hatchet VS hn-search

Hatchet (https://hatchet.run) | New York City | Full-time

We're hiring a founding engineer to help us with development on our open-source, distributed task queue: https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet.

We recently launched on HN, you can check out our launch here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39643136. We're two second-time YC founders in this for the long haul and we are just wrapping up the YC W24 batch.

As a founding engineer, you'll be responsible for contributing across the entire codebase. We'll compensate accordingly and with high equity. It's currently just the two founders + a part-time contractor. We're all technical and contribute code.

Stack: Typescript/React, Go and PostgreSQL.

To apply, email alexander [at] hatchet [dot] run, and include the following:

1. Tell us about something impressive you've built.

2. Ask a question or write a comment about the state of the project. For example: a file that stood out to you in the codebase, a Github issue or discussion that piqued your interest, a general comment on distributed systems/task queues, or why our code is bad and how you could improve it.

Can you explain why you chose every function to take in context? https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet/blob/main/python-sdk/...

This seems like a lot of boiler plate to write functions with to me (context I created http://github.com/DAGWorks-Inc/hamilton).

Hello HN, we're Gabe and Alexander from Hatchet (https://hatchet.run), we're working on an open-source, distributed task queue. It's an alternative to tools like Celery for Python and BullMQ for Node.js, primarily focused on reliability and observability. It uses Postgres for the underlying queue.

Why build another managed queue? We wanted to build something with the benefits of full transactional enqueueing - particularly for dependent, DAG-style execution - and felt strongly that Postgres solves for 99.9% of queueing use-cases better than most alternatives (Celery uses Redis or RabbitMQ as a broker, BullMQ uses Redis). Since the introduction of SKIP LOCKED and the milestones of recent PG releases (like active-active replication), it's becoming more feasible to horizontally scale Postgres across multiple regions and vertically scale to 10k TPS or more. Many queues (like BullMQ) are built on Redis and data loss can occur when suffering OOM if you're not careful, and using PG helps avoid an entire class of problems.

We also wanted something that was significantly easier to use and debug for application developers. A lot of times the burden of building task observability falls on the infra/platform team (for example, asking the infra team to build a Grafana view for their tasks based on exported prom metrics). We're building this type of observability directly into Hatchet.

What do we mean by "distributed"? You can run workers (the instances which run tasks) across multiple VMs, clusters and regions - they are remotely invoked via a long-lived gRPC connection with the Hatchet queue. We've attempted to optimize our latency to get our task start times down to 25-50ms and much more optimization is on the roadmap.

We also support a number of extra features that you'd expect, like retries, timeouts, cron schedules, dependent tasks. A few things we're currently working on - we use RabbitMQ (confusing, yes) for pub/sub between engine components and would prefer to just use Postgres, but didn't want to spend additional time on the exchange logic until we built a stable underlying queue. We are also considering the use of NATS for engine-engine and engine-worker connections.

We'd greatly appreciate any feedback you have and hope you get the chance to try out Hatchet.

This is a great question, thanks for asking.

We are testing workflows internally that use orchestration software like Hatchet/Temporal to allow the framework to robustly handle 100s of GBs of upload data from parsing to chunking to embedding to storing [1][2]. The goal is to build durable execution at each step, because even steps like PDF extraction can be expensive / time consuming. We are targeting an prelim. release of these features in < 1 month.

Logging is built natively into the framework with postgres or sqlite options. We ship a GUI that leverages these logs and the application flow to allow developers to see queries, search results, and RAG completions in realtime.

We are planning on adding more features here to help with evaluation / insight as we get further feedback.

On the A/B, slow rollout, and analytics side, we are still early but suspect there is a lot of value to be had here, particularly because human feedback is pretty crucial in optimizing any RAG system. Developer feedback will be particularly important here since there are a lot of paths to choose between.

[1] https://hatchet.run/

Absolutely -- just created an issue if you'd like to follow along or provide feedback!

- Ads with Psychological tricks

Truly good websites have around 2 facts per 10 word sentence, and get instantly to the chase. Also: good websites give you the names of all their competitors/alternative websites before showing their own stuff, and give you further reading.

Right now the world of technology is supposedly more innovative than ever, but somehow Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org/) and Search Hackernews (https://hn.algolia.com/) beat billion dollar search engines.

Articles written decades ago are still unsurpassed in terms of quality and ease of understanding, but the best modern websites can do is textbook explanations. It is time society graduates from boilerplate buzzword textbook culture.

Now the gems of the internet are slowly being buried beneath mountains of trash.

If something sounds boilerplate it isn't good enough.

Don't bother saying something that has been said before, and better.

>for more detail: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Oh, I see. We actually discussed Pound about four years ago - just a little back and forth about the ABC of Reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196681

>What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist?

I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I just think it's silly to correlate an approach to translation that you dislike with fascism. Especially as I'm not sure it even makes sense on its own terms: I can only read your comment as 'lazy translator? Figures that he would be a fascist', but if I imagine the type of translation a fascist would approve of, the approach I picture is fastidious, fussy, concerned with fidelity to the point of stickler-ishness. (Isn't that from where we get 'grammar nazi'?)

And oh, well, since you ask I'll take a shy at it: my vague sense is that he became fascist because saw a society in decline due to it becoming more and more a sham society: opulence without virtue, power without vigour, money no longer tied to actually existing goods. (Of course, all of this shades easily into antisemitism.) He saw fascism as the answer; It's easier to see in retrospect that it wasn't.

"multiplayer notepad" goes back 15 years at least - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... notepad&sort=byDate&type=comment

it was used back with a popular website which opened a text document and anyone viewing could type, but I can't remember the name. That became a thing in Google Docs, Microsoft Office, Floobits, and lots of self-hosted and cloned sites.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [email protected].

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

I understand the reason for repeating these sentiments—it's the same reason why they get upvoted to the top of threads*—but repetition of this kind is what we're most trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* I've marked this one off topic now.

I was looking for it in the guidelines. There are a couple of conventions for postings. Consider a bit of prior examples: [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=show+hn]

yeah there are only three stories coming up from the site search

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postgres+clustering

only one is semanthically correct, the other pick up the wrong version of clustering (i.e. k-means instead of multi master writes)

but yeah if one doesn't test the hard cases, how does one know it preserves semantics :D

Like dismissing the work of Feyerabend or Wittgenstein without seemingly having read either:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...