hatchnyc (u/hatchnyc)

hatchnyc commented on You might not need an ORM sometechblog.com/posts/yo... · Posted by u/l5870uoo9y

vlunkr · 3 years ago

After working with ORMs for a long time, all I really want is a nice API for building queries (that actually supports all underlying database features) and automatic mapping of the results to whatever objects/structs and primitives the language supports.

Everything else is IMO a bad layer of abstraction that will eventually bite you when you need to get closer to SQL.

hatchnyc · 3 years ago

Yeah I built one of these for .NET specifically for this, with DB-specific drivers to extend the API, especially for Postgres. It just tries to be a dead simple representation of the query, then provides a command API to do mapping and execution, some unit of work support. Really happy with it so far, especially compared to an ORM.

hatchnyc commented on Is Web3 Bullshit? (Transcript) blog.mollywhite.net/is-we... · Posted by u/pferde

mjburgess · 3 years ago

Will blockchain work for money? No

Will blockchain work as a store of value? No

Will blockchain work for art? No

Will blockchain work for the web? No

Web3 is just another problem domain people up the pyramid chain are looking to expand their MLM into. Since blockchain (as with herbal life, etc.) isn't effective at almost anything, this will pass.

It's so laughably ineffective that I think we dont even really have to argue much with it. "Blockchain technology" takes the computing power of an apple watch and realises it with a data centre.

It's so bad its self-exposing to most non-gullible people.

I think we can wait for Web3 to pass, as with NFTs.

Next it'll be HousesOntheBlock, MedicalRecordsOnChain, etc. this will all cycle out over the next decade until gov's start to see the massive crypto losses, and as with the opiod pandemic, step in.

One would hope most govs would regulate it into oblivion soon. As soon as the pyramid scheme around crypto is broken 99% of its fanatics won't be desperately searching to find a use case.

Remember, with crypto, people's lives are actually invested in it. This ain't Rust. It's Rust but each keyword was $50,000 you need.

hatchnyc · 3 years ago

Every cool new revolutionary, game changing, disruptive tech I can think of has had some kind of “killer app” that lead the way to widespread pubic awareness. Peer to peer had Napster, AJAX had Google Maps, microservices had services of large scale tech giants, and even blockchain originally had Bitcoin. In each case people were doing some cool new thing and we approached the technology trying to figure out how it was accomplished. I am not aware of a single such example for Web3 nor has anyone I’ve asked been able to name one. The killer Web3 apps are at best hypothetical imaginings of what someone could build with it someday, and even that take is quite generous. It is a technical buzzword in search of funding which is not a proven solution for anything at all.

hatchnyc commented on Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? · Posted by u/joshbochu

rad_gruchalski · 4 years ago

> raising the car a few inches just at the moment of impact, apparently slightly reducing the potential for injury

I wonder if the occupants of the other car benefit in any way...

hatchnyc · 4 years ago

Haha, maybe not? Since their car would tend to go underneath, although the footage I've seen always shows the other vehicle hitting from the side with the hood sliding slightly beneath the Mercedes...it does seem from watching that would give other vehicle slightly more space to dissipate the impact energy.

Now if they had only bought a Mercedes as well, they could have chosen the self-breaking option to avoid the collision in the first place.

hatchnyc commented on Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? · Posted by u/joshbochu

camelcasing · 4 years ago

any examples?

hatchnyc · 4 years ago

Mercedes has a system on the S-class that uses the sensors to detect a potential impact (e.g. an rapidly approaching vehicle while the car is stationary) and uses the active suspension to "jump" raising the car a few inches just at the moment of impact, apparently slightly reducing the potential for injury.

Many cars and especially planes & spaceships are have tons of systems like this.

I worked on a system that did things like in response to a primary datasource being offline would switch the queries it used to a different database to include substitute data and pass this back to be used instead until the primary store came back online. Three years after it was put in production this happened on one of the company's biggest and most important days of the year, and our SREs were sitting there calmly trying to solve the issue, ended up waiting until late at night to deploy a fix. It would have been reasonable for this service to just rely on the primary source, but we would have been offline for hours if this little trick hadn't been put in place.

hatchnyc commented on Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software? · Posted by u/joshbochu

hatchnyc · 4 years ago

Not a specific piece of software, but a characteristic of a limited percentage of anonymous internal systems--one of the most beautiful things to witness in the realm of design is a system undergoing catastrophic stress when the designers anticipated and planned for such events, and in usually a very short period of time you see the results of extensive planning spool out, design features hidden from view and unappreciated until this moment, kick in and recover/compensate in ways that feel almost magical.

For obvious reasons it is much more common to see this level of design in physical, life-critical systems like aerospace or automotive technology, but you do see it sometimes in software. Well designed services that under heavy load, various kinds of infrastructure failure, attack, or other kinds of scenarios well outside the bounds of normal expected operations intelligently compensate while signaling alerts with precise, useful information, and attempt whatever kind of recovery is possible.

This is hard to anticipate and often thankless to build in advance. It's always a stressful time when this behavior is visible, but it gives me a feeling of admiration for the perhaps long gone employees who built it.