[HN Gopher] Designing software for things that rot
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Designing software for things that rot
Author : valzevul
Score : 151 points
Date : 2025-10-21 22:10 UTC (1 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (drobinin.com)
| amoss wrote:
| Not my kind of thing but still a highly enjoyable read. I love a
| tale of a software engineer who has gone down a rabbit-hole so
| deeply that they've come out the other side. And who doesn't like
| data?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| And he's got a great way with words as well.
| brenschluss wrote:
| Unfortunately it smells of ChatGPT at points.
| gwern wrote:
| You're correct, but when the worst the ChatGPTisms get is
| turns of phrases like "LeetCode youth finally paid off:
| turns out all those "rebalance a binary search tree"
| problems were preparing me for salami, not FAANG
| interviews." or "Designing software for things that rot
| means optimising for variance, memory, and timing-not
| perfection. It turns out the hardest part of software isn't
| keeping things alive. It's knowing when to let them age.",
| then I'm inclined to forgive it compared to how many far
| more egregious offenders are at the top of HN these days.
| This is a rather mild use of ChatGPT for copyediting, and
| at least I feel like I can trust OP to factcheck everything
| and not put in any confabulations.
| solumos wrote:
| You're absolutely right!
| xanderlewis wrote:
| > That's when it clicked:
|
| > You know the drill:
|
| etc etc.
|
| If these are hand-typed, I'll eat my hat.
| ge96 wrote:
| Tangent: I see little pine cones in there, pine soda is
| interesting
| 542458 wrote:
| I believe it's mugolio, which is a sweet syrup
|
| https://foragerchef.com/mugolio-pine-cone-syrup/
| valzevul wrote:
| OP here. Indeed, I referred to the syrup, but I hope to
| eventually nail the pine soda as well (last few attempts
| tasted like Christmas tree rinse).
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I should see what can be done with juniper. I have lots of
| invasive juniper shrubs and trees. Gave a friend a few pounds
| of berries once so he could try making gin.
|
| It smelled amazing, but tasted like ass, unfortunately.
| valzevul wrote:
| Depends on juniper; I use Juniperus communis as a spice by
| drying it first, then adding it to sauerkraut, pickled
| mushrooms, and spirit infusions.
|
| That being said, it's toxic in larger amounts [1], so I
| wouldn't use it raw; for spirits, I'd infuse and then
| distill.
|
| There is also Juniperus sabina, which is very common as well
| (at least in the UK) and smells great, but it's outright
| poisonous [2].
|
| --- [1]:
| https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-724/juniper
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juniperus_sabina#cite_ref-
| pfaf...
| p1necone wrote:
| > It smelled amazing, but tasted like ass
|
| Sounds like a successful gin recipe to me.
| seanparsons wrote:
| Here's me hoping this was something for Factorio: Space Age...
| guhcampos wrote:
| Hahaha my exact thought.
| guhcampos wrote:
| Yes. I thought of Gleba too.
| theturtlemoves wrote:
| >... my wife's sourdough starter living on the counter and
| getting fed when she remembers. The app reminds her; she ignores
| the app; the starter survives anyway because sourdough is
| remarkably forgiving.
|
| That's so great about sourdough starter, you don't have to
| babysit it at all. We'll, that is, once I figured out that I
| should ignore the "hydration hydration hydration" and "add blah
| percentage water and 1.618034 grams of flour" advice. Instead, I
| just add _lots_ (yes, that 's a measure, like pinch and scoop) of
| fresh flour to my starter and just add water until it's a gooey
| sticky mess. Leave it alone and it'll do its thing.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| .. also nice to give it a little drop of honey now and then,
| especially if your kitchen (or wherever you store it) is a bit
| on the cool side.
| rpearl wrote:
| The point of measuring is reproducibility. If you want to get
| the same result repeatedly the easiest way is to measure.
|
| Obviously people have been making sourdough for a very long
| time; you don't have to measure.
| crabbone wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| This is also a typical approach from the chefs I know: they
| don't care about precision in most recipes (eg. dishes like
| soups, or pasta, or salads...), but then sometimes there are
| dishes where precision is absolutely crucial, and baking is
| one place where precision is really important.
|
| With sourdough, if you don't measure, you may still get good
| results, but you will have to babysit the dough and try to
| figure out when it's ready by checking frequently. Some
| people can afford it time-wise, and to some this would be
| prohibitively inconvenient.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| tip: take a kitchen brush and "paint it" thick (have to stick
| your tongue out as far as you can when you say the 'th sound, i
| do not make the rules) on parchment paper. put it in oven, and
| turn on the oven light. Wait till it dries. Collect the dry
| flakes and store in dark, airtight jar. Keeps 'forever'-ish.
| Take it anywhere, and to re-awaken, just rehydrate and feed.
| 2-3 days and baaam! you got your progenitor starter's baby in a
| jar.
|
| No constant feeding and wasted flour.
|
| (edit:terrible spellingaringage)
| intalentive wrote:
| Before clicking I thought this was going to be a philosophical
| piece about entropy.
| nzach wrote:
| I had the same expectation going in. But it was an interesting
| read.
| shetaye wrote:
| Great read! I'm sure expensive enterprise tooling exists for busy
| kitchens to manage safety protocols (or not?), so it is very cool
| to see high quality tooling for this kind of thing out in the
| open. After watching so many Chubby Emu videos, I'm definitely
| scared straight.
|
| Off-topic, but the syntax highlighting is a little difficult to
| read on light mode: https://pasteboard.co/5dXcQjgcHIqu.png
| sleepybrett wrote:
| This is fucking awesome. I've recently built my own curing
| chamber and modified a humidifier so it didn't need a button
| press ;), and am taking delivery of some jowls on the weekend and
| have been getting all the software infrastructure set up for the
| monitoring of it's temp/humidity (grafana, prometheus, alerting,
| etc).
|
| Given that my grandfather used to cure his own in a cabinet in
| his root cellar with NO automation it feels a little overkilly
| but I'm glad to see someone else is overkilling at an even more
| extreme level than me and is making their work public.
| valzevul wrote:
| Root cellars are far more stable than a ground-floor garage in
| my case: steady temperature throughout the year, low airflow.
| Some wooden cabinets are also superior to modern chambers, i.e
| cedar acts like a humidity buffer, which is why miso makers
| still swear by cedar koji boxes.
|
| Good luck with the jowls!
| sleepybrett wrote:
| To call it a wooden cabinet might be a wee bit generous.
| Actually a broken wardrobe he probably found on the side of
| the road with broken hinges on one of the doors so he nailed
| it shut. :lol:
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| My kinda guy!
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > Let's say, you're curing coppa and on day 12 humidity drops to
| 68% for six hours because you forgot to refill the reservoir.
|
| Two float switches, a latching relay, a cold water line, a valve,
| and a valve actuator can automate reservoir filling. An HOA
| switch and leak detection would be nice additions to the
| automatic reservoir filling, low and high water alarms too.
| That's how a boiler feedwater tank works. Might be tricky to fit
| the float switches in a small humidifier tank, though.
|
| It's a bit more work to set up than temp and humidity
| sensing/control but you might as well automate it all once you
| start.
| valzevul wrote:
| I wish. No-fault evictions aren't a thing in Scotland, but I'd
| still struggle to explain the whole "I plumbed a cold line for
| salami" thing to the landlord.
| goopypoop wrote:
| you could run a hose from a tap without damage with something
| like e.g. https://www.diy.com/departments/nes-home-chrome-
| adapter-two-...
|
| or a push-fit splitter under the sink could be revertable
| and/or unnoticed
| lexicality wrote:
| You just need to phrase it correctly. Try "I plumbed a cold
| line for salami. Would you like some salami?"
| burnished wrote:
| 'Who likes hiring plumbers? I took care of that FOR you'
|
| yeah like sibling said, its all in the phrasing (I imagine)
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Lol, that would be quite difficult to explain to the
| landlord, now it makes perfect sense why you didn't do that
| :)
|
| Very cool project, I bet the salami is delicious too!
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| You can go even simpler if you have a bigger reservoir.
| Automatic trough fillers where a float mechanically shuts off a
| valve fed from a garden hose are like $20 at a farm supply
| store.
| blobbers wrote:
| My professor in college said he designed grain silo software
| control algos to prevent mold but maximize water retention
| (weight) in corn.
|
| Apparently when you're in the bulk business, selling water is a
| good business, but if you lose x% of your water in your corn
| you're out an equivalent portion of your revenue.
|
| If the corn goes moldy, you may be out more. Hence the
| optimization.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Could I have added blockchain for tamper-proofing? Sure. Am I
| going to give people that idea? Absolutely not.
|
| I appreciate the restraint. :P Besides, embedding a lie into a
| ledger doesn't make it true, it just makes it slightly harder to
| escape accountability that might not exist anyway.
|
| > "Slightly more sour than batch #3" beats pH to three decimals.
|
| Yeah, while the "human tongue" sensor and support package might
| not be _standardized_ , it's still far more powerful than
| anything we can build in a factory.
|
| We just need to control for cases where its processing-unit
| automatically incorporates data we want to exclude, like "how
| expensive was that sample."
| jcims wrote:
| I build a fully automated 'hand sanitizer factory' back in the
| summer of 2020 out of boredom and a feeling that it could
| actually be useful at some point. It doesn't exactly rot but some
| of the challenges are similar.
|
| I found a really nice modular architecture in esp32 flashed with
| tasmota for all of the sensors and switching, they would talk via
| MQTT over Wi-Fi to a raspberry pi running node-red. It was
| responsible for all of the data integration, flows, process
| automation and dashboards.
|
| Just made it super easy to add/remove features without rewiring
| things and allowed me to replace the esp32's very easily.
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