They use WAL in SQLite. If I continuously perform reads/writes so that they overlap with no gaps, I can make their VM go down because SQLite will not have time to initiate a checkpoint to trim the WAL file. SQLite waits for a time window without any active reads/writes before starting a WAL checkpoint. If there isn't one, the WAL will grow indefinitely, eating up all the disk space on the VM.
It's in SQLite's documentation, and almost no one switching to Sqlite seems to be aware of it because no one discusses it in blog posts like these. I guess most projects switching to SQLite have very low traffic and no malicious users (yet)
Could you go into more detail about this issue and provide some links to the documentation?
I'm absolutely no expert, I'm just reading about it now, but from the SQLite WAL documentation [0]:
> 7. There is the extra operation of checkpointing which, though automatic by default, is still something that application developers need to be mindful of.
and from their "checkpointing" documentation [1]:
> By default, SQLite does a checkpoint automatically when the WAL file reaches a threshold size of 1000 pages.
I'm only skimming but I see no mention of waiting for an idle time window.
>However, if a database has many concurrent overlapping readers and there is always at least one active reader, then no checkpoints will be able to complete and hence the WAL file will grow without bound.
>This scenario can be avoided by ensuring that there are "reader gaps": times when no processes are reading from the database and that checkpoints are attempted during those times.
Dunno, maybe Rails has a built-in workaround for this.
My workaround was to run a separate thread that monitored the WAL size on disk every second. If it went above the target size of 8 MB, my framework would enter "slow down" mode, where all reads and writes were artificially delayed by calling "sleep()", starting at 16 ms and gradually increasing the sleep time based on a few heuristics.
This allowed the application to have short gaps with no reads or writes, so the checkpointer could actually proceed.
Why not grab a rwlock so that no readers or writers can proceed and all existing ones are drained, and then force a checkpoint? What's with the exponentially increasing sleep?
That's only true in theory. In practice, you'll be rate-limited first. Even if you aren't, the database won't be the bottleneck because SQLite is so fast. Their Ruby on Rails stack will suffer thread starvation way before the WAL grows. Rapid requests still leave microsecond gaps between context switches for SQLite to run an automatic checkpoint. To actually make SQLite stall, you'd need an endpoint that lets you hold a massive write transaction open indefinitely, which lobste.rs doesn't expose anyway (I hope).
I reproduced it in Sqlite with short-lived reads/writes though. Other DBMSes seem to not have this issue (IIRC MySQL will block a write if WAL falls behind)
SQLite definitely seems like a poor choice for dealing with many concurrent requests.
Maybe it's improved since I last used it, but to my knowledge SQLite essentially forces all writes to be serialised, at risk of data corruption otherwise.
There are tricks for improving the performance such as WALs, but that is merely a performance boost rather than genuine concurrency with things like row-level locks that you might find in other databases.
I guess if the whole thing is architected with a write-through cache that handles concurrent writes and deals with serialising all the writes, then it can be a single writer streaming changes through to the database, but then you still have a point of serialisation, it just will manifest itself slightly differently.
And SQLite is something that will give you constraints you will always have to consider.
Whereas running mariadb or postgres on the same machine would deliver similar benefits without a risky migration.
If your DB is small enough to run as a SQLite database, then it probably ought to have never been on a different machine in the first place.
There is a very happy medium between SQLite and a database on a different machine, one I am continually surprised to see people ignore.
> SQLite definitely seems like a poor choice for dealing with many concurrent requests
Can you qualify "many"? SQLite easily handles 100k+ writes per second and it's not hard to have app layer code serialize and batch writes to take advantage of that speed. Concurrent writes require a ton of overhead and your system and code can be quite a lot faster and simpler if you just skip the idea of them altogether.
Can't you do infinity read replicas? I don't think the write load on lobster.rs is severe - maybe 1 comment/sec, with an acceptable replication delay of 60 sec?
If you can do that, you can have infinity instances.
With WAL, you don't need read replicas, you can have lots of readers and they don't get blocked by writers.
As an aside, on replication, eventual consistency is not a panacea:
If I make this comment, it's absolutely fine if you don't see it for a minute.
If I make this comment, it's absolutely broken if I then don't see it on my subsequent requests. I'll think the site has broken, and try to resubmit my comment.
You can relatively easily work around that one by pinning people to instances, but that's still yet another thing to consider, and those kinds of considerations add up when you're dealing with distributed systems.
However, this a single instance, it's way too early to talk about replication.
Given that just hitting their front-page is taking 6+ seconds, they've got a performance problem that needs fixing, and my hunch is that they have some kind of "last accessed" database entry, which turns every request into a write.
They could have one SQLite instance per user and then have a single sweeper that goes through all last writes and then replicates it to the main instance - eventual consistency fanned out across files
So now you're introducing even more processes, even more latency and complexity, and for what benefit?
Eventual consistency on users would make it difficult to do things like "WHERE !user.is_banned" when getting the stories, so you need to keep your users database tightly synchronised. Sure, you could pro-actively delete or mark comments when deleting users, but now you're risking having the ban itself fail, and have also now added a much longer write operation, as you have to mark all those comments deleted. And long running writes is the one thing you desperately need to avoid in SQLite.
And why go to all that effort when you could avoid all that effort by running a database which allows concurrent writes on the machine local to the web application?
All the benefits of machine-local latency, and all the benefits of concurrent writers and transaction isolation.
I wouldn't expect that problem to be solved at the database layer, that's what http caches are for, then application level in-memory caches, then finally if neither of those hit, go to the database.
For example, one of the biggest optimisations that Hacker news does is that it serves logged out users from a cached copy of the front-page.
Logged out users don't care/notice about comment counts, they don't notice that it doesn't update as often, they can't be hiding articles so you can serve the same front-page to the millions of anonymous users and bots, and update that cached copy once and on a slower cadence than every request.
Not sure if this is SQLite or driver/Rails issues? We use it for sites and systems with a lot more (but similar) traffic and have no issues; we did write the drivers we use ourselves (for Node) as we got into much issues with the popular/existing ones.
I jsut had this happen - it was my first visit to the site and probably my second page load. Tried opening the About page and it was completely blank. Thought it was odd & reloaded, which rendered correctly.
Some of the cited reasons for moving off MariaDB [1] seem misguided, in my opinion. Especially the part about "K1 are very enterprise-focused, so the database is likely to focus its work on features that are not relevant to us. There's increased risk they drop the free/open source version we use"
K1 acquired the commercial entity behind MariaDB Enterprise, but that's separate from the non-profit MariaDB Foundation. And there's literally zero risk of the MariaDB server suddenly going closed-source; as a fork of MySQL (which is GPL), this is not even legally possible!
The GPLv2 doesn't prevent a company from distributing binaries and making the source available on request while development is done behind closed doors. This wouldn't really be "open source" as we typically understand it and might be cause to exclude it from some Linux distros, for example. I'm not saying that K1 would do this (I have no idea who they are or what they do), but I also think it's a reasonable risk to consider.
That was precisely how the original free software movement started, actually. Work was done behind closed doors and if you didn't like it, you released your own version with your changes.
I don't see how that would be a realistic risk? Any MariaDB user (including Lobste.rs) could request the source, and per the GPL it must be supplied, so this isn't an effective strategy for any entity to go closed-source.
And in any case, https://github.com/MariaDB/ links to mariadb.org which is run by the MariaDB Foundation, not the commercial enterprise owned by K1.
And even if it did go closed-souce, your existing install can run for ages because the vendor cannot force upgrade. One of my favorite features of FOSS.
It's a large ecosystem with multiple server vendors (Oracle MySQL, MariaDB, Percona, VillageSQL) that are relatively easy to migrate between, compared to moving to a completely different DBMS ecosystem.
Sometimes there are valid technical motivations to move away completely, but a nonsensical fear of a massively-used GPL database somehow becoming closed-source (with no surviving forks or continuity) is not one of them in my book!
- Its query planner is ancient and broken - it comes up with very bad plans. Every time we rely on it, we regret it eventually
- you have to use locks to prevent mangled write transactions, instead of the db handling it. Jepsen report is scathing
- its pretty hard to set it up in semi-sync replication mode, a.k.a. "only return from a transaction commit when the transaction is present on at least one other replica". Once you've set it up, you have to deal with insane things like transactions being visible on replicas before leaders, or even worse transactions visible on replicas briefly but never visible on leaders or other replicas
- every knob and feature contains subtle bugs, sometimes ones as scary as index corruption, that you only discover after it has caused you pain
I don't know why you would choose it unless you were already running it
The query planners have diverged between MySQL and MariaDB; which one are you talking about? Both have received improvements in recent years, so the specific version is relevant as well. And at least both systems have supported index hints for decades (unlike another popular database that only very recently acknowledged their necessity in large production workloads...)
The locking anomalies are a well-known and well-documented side effect of InnoDB REPEATABLE READ differing from the standard in certain pathological cases. The real-world relevance is minor, especially since companies using external write-through caches are already making much worse inherent trade-offs in that area. Regardless, MariaDB fixed it, while providing an option to revert to the old behavior for MySQL compatibility. And fwiw this only comes up because MySQL/Maria defaults to REPEATABLE READ; yet meanwhile the overwhelming majority of Postgres users are totally fine with the much weaker guarantees of READ COMMITTED, because that's their default isolation level.
Semi-sync has some odd behaviors indeed; there are conceptual trade-offs that must be made if you want synchronous-like replication without the full performance penalty! Do you have some novel academic solution for this that you can propose?
Your last bullet is lacking in details so I cannot comment.
Citing semi-sync thinking everything would be automatic was a weird con against MySQL. I’m now trying to think how the hell other databases magically solve this without needing to handle edge cases
Vitess. Also I often wonder if these system are on latest mySQL? I have read plenty of mySQL opinions that still based their experience during 5.x era.
On my Oracle databases, I run the dbms_stats.gather_database_stats package procedure once a week. SQL Server also has stats for sure, and I would be surprised by a relational database that did not.
SQLite will quietly gather stats with each database connection. Running an explicit analyze devotes full attention to an otherwise piecemeal group effort.
2. I don't think rows are physically removed when deleted, instead they are marked. Removal will definitely happen at vacuum.
3. There is a backup command in the CLI that will make a transaction consistent copy of the database file, and there are lower-level C functions behind it that can be used with object code.
4. It is important to remember the many restrictions of WAL mode, including the impact on ATTACHing multiple database files: ACID consistency is lost.
I didn't realize that re-timestamped comments. That's a pretty unexpected behavior, if true. I wouldn't like if that happened to a comment I left - a lot can happen in a week.
Every time it happens there's a sub-thread asking about the weird timestamps and dang replies to it saying changing the timestamps is done so that there won't be a sub-thread about the weird timestamps.
True. I don't understand why they overwrite the date at all actually, for either the post or the comments, that sounds like the hackiest way of implementing the “second chance pool” feature.
Wow, lobsters seems refreshing! Invite only to contribute must be why they can run on sqlite so effectively. I've run into so many issues with WAL (real time market data) unless I'm painfully deliberate with reads and writes. Don't feel like jumping on the "ohhh invite me" bandwagon, but definitely subscribing to their feed.
For a relatively low-traffic site like Lobster's, yeah I'm not surprised they don't need anything crazy. SQLite is really efficient and modern hardware is really fast.
I don't think SQLite is particularly optimized for modern hardware. It's just crazy efficient with a regression test suite many projects wish they could have.
I've got a few planks over a ditch in my garden. The bridge only needs to be designed for the load and then some. In this case, this seems to work just fine.
I've heard "why not PostgreSQL?" a few times this week. It was even our original plan in #539! Well, it was a pragmatic choice in two different ways:
The person who volunteered to do the work used SQLite.
I don't want to use solutions that are bigger and more complex than our likely needs. Postgresql is my default for projects, but it does have the added complexity of being a separate service to run, tune, and maintain.
The person who volunteered to do the work used SQLite.
That is a totally valid reason.
Though if you can run it from SQLite there is not much tuning on Postgres that would be needed. I would expect migration to Postgres from MariaDB would be easier.
Citation needed. I love postgres as much as the next person, but it does have more overhead than Sqlite which is in an in-process db linked through compiled C code, it doesn't run as a separate server. Very significant difference that when you use Sqlite db, there is typically no db process other than your application logic, unless you implement the server yourself. If you don't want your application to have multiple processes (say, as a toy example) then it totally makes sense to prefer Sqlite just for this reason. Sqlite and postgres are different tools, they serve different purposes.
If you run it on your one app server, it’s not much more work than SQLite. SQLite requires some special care when you’re dealing with multiple processes, and backups are about the same amount of effort.
On the same machine where they are currently storing the sqlite file maybe? It's not that hard to run. A sqlite backup cron is also not that much more work than a pg_dump cron.
"Ordinary rsync does not understand SQLite transactions. Rsync will make a copy of ORIGIN into REPLICA, however the copy might not be consistent. Parts of the copy might be from one transaction, while other parts might be from a different transaction. The database copy might be corrupt."
Another SQLite user here. My site gets constantly hammered by crawlers, and SQLite just keeps going on hit miss. Anyway, the real magic is on the ram and the ssd perf.
Pretty cool. I do default to SQLite these days simply because I can just put it on the host, set up a PVC to it, and run the app in Kube pointing at a persistent SQLite. Absent some other need (it's a fork of psql- or mysql-based software) I prefer using it for simplicity.
I do have to say that I've found lobste.rs generally a pretty slow site to render and navigate and I wonder whether that's the Rails backend, or underpowered hardware, or lack of caching. It's more feature-ful than a HN or Reddit though with much lower usage so I wonder what it is.
Everytime Lobste.rs get posted, I get to think should I dive in. This time maybe. Could somebody be kind enough to give me an invite. Email in my profile. Thanks.
I only lurk occasionally, but lobsters feels like a much smaller, less jaded community then HN. The content is very similar. Hopefully not too many people who get invites from this thread bring over the jadedness.
They're very distinct. Both are good in their own ways like elephants and dolphins. Though HN suffers more under AI spam, it permits wider topics and has a wider userbase.
Invitation-only is the future of online communities. Lobsters still has a pulse because you need to know someone to get in and it’s a bad look if you invite annoying people.
I wish lobste.rs would be a tiny bit easier to get access to. Some of my blog posts have been discussed there and every time I try to get access, I can’t get past their IRC stuff.
You should overlay a banner on your blog when they send you an HTTP Referer explaining their nonsense. Maybe then they'll get the message.
Then again, maybe they like the ability to critique your posts without you being able to rebut their opinions. It's an effective tactic in online echo chambers.
Well, lobste.rs requires an email to invite a user. If you had one on your profile, or on your github, or on your website I would have done it as a drive-by since your site is interesting and pretty lobste.rs-y content.
FWIW, you might want to consider publishing your e-mail address in your HN profile or on your website. Otherwise it’s hard for people to get in touch with you.
I've been waiting for my lobste.rs invite for years. I joined the IRC for a few days, but being in Australia, rarely saw too much activity. I could chase someone down for an invite, but at that point I just don't care that much.
I was given my invite from a decent person who, I believe, basically has an "open door" policy. I'm happy to pay it forward and give you an invite if you want it. abetusk@mechaelephant.com
That's nonsense wrt invitation-only being the future. I can equally say that free speech is the future. For comparison, Reddit does very well without being invitation only.
It's also not open access. You have to run an invisible tightrope so its algorithms won't automatically shadowban you and then you have to run a barely visible tightrope to get enough karma to not have your posts automatically removed from every subreddit.
> Invitation-only is the future of online communities.
This feels antithetical/dystopian/elitist compared to what online communities are, for me. I think it's ok for some communities to be like this, but I don't think it's the future of online communities.
I think some are fine, but if I had to choose one I'd choose open access, so I think it's the more important of the two. And in fact it's because the web is open, "no permission needed" by default that allows elitist groups to exist on the web. So I don't think I see it as a mistake. The alternative would be... You can only create a website if you're invited to the internet by someone who already has access? You have to get approval for your website from some authority before it goes public? Those were all potential futures we imo thankfully and carefully avoided!
That's actually how it already works, but there are large commercial access providers known as "ISPs". Before there were ISPs, you literally could only get on the internet with a direct connection to someone on the internet, usually a large university.
>Those were all potential futures we imo thankfully and carefully avoided!
I am not so thankful. But it is coming from my view of the current world.
I think open Internet for business is good. But open Internet for communication was bad. I cannot think of one good thing that have resulted from an open internet for communication/discussions. It has turned out to result in a collective, perpetual state of seizure for all humanity.
I am someone who had to learn stuff from random encounters with books in the 90s. Even then, I would not have it any other way...
This is called the Eternal September problem, after the influx of fresh users to Usenet at the start of every school year, being extended indefinitely as AOL brought new users continually to Usenet.
Isn't this how alot of discord works? maybe the communities are leniant with inviting but it still happens. A group chat is basically invite only too and that's pretty popular for communication.
I think we need to remove dystopian and elitist from the dictionary because at this point you can't breathe without being accused of it.
Deciding who is in or out is the fundamental basis of any community, that's freedom of association. That's what defines a community. A place anyone can enter is a train station bathroom and that's what the logical terminus of the open internet seems to be.
I think scopes/criteria/boundaries on communities are fine, I disagree that invite-only (as one implementation of community boundaries) is the future of online communities.
Although the statement "invite-only only is the future of online communities" isn't super well defined (what does it mean to "be the future"?), so I think the comments are debating past each other.
Lobste.rs is very anti-AI. They force any LLM topic to be tagged with “vibecoding” even when the majority of LLM posts are not about vibecoding.
AI posts are usually the most commented on. Linus Torvalds’ comments saying that LLMs are actually useful is still on the front page, tagged as vibecoding, and has a lot of comments from people mostly disagreeing with him.
Lobste.rs is more of a monoculture than Hacker News. If you get downvoted enough they stick a banner on the top of the page inviting you to delete your account. It has a nasty side effect of driving away good contributors who don’t align perfectly with the hive mind. It’s a site where you learn to keep your mouth shut if your input doesn’t agree with what the core users want to hear.
Being anti-AI is fine by me, but the hardcore Tumblr dogma can be very tiring sometimes; even if only as a reader interested in the valuable technical comments.
I originally went to lobste.rs because I wanted to avoid repetitive discussion and get more technical stuff. In time, though, lobste.rs got fairly boring since it's always the same stuff over and over again. I found an alternative means[0] of filtering out boring things here on HN and it's enjoyable to use again.
0: deleting comments of people who aren't interesting from my view and highlighting ones who often say things that are interesting, the user I'm replying to is one of the latter
> In time, though, lobste.rs got fairly boring since it's always the same stuff over and over again.
There are some interesting comments there from some people who don’t spend time on other sites, but your assessment is similar to mine
My comment about being anti-AI above may not have been clear. They actually talk about AI a lot and AI threads attract a high amount of activity. The difference is that insightful or honest comments don’t have much of a chance because there’s a clear popular opinion on the site and any information that doesn’t fit isn’t welcome.
The giant soupy mess of opinions on HN can be tiresome, but it’s nice to get a wider range. HN is its own little bubble but at least there’s some diversity of experiences to be found.
It's a lot smaller of a community than HN, so it will naturally have a smaller range of opinions merely due to the fact that it has a lot fewer users.
That said, I don't believe it's as much of a hivemind as you've portrayed. I've seen dissenting opinions voiced there which weren't downvoted (or at least not noticeably), while the same opinion in a similar thread here on HN would be downvoted and flagged. So I don't think that getting downvoted enough so that you're invited to delete your account is a common occurrence with productive members.
It's fine not to be an AI user, just some people there seem to be holding their breath and stomping their feet until it goes away. Which leads to a really repetitive and boring discussion. (I'm not a member there, but they often have better technical links vs HN.)
> So I don't think that getting downvoted enough so that you're invited to delete your account is a common occurrence with productive members.
It is! It’s a rite of passage on the site if you dare comment anything that someone might disagree with.
There have been several high profile cases of valued members getting fed up with it and leaving the site. One example where even the community was starting to question if this is really what they want: https://lobste.rs/s/zp4ofg
I don't think it is a much a hive mind but it is - or at least was - susceptible to manipulation by individuals who know how to game the system to push their own narrative. I got into a discussion with one of these, a 'furry' who posted semi-relevant articles laced with furry-themed illustrations where those illustrations seemed to be the main point of the articles. After a number of such articles I remarked on this and was banned shortly after, somewhat out of the blue. The moderator did not like this type of 'sensitive' discussion which more or less meant the site was fair game for those willing to abuse it knowing that any discussion on their abuse would be suppressed. Maybe things have changed, maybe they haven't but it did leave me rather disillusioned with the way the place was moderated and as such I haven't been there for years.
I dont remember why I was kind of barred from lobsters , but I applaud all this behavior you mentioned. In the end, that's how normal clickes of friends/interest groups form (or formed 30 years ago in real life.)
If you got into my group of death metal people, and suddenly started talking about Oasis... we would invite you to get out haha.
Same with patriots.win . They may be a group of right wing biggots, but hey, they did their platform and are happy talking there.
> I dont remember why I was kind of barred from lobsters , but I applaud all this behavior you mentioned.
Some serious cognitive dissonance here.
I think a lot of people like this idea of a close-knit clique of like minded people, but the communities tend to pick up toxic qualities where membership becomes a game in itself. Anyone who doesn’t fall in line with the established in-crowd gets pushed out via the Byzantine rules that the in-crowd uses to maintain their position.
I still visit and participate, but I’m realistic about what it is. There is some value there, but you have to navigate it like a small subreddit where the moderator keeps tight control over what can be discussed and indirectly or directly influences the allowable opinions on the site. I really liked their original ideas about having an open moderation log and clear rules, but I’ve seen more than enough questionable moderation decisions and selective application of the rules to accept that it’s not as pure as I thought it was going to be.
Lobsters has other problems too. The owner occasionally steals credit from posters, changing the author of posts to his own friends, also taking all the credit for it away. Debating the owner's action results in a ban.
Hmmmm interesting analogy! I'm not too sure if cliques apply as much to online communities. Cliques are usually exclusionary not because people don't meet the criteria/scope of the clique, but by scale constraints, eg how many people someone can maintain a close relationship with. Online communities are kind of sufficiently different because of this scale. They can grow basically indefinitely, and are only limited by the stated scope/criteria of the community.
It's a wonderful place. It feels like HN, but with the Silicon Valley attitude dialed way way way down, and with a much narrower scope (politics, economics and entrepreneurship are all off-topic, for example).
The SV attitude isn't there but there's active assholes who wield their moderation weirdly. I deactivated my account before deactivations were added to the logs and I don't remember what made me quit. I've largely avoided Lobsters since.
I joined their IRC channel last week and it's been rather chill.
I do like the invite-only nature of the site though, keeps quality high...while making some folks tyrannical.
Every such "club" inevitably attracts a specific sort that badly want to join just for the sense of exclusivity and a chance to virtue-signal their member status. It's same thing with some hard-to-get-into torrent trackers — once in, people become poster-children for Stockholm syndrome and the mods really get off on their perceived power. It's also the same with expensive new sport car models that manufacturers sell to collectors.
My intuition says it's to do with Status Signaling theory .
I think HN is better. Lobste.rs has too much monocultural pressure.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but honestly, as a foreigner, I have limited English vocabulary, so I end up getting stressed out over being judged as AI. At least here, the admin DEN kindly understood my situation and let me participate after getting permission. But when I look at subreddits and other communities, the stronger the monocultural management, the more fan-like sentiment tends to grow, making it harder for minority voices to speak up.
I'm in favor of LLMs (since being for or against LLMs inevitably depends on regional context—I personally find LLM translation incredibly convenient and helpful), but there are moments when I find it hard to argue against blanket opposition or certain topics. I thought about why that is, and I think it's because Lobste.rs has high-quality posts, but since it's inviet only, the cultural barrier to entry is high, and judgment itself is part of the community identity. It's more about signals like 'are you the same kind of person as us' than logical counterarguments. The community is small, so the same core users appear across many topics, and the reputation built there follows you around, making it closed off to minority opinions.
HN, on the other hand, isn't really a single community but a mix of many groups—startup founders, big-tech engineers, and independent developers like me. Depending on who happens to be reading at that time, the comment sentiment often shifts. And since there are so many readers, even if I say something on one thread, it's unlikely anyone will recognize me in the next.
So Lobste.rs feels like a hard place for an outsider to fit into.
sqlite for a site that debates database migrations is like a chef who eats microwave dinners at home. makes perfect sense and somehow still feels like a betrayal.
Have you ever contemplated the true performance of SQLite? Expensify reached 4M point database queries per second, and an artificial (more like parser-testing, not database-touching) 160M qps.
If your backend is on a single machine of predictable performance, and you properly index your queries, and you don't require remote DB connections, you don't need anything else but SQLite for 95% of use cases.
They use WAL in SQLite. If I continuously perform reads/writes so that they overlap with no gaps, I can make their VM go down because SQLite will not have time to initiate a checkpoint to trim the WAL file. SQLite waits for a time window without any active reads/writes before starting a WAL checkpoint. If there isn't one, the WAL will grow indefinitely, eating up all the disk space on the VM.
It's in SQLite's documentation, and almost no one switching to Sqlite seems to be aware of it because no one discusses it in blog posts like these. I guess most projects switching to SQLite have very low traffic and no malicious users (yet)
> I guess most projects switching to SQLite have very low traffic and no malicious users (yet)
Lobsters is invite only. That helps. :)
In your previous thread the solution was either WAL2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40688336
Could you go into more detail about this issue and provide some links to the documentation?
I'm absolutely no expert, I'm just reading about it now, but from the SQLite WAL documentation [0]:
> 7. There is the extra operation of checkpointing which, though automatic by default, is still something that application developers need to be mindful of.
and from their "checkpointing" documentation [1]:
> By default, SQLite does a checkpoint automatically when the WAL file reaches a threshold size of 1000 pages.
I'm only skimming but I see no mention of waiting for an idle time window.
Have you been successful in DoS'ing lobste.rs?
[0] https://sqlite.org/wal.html
[1] https://sqlite.org/wal.html#ckpt
On the page you linked:
>However, if a database has many concurrent overlapping readers and there is always at least one active reader, then no checkpoints will be able to complete and hence the WAL file will grow without bound.
>This scenario can be avoided by ensuring that there are "reader gaps": times when no processes are reading from the database and that checkpoints are attempted during those times.
Dunno, maybe Rails has a built-in workaround for this.
My workaround was to run a separate thread that monitored the WAL size on disk every second. If it went above the target size of 8 MB, my framework would enter "slow down" mode, where all reads and writes were artificially delayed by calling "sleep()", starting at 16 ms and gradually increasing the sleep time based on a few heuristics.
This allowed the application to have short gaps with no reads or writes, so the checkpointer could actually proceed.
Thanks, this is really embedded in the documentation and is not at all even hinted at in the above documentation.
This seems like a huge DoS security hole.
I encourage you to write a blog post about this. It seems especially relevant.
Why not grab a rwlock so that no readers or writers can proceed and all existing ones are drained, and then force a checkpoint? What's with the exponentially increasing sleep?
https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/72774
Seems to indicate a collection cron with a manual query to truncate can fix it. This is fun little things I like to learn. SRE Easter eggs.
Those SRE people live on excitement, its basically a gift ;)
Is that solved with wal2 mode?
You can force explicit CHECKPOINTs to combat that.
That's only true in theory. In practice, you'll be rate-limited first. Even if you aren't, the database won't be the bottleneck because SQLite is so fast. Their Ruby on Rails stack will suffer thread starvation way before the WAL grows. Rapid requests still leave microsecond gaps between context switches for SQLite to run an automatic checkpoint. To actually make SQLite stall, you'd need an endpoint that lets you hold a massive write transaction open indefinitely, which lobste.rs doesn't expose anyway (I hope).
[flagged]
I reproduced it in Sqlite with short-lived reads/writes though. Other DBMSes seem to not have this issue (IIRC MySQL will block a write if WAL falls behind)
It's been fairly unstable recently, pages sometimes render for several seconds which I've never seen under MariaDB. Used to be instantaneous, always.
Sometimes (maybe 5% or less) the request won't render at all, and you get a browser error page.
Today they ran into this bug, lost a bunch of voting data, and went into read-only mode for several hours:
https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/57128
I wonder how much of this is usual bugs which crop up during major database migrations, and how much is caused by choice of SQLite.
SQLite definitely seems like a poor choice for dealing with many concurrent requests.
Maybe it's improved since I last used it, but to my knowledge SQLite essentially forces all writes to be serialised, at risk of data corruption otherwise.
There are tricks for improving the performance such as WALs, but that is merely a performance boost rather than genuine concurrency with things like row-level locks that you might find in other databases.
I guess if the whole thing is architected with a write-through cache that handles concurrent writes and deals with serialising all the writes, then it can be a single writer streaming changes through to the database, but then you still have a point of serialisation, it just will manifest itself slightly differently.
And SQLite is something that will give you constraints you will always have to consider.
Whereas running mariadb or postgres on the same machine would deliver similar benefits without a risky migration.
If your DB is small enough to run as a SQLite database, then it probably ought to have never been on a different machine in the first place.
There is a very happy medium between SQLite and a database on a different machine, one I am continually surprised to see people ignore.
> SQLite definitely seems like a poor choice for dealing with many concurrent requests
Can you qualify "many"? SQLite easily handles 100k+ writes per second and it's not hard to have app layer code serialize and batch writes to take advantage of that speed. Concurrent writes require a ton of overhead and your system and code can be quite a lot faster and simpler if you just skip the idea of them altogether.
SQLite serialises all writes - only one can proceed at a time and others must wait until that one is finished
Writes are fast unless you are doing some complex transaction stuff.
Each one includes a few fsyncs
Can't you do infinity read replicas? I don't think the write load on lobster.rs is severe - maybe 1 comment/sec, with an acceptable replication delay of 60 sec?
If you can do that, you can have infinity instances.
With WAL, you don't need read replicas, you can have lots of readers and they don't get blocked by writers.
As an aside, on replication, eventual consistency is not a panacea:
If I make this comment, it's absolutely fine if you don't see it for a minute.
If I make this comment, it's absolutely broken if I then don't see it on my subsequent requests. I'll think the site has broken, and try to resubmit my comment.
You can relatively easily work around that one by pinning people to instances, but that's still yet another thing to consider, and those kinds of considerations add up when you're dealing with distributed systems.
However, this a single instance, it's way too early to talk about replication.
Given that just hitting their front-page is taking 6+ seconds, they've got a performance problem that needs fixing, and my hunch is that they have some kind of "last accessed" database entry, which turns every request into a write.
Depends on the architecture..
They could have one SQLite instance per user and then have a single sweeper that goes through all last writes and then replicates it to the main instance - eventual consistency fanned out across files
So now you're introducing even more processes, even more latency and complexity, and for what benefit?
Eventual consistency on users would make it difficult to do things like "WHERE !user.is_banned" when getting the stories, so you need to keep your users database tightly synchronised. Sure, you could pro-actively delete or mark comments when deleting users, but now you're risking having the ban itself fail, and have also now added a much longer write operation, as you have to mark all those comments deleted. And long running writes is the one thing you desperately need to avoid in SQLite.
And why go to all that effort when you could avoid all that effort by running a database which allows concurrent writes on the machine local to the web application?
All the benefits of machine-local latency, and all the benefits of concurrent writers and transaction isolation.
edit: misread requests as writes
I wouldn't expect that problem to be solved at the database layer, that's what http caches are for, then application level in-memory caches, then finally if neither of those hit, go to the database.
For example, one of the biggest optimisations that Hacker news does is that it serves logged out users from a cached copy of the front-page.
Logged out users don't care/notice about comment counts, they don't notice that it doesn't update as often, they can't be hiding articles so you can serve the same front-page to the millions of anonymous users and bots, and update that cached copy once and on a slower cadence than every request.
Not sure if this is SQLite or driver/Rails issues? We use it for sites and systems with a lot more (but similar) traffic and have no issues; we did write the drivers we use ourselves (for Node) as we got into much issues with the popular/existing ones.
Pages (especially threads while logged in) taking seconds to load definitely happened to me pre SQLite migration.
I jsut had this happen - it was my first visit to the site and probably my second page load. Tried opening the About page and it was completely blank. Thought it was odd & reloaded, which rendered correctly.
It's super slow.
[flagged]
Yes, a pox on othersite, all hail currentsite.
Currentsite isn't as good as it was in pastdate, the grass is greener on othersite!
Why do we need any other sites at all? Let's just all use Facebook
Why do we need sites at all? Let's just all use Usenet.
Some of the cited reasons for moving off MariaDB [1] seem misguided, in my opinion. Especially the part about "K1 are very enterprise-focused, so the database is likely to focus its work on features that are not relevant to us. There's increased risk they drop the free/open source version we use"
K1 acquired the commercial entity behind MariaDB Enterprise, but that's separate from the non-profit MariaDB Foundation. And there's literally zero risk of the MariaDB server suddenly going closed-source; as a fork of MySQL (which is GPL), this is not even legally possible!
[1] https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/539#issuecomment...
The GPLv2 doesn't prevent a company from distributing binaries and making the source available on request while development is done behind closed doors. This wouldn't really be "open source" as we typically understand it and might be cause to exclude it from some Linux distros, for example. I'm not saying that K1 would do this (I have no idea who they are or what they do), but I also think it's a reasonable risk to consider.
That was precisely how the original free software movement started, actually. Work was done behind closed doors and if you didn't like it, you released your own version with your changes.
I don't see how that would be a realistic risk? Any MariaDB user (including Lobste.rs) could request the source, and per the GPL it must be supplied, so this isn't an effective strategy for any entity to go closed-source.
And in any case, https://github.com/MariaDB/ links to mariadb.org which is run by the MariaDB Foundation, not the commercial enterprise owned by K1.
Even with that in mind why switch to sqlite rather than PostgreSQL, which is roughly equivalent to MariaDB?
What Linux distros do you think would exclude on the basis of closed door/cathedral-style development? I’ve never heard of this.
And even if it did go closed-souce, your existing install can run for ages because the vendor cannot force upgrade. One of my favorite features of FOSS.
How could it go closed source?
Probably in the way Minio did. Technically the source is still available but the controlling entity behind it have shut down all changes
As a big user of MySQL - moving off of it does seem like a good idea, if you can. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to flee
It's a large ecosystem with multiple server vendors (Oracle MySQL, MariaDB, Percona, VillageSQL) that are relatively easy to migrate between, compared to moving to a completely different DBMS ecosystem.
Sometimes there are valid technical motivations to move away completely, but a nonsensical fear of a massively-used GPL database somehow becoming closed-source (with no surviving forks or continuity) is not one of them in my book!
Any reason besides trust me bro?
- Its query planner is ancient and broken - it comes up with very bad plans. Every time we rely on it, we regret it eventually
- you have to use locks to prevent mangled write transactions, instead of the db handling it. Jepsen report is scathing
- its pretty hard to set it up in semi-sync replication mode, a.k.a. "only return from a transaction commit when the transaction is present on at least one other replica". Once you've set it up, you have to deal with insane things like transactions being visible on replicas before leaders, or even worse transactions visible on replicas briefly but never visible on leaders or other replicas
- every knob and feature contains subtle bugs, sometimes ones as scary as index corruption, that you only discover after it has caused you pain
I don't know why you would choose it unless you were already running it
The query planners have diverged between MySQL and MariaDB; which one are you talking about? Both have received improvements in recent years, so the specific version is relevant as well. And at least both systems have supported index hints for decades (unlike another popular database that only very recently acknowledged their necessity in large production workloads...)
The locking anomalies are a well-known and well-documented side effect of InnoDB REPEATABLE READ differing from the standard in certain pathological cases. The real-world relevance is minor, especially since companies using external write-through caches are already making much worse inherent trade-offs in that area. Regardless, MariaDB fixed it, while providing an option to revert to the old behavior for MySQL compatibility. And fwiw this only comes up because MySQL/Maria defaults to REPEATABLE READ; yet meanwhile the overwhelming majority of Postgres users are totally fine with the much weaker guarantees of READ COMMITTED, because that's their default isolation level.
Semi-sync has some odd behaviors indeed; there are conceptual trade-offs that must be made if you want synchronous-like replication without the full performance penalty! Do you have some novel academic solution for this that you can propose?
Your last bullet is lacking in details so I cannot comment.
Citing semi-sync thinking everything would be automatic was a weird con against MySQL. I’m now trying to think how the hell other databases magically solve this without needing to handle edge cases
>I don't know why you would choose it
Vitess. Also I often wonder if these system are on latest mySQL? I have read plenty of mySQL opinions that still based their experience during 5.x era.
Yep. In 2026 I’m still hearing that MySQL is terrible because of MyISAM
This makes little sense but I guess they get little traffic so pretty much any database will work for them.
If traffic grows they will find problems, then limitations, then move to postgres. And if not it's fine. Story old as time.
Some observations:
1. Stats are used by "Cost-Based Optimizers."
I think this is the most appropriate wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_optimization
On my Oracle databases, I run the dbms_stats.gather_database_stats package procedure once a week. SQL Server also has stats for sure, and I would be surprised by a relational database that did not.
SQLite will quietly gather stats with each database connection. Running an explicit analyze devotes full attention to an otherwise piecemeal group effort.
2. I don't think rows are physically removed when deleted, instead they are marked. Removal will definitely happen at vacuum.
3. There is a backup command in the CLI that will make a transaction consistent copy of the database file, and there are lower-level C functions behind it that can be used with object code.
4. It is important to remember the many restrictions of WAL mode, including the impact on ATTACHing multiple database files: ACID consistency is lost.
https://sqlite.org/lang_attach.html
'Transactions involving multiple attached databases are atomic, assuming that the main database is not ":memory:" and the journal_mode is not WAL.'
Ironically, this post resurfaced on HN with my comment here shown as if made 15 minutes ago, which I in reality did last week?
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740177> (dang, on 2CP & timestamps).
More: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
Second chance pool, most likely.
I didn't realize that re-timestamped comments. That's a pretty unexpected behavior, if true. I wouldn't like if that happened to a comment I left - a lot can happen in a week.
Every time it happens there's a sub-thread asking about the weird timestamps and dang replies to it saying changing the timestamps is done so that there won't be a sub-thread about the weird timestamps.
I'm pretty sure this comment chain is in every popular 2nd chance pool post though anyway
True. I don't understand why they overwrite the date at all actually, for either the post or the comments, that sounds like the hackiest way of implementing the “second chance pool” feature.
Does HN still use simple files for storing its data?
Wow, lobsters seems refreshing! Invite only to contribute must be why they can run on sqlite so effectively. I've run into so many issues with WAL (real time market data) unless I'm painfully deliberate with reads and writes. Don't feel like jumping on the "ohhh invite me" bandwagon, but definitely subscribing to their feed.
The site is performing poorly for me. For example, the login page took 9 seconds to load, same with the home page.
Wait, no edge cache, just one node with SQLite db?
For a relatively low-traffic site like Lobster's, yeah I'm not surprised they don't need anything crazy. SQLite is really efficient and modern hardware is really fast.
I don't think SQLite is particularly optimized for modern hardware. It's just crazy efficient with a regression test suite many projects wish they could have.
Modern hardware mostly benefits from the optimizations made for older hardware too, so I'm not really sure what your point is.
Caddy does cache a portion of the traffic, and what it can't cache makes its way to rails.
Software “engineering”. Thank goodness bridges aren’t built with this level of rigor.
In any case I will take an invite if one has one because the community is solid.
I've got a few planks over a ditch in my garden. The bridge only needs to be designed for the load and then some. In this case, this seems to work just fine.
Give your email or send me a message (abetusk@mechaelephant.com) so I can send the invite.
Done. Just added to profile, thank u!
Although the site is very fast for me as of this writing, it looks like they're running into an issue:
https://lobste.rs/s/ko1ji1/lobste_rs_is_now_running_on_sqlit...
I hope they get it sorted soon, I'm rooting for sqlite.
I would visit lobste.rs more if it filtered out stories that are on Hacker News.
I'm not interested in a rehash of Hacker News but I am interested in more tech news.
Anyhow on topic: I find it puzzling the whole "use sqlite in production!" thing.
- you're stuck on a single machine now.
- you don't have remote database access.
- you have to live with the inflexibility of sqlite's schema change capability.
- all writes go through a single writer.
- fewer data types
- fewer backup/security/high availability options
- foreign keys and strict disabled by default.
- you're single core in a multi core world.
It's not a terrible decision but when you can choose Postgres, why would you go with sqlite?
A single page answers that question: https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html
No intention to antagonize but... why not postgre? Even my side projects run on postgresql with no overhead at all
It's also explained in the post shared:
---
I've heard "why not PostgreSQL?" a few times this week. It was even our original plan in #539! Well, it was a pragmatic choice in two different ways:
The person who volunteered to do the work used SQLite.
I don't want to use solutions that are bigger and more complex than our likely needs. Postgresql is my default for projects, but it does have the added complexity of being a separate service to run, tune, and maintain.
The person who volunteered to do the work used SQLite.
That is a totally valid reason.
Though if you can run it from SQLite there is not much tuning on Postgres that would be needed. I would expect migration to Postgres from MariaDB would be easier.
> run on postgresql with no overhead at all
Citation needed. I love postgres as much as the next person, but it does have more overhead than Sqlite which is in an in-process db linked through compiled C code, it doesn't run as a separate server. Very significant difference that when you use Sqlite db, there is typically no db process other than your application logic, unless you implement the server yourself. If you don't want your application to have multiple processes (say, as a toy example) then it totally makes sense to prefer Sqlite just for this reason. Sqlite and postgres are different tools, they serve different purposes.
If you run it on your one app server, it’s not much more work than SQLite. SQLite requires some special care when you’re dealing with multiple processes, and backups are about the same amount of effort.
Where are you hosting postgres
On the same machine where they are currently storing the sqlite file maybe? It's not that hard to run. A sqlite backup cron is also not that much more work than a pg_dump cron.
if they have only one server, then on that server. If they have a load-balanced front end and central database, then on the database.
my take to benefit from SQLite:
make sure you're not doing a bunch of migrations. that's the SQLite weak point that I know of & have experienced.
use SQLite - as if you're using a KV or better yet maybe a CQRS approach.
sqlite3_rsync exists:
https://sqlite.org/rsync.html
... and is installed and available:
"Ordinary rsync does not understand SQLite transactions. Rsync will make a copy of ORIGIN into REPLICA, however the copy might not be consistent. Parts of the copy might be from one transaction, while other parts might be from a different transaction. The database copy might be corrupt."Another SQLite user here. My site gets constantly hammered by crawlers, and SQLite just keeps going on hit miss. Anyway, the real magic is on the ram and the ssd perf.
> keeps going on hit miss
(Is this a typo?)
May I have an invite, if anyone has one to spare?
Provide an email or email me (abetusk@mechaelephant.com) so I can get yours for the invite.
Pretty cool. I do default to SQLite these days simply because I can just put it on the host, set up a PVC to it, and run the app in Kube pointing at a persistent SQLite. Absent some other need (it's a fork of psql- or mysql-based software) I prefer using it for simplicity.
I do have to say that I've found lobste.rs generally a pretty slow site to render and navigate and I wonder whether that's the Rails backend, or underpowered hardware, or lack of caching. It's more feature-ful than a HN or Reddit though with much lower usage so I wonder what it is.
Everytime Lobste.rs get posted, I get to think should I dive in. This time maybe. Could somebody be kind enough to give me an invite. Email in my profile. Thanks.
Invite sent. Let me know if you didn't get it.
Do you feel like lobste.rs is a better version of HackerNews?
I only lurk occasionally, but lobsters feels like a much smaller, less jaded community then HN. The content is very similar. Hopefully not too many people who get invites from this thread bring over the jadedness.
They're very distinct. Both are good in their own ways like elephants and dolphins. Though HN suffers more under AI spam, it permits wider topics and has a wider userbase.
I'd appreciate a lobste.rs invite if anyone has one. Email is in my profile. Thanks!
Successfully e-mailed invitation to hn@oandrew.dev.
Hi. Could you send me an invite too? Email in my profile :)
Nevermind, I get it. Thank you.
Thank you!
> I'd appreciate a lobste.rs invite if anyone has one. Email is in my profile. Thanks!
I'd like one too if someone wishes to invite me as well, Thanks and have a nice day!
Successfully e-mailed invitation to anonplusplus@proton.me
I have signed up, thanks!
You are awesome mate!, have a good day :-D
Take it easy :)
Please don’t post other’s addresses, after a bit are unable to be removed. If they decide to later it’s too late.
Nice to see Lobsters is made with ruby
DHH has made a big deal about using SQLite in rails
Lobste.rs seems cool. Would someone invite me?
Invitation sent. Let me know if you didn't receive it.
Oh wow. Off-topic but quite refreshing to see a site not absolutely plastered in AI posts
HN is increasingly bot central, I kind of assume 80% of the respondents are artificial.
Lobsters still got a pulse, largely.
Invitation-only is the future of online communities. Lobsters still has a pulse because you need to know someone to get in and it’s a bad look if you invite annoying people.
I wish lobste.rs would be a tiny bit easier to get access to. Some of my blog posts have been discussed there and every time I try to get access, I can’t get past their IRC stuff.
As in: I just don’t understand how IRC works…
IRC is just Discord but without a hardcoded server address, what's hard about it?
You should overlay a banner on your blog when they send you an HTTP Referer explaining their nonsense. Maybe then they'll get the message.
Then again, maybe they like the ability to critique your posts without you being able to rebut their opinions. It's an effective tactic in online echo chambers.
From their about page: "If you wrote a link that was posted, please reach out in chat, we'd love to have you join the community."
Or redirect to a picture of a testicle in an eggcup.
Well, lobste.rs requires an email to invite a user. If you had one on your profile, or on your github, or on your website I would have done it as a drive-by since your site is interesting and pretty lobste.rs-y content.
FWIW, you might want to consider publishing your e-mail address in your HN profile or on your website. Otherwise it’s hard for people to get in touch with you.
I've been waiting for my lobste.rs invite for years. I joined the IRC for a few days, but being in Australia, rarely saw too much activity. I could chase someone down for an invite, but at that point I just don't care that much.
I was given my invite from a decent person who, I believe, basically has an "open door" policy. I'm happy to pay it forward and give you an invite if you want it. abetusk@mechaelephant.com
im sorry but maybe connecting to irc is a bit of a filter on the users they expect. especially with ai it should be almost no effort.
It’s not just irc stuff. There are a lot of elitist mods in lobsters.
That's nonsense wrt invitation-only being the future. I can equally say that free speech is the future. For comparison, Reddit does very well without being invitation only.
Reddit is literally the dead internet right now.
It's also not open access. You have to run an invisible tightrope so its algorithms won't automatically shadowban you and then you have to run a barely visible tightrope to get enough karma to not have your posts automatically removed from every subreddit.
Also, Reddit now requires you to verify your ID with Persona.
reddit does okay from a profit standpoint. reddit does terribly from a bot or even a good community standpoint.
> Invitation-only is the future of online communities.
This feels antithetical/dystopian/elitist compared to what online communities are, for me. I think it's ok for some communities to be like this, but I don't think it's the future of online communities.
I think it is better to have some elitist communities, than to drag everyone down to some least common denomination...
I think that was one of the big mistakes/oversight that came with the Internet..
I think some are fine, but if I had to choose one I'd choose open access, so I think it's the more important of the two. And in fact it's because the web is open, "no permission needed" by default that allows elitist groups to exist on the web. So I don't think I see it as a mistake. The alternative would be... You can only create a website if you're invited to the internet by someone who already has access? You have to get approval for your website from some authority before it goes public? Those were all potential futures we imo thankfully and carefully avoided!
That's actually how it already works, but there are large commercial access providers known as "ISPs". Before there were ISPs, you literally could only get on the internet with a direct connection to someone on the internet, usually a large university.
>Those were all potential futures we imo thankfully and carefully avoided!
I am not so thankful. But it is coming from my view of the current world.
I think open Internet for business is good. But open Internet for communication was bad. I cannot think of one good thing that have resulted from an open internet for communication/discussions. It has turned out to result in a collective, perpetual state of seizure for all humanity.
I am someone who had to learn stuff from random encounters with books in the 90s. Even then, I would not have it any other way...
This is called the Eternal September problem, after the influx of fresh users to Usenet at the start of every school year, being extended indefinitely as AOL brought new users continually to Usenet.
Isn't this how alot of discord works? maybe the communities are leniant with inviting but it still happens. A group chat is basically invite only too and that's pretty popular for communication.
I think we need to remove dystopian and elitist from the dictionary because at this point you can't breathe without being accused of it.
Deciding who is in or out is the fundamental basis of any community, that's freedom of association. That's what defines a community. A place anyone can enter is a train station bathroom and that's what the logical terminus of the open internet seems to be.
I think scopes/criteria/boundaries on communities are fine, I disagree that invite-only (as one implementation of community boundaries) is the future of online communities.
Although the statement "invite-only only is the future of online communities" isn't super well defined (what does it mean to "be the future"?), so I think the comments are debating past each other.
Elitism and hierarchy are good. Drowning everything in slop and darkness is bad. Giving everyone something to strive for is good.
That's an unsubstantiated and false accusation wrt the 80%. If you believe it, why are you even here? Are you one of them?
Bad bot.
[dead]
HN has always been "YC bootlickers only"
Lobste.rs is very anti-AI. They force any LLM topic to be tagged with “vibecoding” even when the majority of LLM posts are not about vibecoding.
AI posts are usually the most commented on. Linus Torvalds’ comments saying that LLMs are actually useful is still on the front page, tagged as vibecoding, and has a lot of comments from people mostly disagreeing with him.
Lobste.rs is more of a monoculture than Hacker News. If you get downvoted enough they stick a banner on the top of the page inviting you to delete your account. It has a nasty side effect of driving away good contributors who don’t align perfectly with the hive mind. It’s a site where you learn to keep your mouth shut if your input doesn’t agree with what the core users want to hear.
Being anti-AI is fine by me, but the hardcore Tumblr dogma can be very tiring sometimes; even if only as a reader interested in the valuable technical comments.
I originally went to lobste.rs because I wanted to avoid repetitive discussion and get more technical stuff. In time, though, lobste.rs got fairly boring since it's always the same stuff over and over again. I found an alternative means[0] of filtering out boring things here on HN and it's enjoyable to use again.
0: deleting comments of people who aren't interesting from my view and highlighting ones who often say things that are interesting, the user I'm replying to is one of the latter
> In time, though, lobste.rs got fairly boring since it's always the same stuff over and over again.
There are some interesting comments there from some people who don’t spend time on other sites, but your assessment is similar to mine
My comment about being anti-AI above may not have been clear. They actually talk about AI a lot and AI threads attract a high amount of activity. The difference is that insightful or honest comments don’t have much of a chance because there’s a clear popular opinion on the site and any information that doesn’t fit isn’t welcome.
The giant soupy mess of opinions on HN can be tiresome, but it’s nice to get a wider range. HN is its own little bubble but at least there’s some diversity of experiences to be found.
lobste.rs, quite literally, allows you to filter the entire site by tags, so you only see what you want to see. I wish more sites did this.
It's a lot smaller of a community than HN, so it will naturally have a smaller range of opinions merely due to the fact that it has a lot fewer users.
That said, I don't believe it's as much of a hivemind as you've portrayed. I've seen dissenting opinions voiced there which weren't downvoted (or at least not noticeably), while the same opinion in a similar thread here on HN would be downvoted and flagged. So I don't think that getting downvoted enough so that you're invited to delete your account is a common occurrence with productive members.
It's fine not to be an AI user, just some people there seem to be holding their breath and stomping their feet until it goes away. Which leads to a really repetitive and boring discussion. (I'm not a member there, but they often have better technical links vs HN.)
With regard to its small size, that's not why. They have for a long while been actively and intentionally hostile to AI.
I love it already!
Nice. I'll go check it out. Thanks.
Hi. Could you send me an invite? Email in my profile :)
Invitation sent. Let me know if you didn't get it.
I have successfully singed up. Thank you very much!
> So I don't think that getting downvoted enough so that you're invited to delete your account is a common occurrence with productive members.
It is! It’s a rite of passage on the site if you dare comment anything that someone might disagree with.
There have been several high profile cases of valued members getting fed up with it and leaving the site. One example where even the community was starting to question if this is really what they want: https://lobste.rs/s/zp4ofg
I don't think it is a much a hive mind but it is - or at least was - susceptible to manipulation by individuals who know how to game the system to push their own narrative. I got into a discussion with one of these, a 'furry' who posted semi-relevant articles laced with furry-themed illustrations where those illustrations seemed to be the main point of the articles. After a number of such articles I remarked on this and was banned shortly after, somewhat out of the blue. The moderator did not like this type of 'sensitive' discussion which more or less meant the site was fair game for those willing to abuse it knowing that any discussion on their abuse would be suppressed. Maybe things have changed, maybe they haven't but it did leave me rather disillusioned with the way the place was moderated and as such I haven't been there for years.
Driving away silicon valley tech bros who spend most of their time boosting AI is actually a prerequisite for building a good community.
Instead invite tech bros from India belonging to the so called premier colleges of India and gatekeep seems to be the vibe of lobsters.
I dont remember why I was kind of barred from lobsters , but I applaud all this behavior you mentioned. In the end, that's how normal clickes of friends/interest groups form (or formed 30 years ago in real life.)
If you got into my group of death metal people, and suddenly started talking about Oasis... we would invite you to get out haha.
Same with patriots.win . They may be a group of right wing biggots, but hey, they did their platform and are happy talking there.
> I dont remember why I was kind of barred from lobsters , but I applaud all this behavior you mentioned.
Some serious cognitive dissonance here.
I think a lot of people like this idea of a close-knit clique of like minded people, but the communities tend to pick up toxic qualities where membership becomes a game in itself. Anyone who doesn’t fall in line with the established in-crowd gets pushed out via the Byzantine rules that the in-crowd uses to maintain their position.
I still visit and participate, but I’m realistic about what it is. There is some value there, but you have to navigate it like a small subreddit where the moderator keeps tight control over what can be discussed and indirectly or directly influences the allowable opinions on the site. I really liked their original ideas about having an open moderation log and clear rules, but I’ve seen more than enough questionable moderation decisions and selective application of the rules to accept that it’s not as pure as I thought it was going to be.
Lobsters has other problems too. The owner occasionally steals credit from posters, changing the author of posts to his own friends, also taking all the credit for it away. Debating the owner's action results in a ban.
Ironic, considering why Lobsters exists in the first place.
So they basically reinvented reddit.
Citation needed.
Hmmmm interesting analogy! I'm not too sure if cliques apply as much to online communities. Cliques are usually exclusionary not because people don't meet the criteria/scope of the clique, but by scale constraints, eg how many people someone can maintain a close relationship with. Online communities are kind of sufficiently different because of this scale. They can grow basically indefinitely, and are only limited by the stated scope/criteria of the community.
Yeah, it's starting to be a bit idiotic. Some of that stuff is here too.
I honestly don’t find any of this concerning
The concern usually only comes when you fall on the "outside" of the prevailing opinion within the group of people voting on comments.
edit: my response isn't about lobste.rs. I don't have an account there.
It's a wonderful place. It feels like HN, but with the Silicon Valley attitude dialed way way way down, and with a much narrower scope (politics, economics and entrepreneurship are all off-topic, for example).
The SV attitude isn't there but there's active assholes who wield their moderation weirdly. I deactivated my account before deactivations were added to the logs and I don't remember what made me quit. I've largely avoided Lobsters since.
I joined their IRC channel last week and it's been rather chill.
I do like the invite-only nature of the site though, keeps quality high...while making some folks tyrannical.
Every such "club" inevitably attracts a specific sort that badly want to join just for the sense of exclusivity and a chance to virtue-signal their member status. It's same thing with some hard-to-get-into torrent trackers — once in, people become poster-children for Stockholm syndrome and the mods really get off on their perceived power. It's also the same with expensive new sport car models that manufacturers sell to collectors.
My intuition says it's to do with Status Signaling theory .
Slight clarification: politics that disagree with the zeitgeist of the site and the mods is off-topic.
Huh. I’ve largely avoided it, but that does sound pretty nice.
Hi. Could you send me an invite? Email in my profile :)
Nevermind, I got it. Thank you.
[flagged]
If still relevant, you can email me and I will send you an invite. My email is dprkh at fastmail dot com
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Thank you!
What's lobster.rs, some kind of Temu HN? Or is it the real deal?
Way more technical, way smaller. HN is a lot more wide in terms of audience and subjects, Lobsters is mainly programming.
I love it.
I'll give it a shot.
It is a closed-minded AI-hating cult.
It's superior and invite only.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
merci!
I think HN is better. Lobste.rs has too much monocultural pressure.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but honestly, as a foreigner, I have limited English vocabulary, so I end up getting stressed out over being judged as AI. At least here, the admin DEN kindly understood my situation and let me participate after getting permission. But when I look at subreddits and other communities, the stronger the monocultural management, the more fan-like sentiment tends to grow, making it harder for minority voices to speak up.
I'm in favor of LLMs (since being for or against LLMs inevitably depends on regional context—I personally find LLM translation incredibly convenient and helpful), but there are moments when I find it hard to argue against blanket opposition or certain topics. I thought about why that is, and I think it's because Lobste.rs has high-quality posts, but since it's inviet only, the cultural barrier to entry is high, and judgment itself is part of the community identity. It's more about signals like 'are you the same kind of person as us' than logical counterarguments. The community is small, so the same core users appear across many topics, and the reputation built there follows you around, making it closed off to minority opinions.
HN, on the other hand, isn't really a single community but a mix of many groups—startup founders, big-tech engineers, and independent developers like me. Depending on who happens to be reading at that time, the comment sentiment often shifts. And since there are so many readers, even if I say something on one thread, it's unlikely anyone will recognize me in the next.
So Lobste.rs feels like a hard place for an outsider to fit into.
sqlite for a site that debates database migrations is like a chef who eats microwave dinners at home. makes perfect sense and somehow still feels like a betrayal.
Moving from MariaDB to SQLite and not Postgres for a web application of this scale is insane. I wonder what went into the discussion behind this.
Have you ever contemplated the true performance of SQLite? Expensify reached 4M point database queries per second, and an artificial (more like parser-testing, not database-touching) 160M qps. If your backend is on a single machine of predictable performance, and you properly index your queries, and you don't require remote DB connections, you don't need anything else but SQLite for 95% of use cases.
https://use.expensify.com/blog/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-qps-on-a...
I hope it's profitable, because this feels like engineering for engineering sake and not actually improving the product in a way that draws customers.