fathomdeez (u/fathomdeez)

fathomdeez commented on Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale recall.ai/blog/postgres-l... · Posted by u/davidgu

panzi · 5 months ago

So what are your thoughts on constraints then? Foreign keys? Should that only be handled by the application, like Rails does (or did, haven't used in a long time).

fathomdeez · 5 months ago

I don't think of those as business logic, per se. They're just validity checks on what the data should look like before it's written to disk - they're not actionable in the way L/N is. That being said, constraints usually end up being duplicated outside the db anyway, but having them where the data rests (so you don't have to assume every client is using the correct constraint code) makes sense.

fathomdeez commented on Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale recall.ai/blog/postgres-l... · Posted by u/davidgu

osigurdson · 5 months ago

I like this article. Lots of comments are stating that they are "using it wrong" and I'm sure they are. However, it does help to contrast the much more common, "use Postgres for everything" type sentiment. It is pretty hard to use Postgres wrong for relational things in the sense that everyone knows about indexes and so on. But using something like L/N comes with a separate learning curve anyway - evidenced in this case by someone having to read comments in the Postgres source code itself. Then if it turns out that it cannot work for your situation it may be very hard to back away from as you may have tightly integrated it with your normal Postgres stuff.

I've landed on Postgres/ClickHouse/NATS since together they handle nearly any conceivable workload managing relational, columnar, messaging/streaming very well. It is also not painful at all to use as it is lightweight and fast/easy to spin up in a simple docker compose. Postgres is of course the core and you don't always need all three but compliment each other very well imo. This has been my "go to" for a while.

fathomdeez · 5 months ago

This kind of issue always comes up when people put business logic inside the database. Databases are for data. The data goes in and the data goes out, but the data does not get to decide what happens next based on itself. That's what application code is for.

fathomdeez commented on The death of partying in the USA derekthompson.org/p/the-d... · Posted by u/tysone

98codes · 5 months ago

Good insights -- people now have to have their party look good for their social feeds: insta, tiktok, whatever. I'm forever thankful that I never had to even think about that, and even if people were taking pictures, nobody gave a damn about the background.

fathomdeez · 5 months ago

I go through this with my wife for every party we throw. She wants the house cleaned, table set, food spread ready, seasonal cocktails mixed, furniture moved around, decorations just so, etc.

I’m like here’s a giant thing of ice cold booze have fun.

fathomdeez commented on Hugging Face just launched a $299 robot that could disrupt the robotics industry venturebeat.com/ai/huggin... · Posted by u/fdaudens

mrbonner · 5 months ago

"could disrupt" with what? Cute voice and wiggling antennas?

fathomdeez · 5 months ago

The conglomerate of Big Furby™ will finally be taken down

fathomdeez commented on Cloudflare: We Will Get Google to Provide a Way to Block AI Overviews seroundtable.com/cloudfla... · Posted by u/freedomben

imilk · 5 months ago

Google has made it very difficult to completely block their AI crawling by also using the standard googlebot search crawlers to feed data into their AI overviews and other AI features within Google search. Google says there is a workaround but it also blocks your site from fully indexing in Google search. This also also all covered in the article though.

> What does an AI crawler do different from a search engine (indexing) crawler?

Many people don't want the extra bot traffic hitting their site that comes from AI, especially when AI chat & AI overviews in Google provide such a small amount of traffic in return and that traffic pretty much always has horrendous conversion rates (personally seen across multiple industries).

fathomdeez · 5 months ago

It doesn't seem like the extra traffic is the issue. People don't want Google's AI from reading and summarizing their data and thus preventing clickthroughs. Why would I click on your site if google did all the work of giving me the answer ahead of time?

fathomdeez commented on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

chis · 6 months ago

I really don't think it's wise to gate your applications behind an AI video interview lol. It's just too much time to invest before I even know if there's any mutual interest.

You will probably tend to filter out candidates with other options and be left by candidates that are more desperate and willing to invest the time.

fathomdeez · 5 months ago

You’d be wise to avoid this place anyway. You can tell from the description it’s not a fun place to work.

fathomdeez commented on -2000 Lines of code (2004) folklore.org/Negative_200... · Posted by u/xeonmc

voidUpdate · 6 months ago

The danish flag is a white cross on a red background. If you cut out the white cross, you will be left with four rectangles of red, which can be pushed together and sewn up again, forming a solid red flag

fathomdeez · 6 months ago

I see. I was wondering where the hammer and sickle came in, since without those is it really a communist flag?

fathomdeez commented on Better Auth, by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC techcrunch.com/2025/06/25... · Posted by u/bundie

threatofrain · 6 months ago

I would recommend that people don't do auth not because it's easy to be insecure, it's that auth sometimes needs agility. Auth sometimes needs to grow and adapt just like any other part of your product.

Except that auth might not be a core part of your insurance or tax app, and you'd rather spend your energy on the part of "agility" that has to do with the core parts of your app.

fathomdeez · 6 months ago

On the flip side I was at a startup using auth0, because as you said, not a core part of the business right? Until the traction hit and they had hundreds of thousands of users. Suddenly the auth bill became untenable - users are great but there wasn’t enough revenue to cover these costs. Auth0 didn’t budge. In fact they were outright nasty to deal with. They were holding our user logins and passwords hostage and they knew it.

fathomdeez commented on -2000 Lines of code (2004) folklore.org/Negative_200... · Posted by u/xeonmc

vodou · 6 months ago

A long time ago I was working in a big project where the PLs came up with the most horrible metric I've ever seen. They made a big handwritten list, visible for the whole team, where they marked for each individual developer how many bugs they had fixed and how many bugs they had caused.

I couldn't believe my eyes. I was working in my own project beside this team with the list, so thankfully I was left out of the whole disaster.

A guy I knew wasn't that lucky. I saw how he suffered from this harmful list. Then I told him a story about the Danish film director Lars von Trier I recently had heard. von Trier was going to be chosen to appear in a "canon" list of important Danish artists that the goverment was responsible for. He then made a short film where he took the Danish flag (red with a white cross) and cut out the white lines and stitched it together again, forming a red communist flag. von Trier was immediately made persona non grata and removed from the "canon".

Later that day my friend approached the bugs caused/fixed list, cut out his own line, taped it together and put it on the wall again. I never forget how a PL came in the room later, stood and gazed at the list for a long time before he realized what had happened. "Did you do this?" he asked my friend. "Yes", he answered. "Why?", said the PL. "I don't want to be part of that list", he answered. The next day the list was gone.

A dear memory of successful subversion.

fathomdeez · 6 months ago

I'm having a lot of trouble visualizing both the flag and the list modifications.

fathomdeez commented on -2000 Lines of code (2004) folklore.org/Negative_200... · Posted by u/xeonmc

fathomdeez · 6 months ago

I am net negative in lines of code added to two different companies I've worked for. I wear that proudly.