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> this deal will go through

It should be noted that Don Jr. is one of the investors who will benefit greatly if/when this goes through.


I feel like it's more nuanced than OP writes. Presumably every log line comes from something like a try/catch. An edge case was identified, and the code did something differently.

Did it do what it was supposed to do, but in a different way or defer for retrying later? Then WARN.

Did it fail to do what it needed to do? ERROR

Did it do what it needed to do in the normal way because it was totally recoverable? INFO

Did data get destroyed in the process? FATAL

It should be about what the result was, not who will fix it or how. Because that might change over time.


> Did it do what it was supposed to do, but in a different way or defer for retrying later? Then WARN.

> Did it fail to do what it needed to do? ERROR

> Did it do what it needed to do in the normal way because it was totally recoverable? INFO

We have a web-facing system (it uses a custom request-response protocol on top of Websocket... it's an old system) that users are routinely trying to, ahem, automate even though it's technically against ToS but hey, as long as we don't catch them? Anyway, it's quite often to see user connections that send malformed commands and then get disconnected after we send them a critical_error/protocol_error message — we do have quite extensive validation logic for user commands.

So, how should such errors be logged in your opinion? I know that we originally logged them as errors but very quickly changed to warnings, and precisely for the reasons outlined in TFA: if some kewl haxxor can't figure out how to quote strings in JSON, it's not really something we can't fix. We probably should keep the records, just to know that "oh, some script kiddie was trying to hack us during that time period" but nothing more than that; it definitely doesn't warrant the "hey, there are too many errors in sfo2 location, please take a look" summons at 3:00 AM from the ops team.


It sounds like it did exactly what it was supposed to do -- reject the bad input. Looks like an INFO to me.

My review was perfect, no notes. I'm going to turn it into a LinkedIn post to promote our new product.

https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/jedberg

(But in seriousness, this self reflection really does highlight what my year has been like and I truly appreciated the laughs)


The salt race condition comic made me laugh :D

Me too! AI is gonna put Randall out of business!

> The problem with durable execution is that your entire workflow still needs to be idempotent.

Yes, but what that means depends on your durability framework. For example, the one that my company makes can use the same database for both durability and application data, so updates to application data can be wrapped in the same database transaction as the durability update. This means "the work" isn't done unless "recording the work" is also done. It also means they can be undone together.


A lot of work can be wrapped inside a database transaction, but never everything. You're always going to want to interact with external APIs eventually.

Yes of course. External calls still need to be idempotent. But the point is some frameworks allow you to make some, or even most, of your work safe for durable execution by default.

> This means "the work" isn't done unless "recording the work" is also done. It also means they can be undone together.

That's just another way of saying that the step in question is idempotent.


No it's different. Idempotent would mean that it can be replayed with no effect. What I'm saying is that this guarantees exactly once execution, taking advantage of the database transactions that make multiple data updates idempotent together.

Aka "the titles when people post these on reddit".

Now you know why HN has the "no editorializing" rule. :)


reddit is a whole different beast. It does not have a sense of humor, rather it is a biased cesspool of partisanship.

You may have thought this is an objective observation.

For anyone over the age of 16 this comment is a loud expression of your political views.

Also, I find Reddit to be super funny. Just yesterday someone posted a photo of their brain MRI showing a tumor the size of a tennis ball and everyone, including the OP were having a great time.


> For anyone over the age of 16 this comment is a loud expression of your political views.

I'm curious as to what you think those political views are, because I strongly agree with what sidcool wrote (even if they didn't mean it the way I interpreted it) and I disagree with you.

I think that Reddit "is a biased cesspool of partisanship", but very much in both directions. Many subreddits are so wholly hard right or hard left that I think they're almost caricatures of themselves. And even for subreddits without a hard political bent, they are often the very definition of an echo chamber - they are great places to go where you want everyone to agree with you and you can see people who disagree with you get downvoted to oblivion. And, importantly, this is literally by design based on how subreddits are created and moderated.

I have rarely (not never, but rarely) made a comment that took a somewhat nuanced opinion where I wasn't heavily downvoted. And, contrarily, I have made similar comments on HN where, if I wasn't particularly upvoted, I received what felt like fair dialogue and back-and-forth with other commenters.

All that said, I still use Reddit frequently and find it frequently interesting, sometimes informative, and often pretty hilarious.


You really don’t know adherents of which political stance are constantly complaining about “lack of a sense of humor”? Or who has been complaining about the “tech bias”? I am glad if you were somehow not exposed. I don’t find it partisan. I come across a lot of criticism of Democrats. And the current administration. Also, if you’re claiming subreddits are partisan in the way mods want it to be, we can’t conclude Reddit as a whole is partisan, can we?

Edit:

The sibling comment offers a more concise explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329213


I sleep better at night thinking it is just a battleground of astroturfing bots fighting each other (at least on the main pages).

Everything from massive Russian state-actor bot farms testing newly trained LLMs popping out AI-generated meme formats before deploying domestically unknowingly getting into arguments with Israeli bot farms trying to raise support for some new movie series that will enable them to raise money for their next missile strike competing for eyeballs/attention from some uni student in a dorm room paying mid-sized black market companies in India to post comments telling you that cast-iron pans are too hard to clean so you should buy the non-sticks you saw on instagram (which are just marketing dropshippers in the USA selling the QA rejected pans from established brands).

The online world is a wild place.


Hacker News is Reddit with a nuclear downvote button and tone policing.

It's not that much better in terms of "dead internet," the bots are just more eloquent. In some ways the HN flavor of gamified engagement actively encourages worse outcomes than Reddit.


(In case you didn't realize it, you're replying to one of the OG reddit admins.)

Hello fellow OG :)

I joined from the Webmonkey sidebar in like 2008.

Lived in San Francisco for a while. Liked seeing you pop up in that sub, even after you retired.


"When we do it, it's called sense of humor. When they do it, it's bias and partisanship."

If you aren't logged in you get a cached version from the CDN/cache. Reddit works the same way.

> Given there are something like 20 million people in the US illegally

You should probably check your sources on that one. That number is highly suspect and came from someone who was trying to sell you on upping budgets for ICE.

> seems counter productive to count people who aren't citizens in a article primarily about US health statistics.

Non-citizens are still people.


FWIW, if you have HBOMax, you can watch what is now, sadly, his final film, Spinal Tap 2. It just arrived there yesterday.

(They also just got the original if you want to watch it again)


The Claude MD is like the documentation you hand to a new engineer on your team that explains details about your code that they wouldn't otherwise know. It's not bad to need one.


But that documentation shouldn’t need to be updated nearly every other day.


Consider that every time you start a session with Claude Code. It's effectively a new engineer. The system doesn't learn like a real person does, so for it to improve over time you need to manually record the insights that for a normal human would be integrated by the natural learning process.


Yes, that's exactly the problem. There's good reasons why any particular team doesn't onboard new engineers each day, going all the way back to Fred Brooks and "adding more people to a late project makes it later".


Reminds me of that Nicole Kidman movie Before I Go to Sleep.


there are many tools available that work towards solving this problem


Sleep time compute architectures are changing this.


I certainly could be updating the documentation for new devs very frequently - the problem with devs is that they don't bother reading the documentation.


and the other problem - when they see something is wrong/out of date, they don't update it...


If you are consistent with how you do your projects you shouldn't need to update CLAUDE.md nearly every day. Early on, I was adjusting it nearly every day for maybe a couple of projects but now I have very little need to make any adjustments.

Often the challenge is users aren't interacting with Claude Code about their rules file. If Claude Code doesn't seem to be working with you ask it why it ignore a rule. Often times it provides very useful feedback to adjust the rules and no longer violate them.

Another piece of advice I can give is to clear your context window often! Early in my start in this I was letting the context window auto compact but this is bad! Your model is it's freshest and "smartest" when it has a fresh context window.


It takes a lot of uncached tokens to let it learn about your project again.


Same thing happens every time a new hire joins the team. Lots of documentation is stale and needs updating as they onboard.


But that documentation shouldn’t need to be updated nearly every other day.

It does if it’s incomplete or otherwise doesn’t accurately convey what people need to know.


And something is terribly wrong if it is constantly in that state despite near daily updates.

Have you never looked at your work's Confluence? Worse, have you never spent time at a company where the documentation wasn't frequently updated?


Do you have nothing but onboarding material on yours and somehow still need to update it several times a week?

Why not?


I have a friend attempting to solve this. He's basically creating oauth for age verification. You sign up with his service and verify your age. After that it works similarly to oauth, but instead of return your identity, it just returns your age.

It's not a perfect solution, as he would still know who you are, but it's built in a way where you create a token locally to pass to the site that includes your age, and that site passes it to his site, which verifies the signature. So he knows who you are but not what sites you visit, and the sites know your age but not who you are.


When I read the title I hoped that EFF was going to do exactly that.

There’s also a way to improve it: Sell “age verification cards” in physical stores. Just like they are verifying that minors aren’t buying alcohol or cigarettes, they can verify that these cards are bought only by grown ups. Sure wouldn’t be perfect but it greatly improves anonymity and especially in paid-for adult services can be used as a payment method so repeat verification will happen for top ups.


On a related note I HATE how when I go buy alcohol they have to scan my ID here.

Potentially having to participate in marketing schemes for a beer?? Its not worth it.

There should also be a read only ID method with more watermarking validation or something.

I dont trust them POS with my info.


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