ealexhudson (u/ealexhudson)

ealexhudson commented on Software factories and the agentic moment factory.strongdm.ai/... · Posted by u/mellosouls

rob · 9 days ago

It's 100% another bot account:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Zakodiac

This one's a bit clever in that it actually comments back.

I feel like I've been pointing them out too much lately so I wanted to wait until somebody else did first.

They all seem to take advantage of accounts that are a few years old with zero posts and then suddenly make a bunch of AI-generated comments on a single day, like this one did (account from 2023, no posts until today.)

The last bot I pointed out that did the same thing ended up having its "owner" make a post about it that didn't get any attention:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901199

ealexhudson · 9 days ago

What would be great, and I don't know if @dang / the mods would take on requests like this, would be for bot participants to be allowed but the account flagged. So e.g. the user name just says "[bot] Zakodiac" or something.

As well as being an ethical approach - I think it's wrong to try to impersonate humans and/or not announce AI output as AI - it would also be handy for new filter options: all bot posts are OK, hide bot leaf comments, or hide all threads with bot comments. etc.

[edited as my robot unicode/emoji char didn't come through]

ealexhudson commented on Event Sourcing, CQRS and Micro Services: Real FinTech Example lukasniessen.medium.com/t... · Posted by u/fmfamaral

buster · 4 months ago

Event Sourcing seems like massive overkill for the stated problem. The core requirement is simple: "show account balance at any point in time" for regulatory compliance.

What specific audit requirements existed beyond point-in-time balance queries? The author dismisses alternatives as "less business-focused" but doesn't justify why temporal tables or structured audit logs couldn't satisfy the actual compliance need.

The performance issues were predictable: 2-5 seconds for balance calculations, requiring complex snapshot strategies to get down to 50-200ms. This entire complexity could have been avoided with a traditional audit trail approach.

The business context analogy to accounting ledgers is telling - but accounting systems don't replay every transaction to calculate current balances. They use running totals with audit trails, which is exactly what temporal tables provide.

Event Sourcing is elegant from a technical perspective, but here it's solving a problem that simpler, proven approaches handle just fine. The regulatory requirement was for historical balance visibility, not event replay capabilities.

ealexhudson · 4 months ago

I think they needed to be clearer about what the actual requirement was.

If the requirement is, "Show the balance _as it was_ at that point in time", this system doesn't fulfil it. They even say so in the article: if something is wrong, throw away the state and re-run the events. That's necessarily different behaviour. To do this requirement, you actually have to audit every enquiry and say what you thought the result was, including the various errors/miscalculations.

If the requirement is, "Show the balance as it should have been at that point in time", then it's fine.

ealexhudson commented on Event Sourcing, CQRS and Micro Services: Real FinTech Example lukasniessen.medium.com/t... · Posted by u/fmfamaral

coryvirok · 4 months ago

Not sure why there is so much hate on this thread. I found the post well written, insightful, and pragmatic.

Having built systems that process billions of events and displayed results, triggered notifications, etc in real time (not RTOS level, I'm talking 1 or 2 seconds of latency) you absolutely need to separate reads and writes. And if you can trust db replication to be fast and reliable, you can indeed skip distributed locks and stay on the right side of the CAP theorem.

Event sourcing is how every write ahead log works. Which powers basically every db.

Is the concern on this thread that they preoptimized? I thought they walked through their decision making process pretty clearly.

ealexhudson · 4 months ago

I suspect there is a bit of knee-jerk because so often this pattern is misapplied. I actually quite like the example in the article although I'm basically allergic to CQRS in general.

I think your point about write-ahead logging etc is a good one. If you need a decent transactional system, you're probably using a system with some kind of WAL. If you're event sourcing and putting events into something which already implements a WAL, you need to give your head a wobble - why is the same thing being implemented twice? There can be great reasons, but I've seen (a few times) people using a perfectly fine transactional DB of some kind to implement an event store, effectively throwing away all the guarantees of the system underneath.

ealexhudson commented on The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe techtrenches.substack.com... · Posted by u/redbell

fzeindl · 4 months ago

> If you plot the line it's probably still curving up and I'm not clear at which point (if ever) it would start bending the other way.

I suspect when Moore‘s law ends and we cannot build substantially faster machines anymore.

ealexhudson · 4 months ago

Moore's law has kind of ended already though, and maybe has done for a few years, and even if you can make a chip which is faster there's a basic thermodynamics problem running it at full tilt for any meaningful period of time. I would have expected that to have impacted software development, and I don't think it particularly has, and there's also no obvious gain in e.g. compilers or other optimization which would have countered the effect.

ealexhudson commented on The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe techtrenches.substack.com... · Posted by u/redbell

ealexhudson · 4 months ago

I don't want to sound too dismissive, but all these arguments have been brought up time and again. The move from assembler to high level languages. The introduction of OOP. Component architecture / COM / CORBA / etc. The development of the web browser. The introduction of Java.

2018 isn't "the start of the decline", it's just another data point on a line that leads from, y'know, Elite 8-bit on a single tape in a few Kb through to MS Flight Simulator 2020 on a suite of several DVDs. If you plot the line it's probably still curving up and I'm not clear at which point (if ever) it would start bending the other way.

ealexhudson commented on The Unknotting Number Is Not Additive divisbyzero.com/2025/10/0... · Posted by u/JohnHammersley

deadfoxygrandpa · 4 months ago

you're either lying or you don't understand what you're looking at. theres a reason this conjecture wasnt disproven for almost a hundred years

ealexhudson · 4 months ago

Surely the example can be "obvious" because it's simple/clear. I don't think they're commenting on whether _finding_ the example is obvious...

ealexhudson commented on Anthropic raises $13B Series F anthropic.com/news/anthro... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

paulpauper · 5 months ago

the frauds were stopped by Sam going to jail. There was still money left by liquidating, which in hindsight was a very poor timing.

ealexhudson · 5 months ago

Sure, but would we really want to tell liquidators to manage assets for best eventual return rather than just convert everything to cash? In this instance, in hindsight, sure - you'd want the other thing, you want the bitcoin not the cash. But this feels like the exception that proves the rule.

ealexhudson commented on Anthropic raises $13B Series F anthropic.com/news/anthro... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

paulpauper · 5 months ago

FTX creditors should be seeing red. the trustee sold Anthropic out at the bottom. Same for crypto. Hindsight is 20-20, but imagine had CZ not made those tweets of divesting from the FTT token. FTX could have possibly weathered the final 3 months of the BTC bear market and then reaped the post-2023 AI and crypto bull market. Sam would have gone from pauper in jail to brilliant investor in Anthropic, mogul, and so on.

ealexhudson · 5 months ago

The trustee's reports on FTX's internal processes were damning. Even they had held their Anthropic on the way up, who's to say their internal FTT ledger and black holes in the Alameda books would not have eclipsed that?

The issue wasn't that crypto markets in general were down at that point; the issue was they were doing frauds.

ealexhudson commented on Switching Pip to Uv in a Dockerized Flask / Django App nickjanetakis.com/blog/sw... · Posted by u/tosh

stavros · 8 months ago

If there's no lock file at all, you haven't locked your dependencies, and you should just install whatever is current (don't create a lockfile). If it's broken, you have problems, and you need to abort the deploy.

There is never a reason for an automated system to create a lockfile.

ealexhudson · 8 months ago

The reason is simple: it allows you to do the install using "sync" in all cases, whether the lockfile exists or not.

Where the lockfile doesn't exist, it creates it from whatever current is, and the lockfile then gets thrown away later. So it's equivalent to what you're saying, it just avoids having two completely separate install paths. I think it's the correct approach.

ealexhudson commented on Gemini Diffusion simonwillison.net/2025/Ma... · Posted by u/mdp2021

beernet · 9 months ago

Serious question: Why does it appear that pages from this URL very often end up on top of HN? I don't find the content particularly special compared to the average HN post. Does the algorithm prefer certain URLs?

ealexhudson · 9 months ago

Perhaps your content quality meter needs a recalibration?