snicker7on Intel Solidifies $3.5B Deal to Make Chips for Military

“Stuck making obsolete parts” sounds great. Guaranteed revenue without needing to stay competitive.

snicker7on Show HN: DBOS transact – Ultra-lightweight durable execution in Python

How does the DX compare against AWS step functions? My experience is that it is very difficult to “unit test” step workflows.

snicker7on Show HN: DBOS transact – Ultra-lightweight durable execution in Python

It turns out that DBs were invented to solve hard problems with state management. When people moved away from DBs (at least transactional relational DBs) they had to rediscover all the old problems. Tech is cyclical.

snicker7on PostgreSQL and UUID as Primary Key

OR if the primary key is exported out of the DB, i.e. for constructing URLs.

snicker7on Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

SICP. Lectures are on YouTube.

snicker7on Getting the Lorentz transformations without requiring an invariant speed (2015)

What’s interesting about this paper is that, with some very generic mathematical assumptions, only Galilean and special relativity are permissible.

snicker7on Should you use a Lambda Monolith, a.k.a. Lambdalith, for your API?

I find managing the AWS API Gateway to be too cumbersome. We use a proxy lambda that handles authentication and has routing logic to other lambdas (or SQS | State Machine).

snicker7on Winsorized mean

Why would I prefer a winsorized mean over a median?

snicker7on Microsoft in talks to sign on Amazon as customer in $1B cloud tools deal

$1B? Imagine if even 1% of that went into LibreOffice funding.

snicker7on Bad Emacs defaults

YAML was a mistake. Couldn’t count how many issues I and my colleagues encountered due to white space misalignment.

snicker7on Prefaulting Memory Mapped Arrays in Julia (2020)

Wouldn’t you get similar performance by just loading the file to ramdisk?

snicker7on Choose Postgres queue technology

I wonder how this is is actually simpler than an a managed queue, say SQS.

snicker7on Tabs are objectively better than spaces

Python is especially bad wrt to accessibility.

snicker7on XML is better than YAML – Hear me out

Spec, not library. Otherwise, no chance of having many-lang adoption.

snicker7on Breakfast cereal is in long-term decline

Bacon and eggs

snicker7on How to type “blimpy” in Emacs [video]

“Unwashed masses” == vim converts.

snicker7on Doing laundry on campus without a phone

It’s more than that. The app likely has some backend dependencies that require some ongoing maintenance or cost. It’s not just that your washing machine depends on an iOS app, but on some DynamoDB table somewhere.