When writing an API, it’s easy to unknowingly introduce a dangerous, implicit assumption: that the database is the ultimate source of truth. If a record is in the database, an application often treats it as authoritative. I want to explain
Over the years I’ve found that I write two distinct kinds of software: The first category includes my work in astrophysics and plasma physics, along with the probabilistic models we build at Sturdy Statistics. The second category includes t…
Turning your infrastructure into a dependency graph Deploying a web server is fraught. You need error handling, database migrations, and rollback mechanisms. If all goes well, nobody notices. But if a deploy goes badly, you might suffer dow…
Why we confuse reading text with analyzing data, and how to stop. In serious analytics, the signal is rarely obvious. The glaring failures are caught by operational alerts and fixed long before a data scientist is ever involved. What remain…
LLMs make it easy to build features, but hard to build margins. Here’s why — and how to fix it. Traditional software has an economic model that’s the envy of every other industry: you pay a fixed cost to build the product, but near-zero mar…
How a “trivial” change yielded a 13× throughput increase. We recently released an open-source Clojure implementation of Roughtime, a protocol for secure time synchronization with cryptographic proof. When a client asks for the time, it send…
A short story about good abstractions colliding I recently lost an entire day to a data ingestion task that I was confident would take about twenty minutes. I’m not criticizing the tools — Clojure, tech.v3.dataset, tmducken, DuckDB, and the…
Strengthening the “lie-detecting” infrastructure of internet time Time is the invisible foundation of internet security. Everything, from TLS certificates to log integrity, digital signatures, blockchains, and build reproducibility, depends…
Anthropic’s recent results remind us that the quality and traceability of data matter more than quantity. In early October, Anthropic released a study with the UK AI Safety Institute and the Alan Turing Institute showing that a few hundred
The web was designed for documents, and the combination of HTML and CSS still represents that idea at its purest: structure and style, clearly defined and beautifully separate. HTML and CSS aren’t new. They were built by people who needed t…
Macroeconomics, DIY Hardware and AI-Driven Voting Pools I downloaded every Show HN post since the site was launched and ran them through a hierarchical topic model. I set out to discover what the Hacker News community finds interesting but
At Sturdy Statistics, our models are probabilistic, structured, and deeply recursive — Bayesian DAGs that encode how information flows through the data. Our models are not arbitrary graphs; they have constraints that make them regular and,