smithclay
Joined 14 years ago
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287
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112
Member since
Jun 29
doing tech things in san francisco
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 12 days ago
It's at the end of this Netflix post: but the end game is to connect whatever your observability ontology is with whatever system the business people and data engineering teams use to be able to answer previously hard questions like "how much money did this operational or engineering change make or lose?"
In theory, at least.
Observability vendors have been beating the drum for 10+ years that there's so much untapped business value in operational data. Seems like we might be getting close to seeing how real that is.
Comment · 23 days ago
Don't think it's widely known or understood, but Ducklake doesn't require duckdb: it's just a (good) data lake spec that works in duckdb.
There's a cool alternate rust/datafusion ecosystem initiative going on at https://github.com/datafusion-contrib/datafusion-ducklake, and think the Quack protocol opens up a lot of cool possibilities too.
If you need an idea for what do do with ducklake: recommend throwing all of your agent traces in it.
Comment · 23 days ago
More benchmarks comparing effectiveness of various AI SREs is welcome and overdue: especially vendor-vs-vendor comparisons. One area that I think is going to be really interesting and important is the best way to emulate complex IT environments for evals.
Some related work I recommend checking out: - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33023 (new last week!) - https://github.com/SREGym/SREGym - https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx/tree/main/packages/hdx-... (Clickstack's version) - https://github.com/grafana/o11y-bench (Grafana's version)
Comment · 1 month ago
This is a lot to like here as someone who pretty much exclusively uses the Cloudflare API via agents. Hoping (since it's built on top of Forge), some kind of native terraform support is also in the works.
Great when you're a solo dev deploying a worker, but would be incredible for production deployments if this could also just natively output terraform code.
Comment · 2 months ago
Feel like AWS got a lot of the concepts right with S3 Tables* ("serverless" Iceberg catalog on top of S3) ... would love, love to see a version of S3 Tables that lets you choose between Ducklake or Iceberg as the catalog.
* Cloudflare also seems to have gotten the same idea right with R2 Data Catalog
Comment · 3 months ago
As someone who lives in central San Francisco: Costco is amazing with a cargo bike (or Waymo off-peak).
Haven't had Amazon Prime for 2+ years and don't miss it, but would definitely miss my Costco membership.
Comment · 4 months ago
If you're reading this and curious: consider writing a duckdb community extension* or contributing to an existing one*
duckdb is becoming a kind of data superglue between a lot of data ecosystems (GIS, observability, analytics, lakehouses, object storage, etc) that don't talk to each other typically, and it's worth checking out in 2026.
* https://github.com/duckdb/extension-template * https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/
Comment · 5 months ago
Not yet.
That said… think duckdb/ducklake/quack could potentially be a future replacement for Mimir or Clickstack with way less operational complexity.
Comment · 5 months ago
Been working on open-source projects involving storing and querying observability data (metrics, logs, traces) in parquet[0] and have been frustrated with the usability of Apache Iceberg … despite strongly agreeing and wanting to use an open storage format and catalog.
This makes Ducklake much more interesting for my use case, excited where this is going.
Comment · 7 months ago
sprites.dev / fly.io has publicly said they are using a variant of JuiceFS for the object-storage-to-VM-filesystem stuff, it's cool tech.
* https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/ * https://juicefs.com
Comment · 8 months ago
The Claude Code analytics space is really interesting to me right now as well, this is cool.
I'm coming at it from more of the data infrastructure side (e.g. send all of your logs and metrics to a cheap Iceberg catalog in the cloud so you have a central place to query[1]) but also check out https://github.com/tobilg/ai-observer -- duckdb popping up everything to make this interesting and easy.
Comment · 8 months ago
High-quality digital twins of complex software does not bode well at all for a lot of SaaS companies.
For customers, it makes migrations much easier and less-risky between vendors.
For the vendors themselves, it means you can cheaply and reliably port features your competitors have that you don’t have.
Comment · 9 months ago
Personally: love the decorator pattern after I got used to it :)
Posted this yesterday as well, but seems like a really nice emerging pythonic way to call out to remote infrastructure (see: Modal[1]).
[1]: https://modal.com/docs/examples/hackernews_alerts#defining-t...
Comment · 9 months ago
This looks cool, love the approach of a more "pythonic" infra as code -- have also noticed this pattern in Modal [1] and Ray [2] and all for it.
[1] https://modal.com/docs/examples/hackernews_alerts [2] https://docs.ray.io/en/latest/ray-overview/getting-started.h...
edit: forgot to mention StackQL [3], which is somewhat similar but takes a SQL-first vs python-first approach. The IaC space is about to get a lot more interesting.
Comment · 9 months ago
We need more rigorous benchmarks for SRE tasks, which is much easier said that done.
The only other benchmark I've come across is https://sreben.ch/ ... certainly there must be others by now?