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iamandoni 3 minutes ago [-]
I have to say, when I first heard about Origin, I was skeptical. But now I do believe that the team behind it is capable of pulling it off and shipping something truly incredible.
brasic 1 days ago [-]
It’s hard to overstate the reputation of the author of this post. Everything good about GitHub’s internal systems seemed to have his name all over it (I realize that today this statement hits different than a few years ago). Our times at GH didn’t overlap much but hearing the fact that he’s working at cursor increases my estimation of their engineering org by leaps and bounds.
allthetime 33 minutes ago [-]
The biggest, richest companies in the world are hiring top talent. Who woulda guessed.
vindex10 5 hours ago [-]
Came here to share a related fact :)
This solution with WAL and compact resembled the database internals as taught by Martin Kleppmann.
I asked Claude about this observation, and learned that the author (Vicent Martí) wasn't only core Github developer but also worked on Vitess from PlanetScale.
So no surprise these two contexts resulted in the design of Continuity as it is.
https://vitess.io/ - Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL.
bryanlarsen 8 hours ago [-]
Is this enough to counteract the reputation of his new boss, Elon Musk?
<edit>: there is lots of demand for a GitHub alternative due to poor uptime, poorly implemented components (CI), and Microsoft stewardship. Switching, especially at this early stage requires a huge component of trust.
jmuguy 5 hours ago [-]
Cursor isn't covering itself in glory regardless. The flagship app is getting enshittified at a surprising clip. It constantly pops up and interrupts your work pushing new features, changes your model to whatever the latest Grok is without prompting, has this mystery meat UI that is constantly changing, pushes cloud agents in ways that are definitely designed to trick you. We're actively looking at alternatives, I wouldn't touch anything this company produces from here on out.
uracocksucker20 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ricardojoaoreis 7 hours ago [-]
Did you really create an account for this?
rbtprograms 7 hours ago [-]
its literally elon getting mad and making an account calling people cock suckers
bakies 7 hours ago [-]
* spent tokens on this
solid_fuel 3 hours ago [-]
An LLM would have produced a more interesting and better formatted insult.
figmert 7 hours ago [-]
But OP is the loser for leaving a comment.
throwitaway222 7 hours ago [-]
tired of this
mlnj 6 hours ago [-]
There's a reason you say that with a throwaway account. Even you know it's shameful.
ryan_lane 54 minutes ago [-]
It's probably Elon Musk.
croes 6 hours ago [-]
Just like with climate change, the problems Elon creates don’t go away just because people are reminded of them.
He still pushes his agenda, he still has lots of followers who believe his nonsense
brandonagr2 4 hours ago [-]
An agenda to improve the future for humanity? What do you think his agenda is?
tadfisher 4 hours ago [-]
He can do that without the "Roman salute" part. Or the "methane reactors without emission controls" part. Or the "whining about the great replacement" part.
solid_fuel 3 hours ago [-]
Why don’t you just go read his twitter account and take a guess. He hasn’t been focused on improving the future for anyone but himself for years.
asdjfh17 4 hours ago [-]
His agenda is to improve the stock price of TSLA and SPCX via a) overpromising and memeing on X and b) political deals.
Members of he Kushner family got rich via the outrageous $60B payment for Cursor, and I'm sure Musk will be rewarded later with government deals.
ashayh 53 minutes ago [-]
"Remigration" will improve humanity?
You either know this, or willfully ignore. Can't say which is worse.
croes 16 minutes ago [-]
In what way does it improve humanity's future to contribute to the dismantling of USAID and cause the deaths of thousands?
In what way does it improve humanity's future to promote a racist film by Uwe Boll while claiming it is banned in Germany, when it actually isn't?
How low do you have to sink to promote a Uwe Boll film?
aaroninsf 3 hours ago [-]
To get racist murderer cops out of jail, is the story I read today.
I'm not a user of twitter/x/whatever but every. damn. time. I click on an X link it's made me sadder and stupider, and the world a slightly worse place. It's the dirty bathwater of humanity.
tibbydudeza 3 hours ago [-]
Clearly you either don't read the news or a fanboy or some of his stunts and lies does not bother you.
catlover76 23 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
newspaper1 6 hours ago [-]
Well, there's going to be a lot more of it. You can't be an outright ultra-right wing racist and expect that it doesn't cause brand damage. It never made business sense for Musk to act the way he does, but he couldn't help himself. Do not expect people to just be ok with it.
catlover76 5 hours ago [-]
tired of you
bilalq 13 minutes ago [-]
It wasn't that long ago that S3 didn't have read-after-write consistency. Crazy to see the explosion in cool stuff built on top after that change. This is a really well written article and definitely changes my perception about Cursor's capability to host a reliable Github replacement. But I could never bring myself to use it because of whose leadership they're under now. It's such a shame.
biwills 2 days ago [-]
> What about consensus? Elections? Which server is the primary for a given repository? It also doesn't matter! There's no state and no consensus here. Any server can be the primary. All updates to the write-ahead log are synchronized with an atomic compare-and-swap (CAS) operation on S3, so it's always safe for any instance of a repository to receive a push.
Again reminded of what an amaizing piece of engineering S3 is (99.999999999% - 11 nines of durability) [1]
Not just durability. But read after write guarantee on a distributed object store.
How many startups and corporations built on top of S3 semantics?
Snowflake and the big lakehouses are one of them. They use S3 as giant disk in the sky.
nikolay 5 hours ago [-]
There's nothing Cursor can do that GitHub/Microsoft can't in 2026... And vice versa... after several years of Cursor vibecoding a GitHub clone while catching up with GitHub's new features. Git's performance it's not the issue; it's GitHub Actions, PRs, etc. The moment Cursors steals paid GitHub customers and gets the same workloads, they will start having similar issues! Stealing engineers who couldn't fix this at GitHub won't make much of a difference. GitHub is not just source control; everybody can set up Gitolite and have an amazingly configurable and secure Git setup. I did this 10 years ago, and CODEOWNERS, protected branches, and tags can't do 1% of what I had done before. Cursor is going all over the place as it can't compete with their model. So, this is a defeat, a pivot, not something glorious!
bric-a-brac 4 hours ago [-]
I'd argue that for whatever other faults they have, Composer 2.5 is pretty competitive as an implement-planned-work model. It's several times faster than Sonnet 5, cheaper, and performance is comparable.
Ears wide open for a model that does better for the same parameters. Pareto efficiency is important, but Anthropic doesn't seem to care about it. They desperately need a Haiku 5, IMO.
deburo 4 hours ago [-]
Perhaps you didn't read the article, but the implementation they describe is interesting and perhaps easier implemented in a new project from scratch.
It can't be any worse than current github, and since we've heard plenty of people express their dissatisfaction with github recently, this is actually a good direction for Cursor. A product people may want. We'll see.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
> It can't be any worse than current github
Yeah, and the grass is always greener somewhere else.
The only way to finally end up in a happy state about your git hosting and automated workflows running, is by running the whole shebang yourself. Saves you so much sanity in the long-term, even if starting and scaling is slower.
nikolay 16 minutes ago [-]
I am just too old, you know. I remember Bitbucket, GitLab, and the plethora of other GitHub killers. GitHub is an ecosystem, not a product. Cursor needs at least a decade to beat that! Maybe more!
The language selection is in the footer. Interestingly, the URL for English is the original post without en-US.
9cb14c1ec0 31 minutes ago [-]
Just imagine the deluge of inbound sales pitches Cursor is now getting from every S3 vendor out there.
wrs 8 hours ago [-]
There’s a trend of doing impressive things by pushing many of the hard problems into S3 and assuming S3 “just works”, then not bothering to explain how S3 works. I guess we do the same thing all the time with other miraculous solutions to hard problems, like assuming that superscalar out-of-order processors “just work”, but in cases like this it makes for an unsatisfying explanation. Especially because S3 is a proprietary product, not an algorithm.
altcognito 1 hours ago [-]
This was the thing that caught my attention. It does feel like a lot of "scaling git was hard and complicated, so we're just offloading a significant to a different layer"
I've got no dog in this fight and no specific rationale, but it smells like a shortcut that's going to make some assumptions that might surprise later (maybe not at the global level, but a local level)
10000truths 1 hours ago [-]
The product is proprietary, but the interface and semantics are documented and freely available. "S3-compatible object store" is a commodity at this point, so it makes sense to treat it as a primitive building block for a distributed system. Of course, each implementation will have its own set of idiosyncrasies and limitations, so you'll still have to make sure that any such divergent behavior doesn't interfere with your own system requirements.
mananaysiempre 1 hours ago [-]
Less of a commodity at this point than a few years ago, what with Minio immolating itself to be reborn as, excuse my French, AIStor.
Which is not to say that TFA’s approach is invalid or uninteresting, but the mechanics of how “an S3” works are really obscure to those of us not in the know.
10000truths 32 minutes ago [-]
If you're looking specifically for self hosted S3-compatible object stores, then yes, the selection of available options is smaller. But an object store's ability to self-host is orthogonal to its compatibility with S3's interface and semantics.
anthonypasq 5 hours ago [-]
at this point, s3 just means object storage and doesnt mean it actually has to be hosted on aws. theres plenty of other companies that provide s3 compatible storage apis.
wrs 5 hours ago [-]
APIs, sure, but do they provide the semi-magical consistency, atomicity, durability, and latency guarantees that this depends on?
majormajor 2 hours ago [-]
It depends?
Last time I looked many of the alternatives didn't have as good support for some of the transaction-friendly things like conditional writes.
Hopefully if you're trying to build something complex on top of S3 and have any expectation of potentially needing to run on top of other infra in the future, you know which magic features you need and can see which of them are supported by what vendors/OSS projects. :)
But it's not really that different than doing cool stuff by pushing a bunch of things into Postgres or Kafka or [other thing] and not explaining how those things work.
ovaistariq 5 hours ago [-]
Yes a good object storage service provider would. It all depends on what you are optimizing for. If you are only optimizing for cost then there are several cheap options that probably don't make sense for hot or warm storage. But if you care about availability, consistency, and latency guarantees then there are different service providers available.
semessier 23 minutes ago [-]
I would parse it as event sourcing at its finest + cqrs
luke5441 6 hours ago [-]
Took me some thinking to figure out where this design is not optimal.
The first step is to separate the problems. The content addressable object storage and storing the refs. libgit2 has two backends for those already.
Then use appropriate distributed dbs for the two backends. With large scale something like Cassandra for the objects (AP) and FoundationDB (CP) for the refs (or the equivalent Amazon services).
For performance the objects need to be cached locally and requests routed to nodes where the objects are cached locally.
p_l 6 hours ago [-]
Part of the problem is that the API you're supposed to provide externally depends on git packs which you might have to reconstruct on the fly from such a system.
tex0 5 hours ago [-]
Exactly. I would love to see that design work, but it doesn't for any realistic workload.
luke5441 4 hours ago [-]
Then the local cache system needs to provide or cache those git packs
eatonphil 9 hours ago [-]
> The "fan-out" is synchronized with a classic consensus algorithm called 3PC (three-phase commit) so that a push is only accepted if a majority of the nodes acknowledge it.
Doesn't 3PC require all nodes to agree, not just a majority?
dataplumb3r 6 hours ago [-]
I would think so - outside this sentence the author indicates they're talking about consensus across all members.
IE - the interactive diagram and note about latency being bounded by the slowest replica
gritzko 8 hours ago [-]
The key part: they decided to use the unchanged git codebase as their building block. Likely assuming that the people who wrote the Linux kernel probably knew what they were doing. That explains some features that look bizarre from the generic distributed-database perspective. I think the author has had this argument many times, because he reiterates it several times in the post. The rest follows from it.
skybrian 4 hours ago [-]
This is an excellent post that explains why their version of git hosting is more scalable. But it seems like most people won't need it, assuming Github remains free to use and they get their availability problems fixed.
Will free Git hosting continue to be sustainable, though, without architectural improvements like this?
mtharrison 4 hours ago [-]
Any ideas how these interactive animated diagrams were made?
dataplumb3r 6 hours ago [-]
> The productivity cost of five minutes of downtime in your CI system is hard to quantify in dollars, but it is, by any measure, a humongous amount.
Not sure the last month GH had fewer than five minutes of downtime - but I think it's been a while
ksk23 8 hours ago [-]
I don’t see a button to switch to English and the German text is a pain to read, comparable to Reddit auto translate..
> Short term, we had to resolve a variety of bottlenecks that appeared faster than expected from moving webhooks to a different backend (out of MySQL), redesigning user session cache to redoing authentication and authorization flows to substantially reduce database load. We also leveraged our migration to Azure to stand up a lot more compute.
The scaling issues they have don’t have git as the bottleneck from what I understand
dewey 4 hours ago [-]
In the same article it says:
> The number of repositories on GitHub is growing faster than ever, but a much harder scaling challenge is the rise of large monorepos. For the last three months, we’ve been investing heavily in response to this trend both within git system and in the pull request experience.
They also mention large monorepos and git read operations as a core issue in the other incident post that's on the HN front page right now:
Interesting, wonder how Cursor will scale with Git with this approach.
vegadw 2 days ago [-]
Remember, don't put large objects in cnt, it makes it a real pain later.
esafak 9 hours ago [-]
cnt?
1qwdq 8 hours ago [-]
Continuity system of Cursor. Brilliant name, just like the octo"cat"! Elon will approve.
speed_spread 5 hours ago [-]
Reading this, I can't come to a conclusion other than "git rapidly starts sucking balls for use cases outside of Linux development". Github started with ze_current_fastness but then ended up recurrently smashing into walls because of it.
They should have just failed to scale git and leave place for the less idiosyncratic bazaar or mercurial to take the lead. These were slower, but would probably have scaled much better in the long term.
Github's core innovation was re-centralizing a decentralized SCM (as per article) by giving it nice web UI and features such as PRs. Oh and also free code hosting space. None of which relied on git's peculiarities.
warmwaffles 5 hours ago [-]
Very cool write up. But I do have to wonder, is Git the right solution for version control given where we are heading? The commands are all muscle memory for me now at this point, but all the projects I've been working on lately have just all moved to trunk based development, rebasing, and squashing merging feature branches onto main.
I've been working on another project where I have binary files checked in, assets that move or are moved and then changed that git "loses track of" due to the significant change. This just may be me doing silly things like moving a file and then editing it and then committing it and git thinks I deleted it and created a new file.
tonymet 7 hours ago [-]
how does git lock the repo on extreme concurrency? let's say 1000 devs writing to the same repository? eventually you'll have saturation of the resource locking everyone out.
When I've worked at big companies they had bespoke SCM that resolved this. But i'm curious about mid size teams that are big enough to overwhelm git but not so that they can rewrite it.
aeyes 7 hours ago [-]
If those 1000 devs write to different branches then you only take a light lock on the branch, usually that is not the problem.
The problems start when there is a lot of changes on one branch and usually the first band-aid is to put a commit queue in place. The few very big companies that need even more than that probably aren't going to put their code on a new git hosting provider tomorrow.
tonymet 6 hours ago [-]
that sounds like a practical solution once you reach that size. yeah you're right i think only the refs are locked, the rest of the objects can all be submitted concurrently, so it would be high contention refs/branches that would be a pain point.
newspaper1 8 hours ago [-]
It doesn't matter how many technical blog posts they put out, I will still never host my code with Elon Musk.
bluerooibos 49 minutes ago [-]
I really wish someone would make a version of the opencode desktop application that's as responsive and well-made as Cursor so I can promptly move over.
foolswisdom 4 hours ago [-]
Agreed. The recent privacy kerfuffle with Grok CLI (plus the untrue "it's your fault" response, although they then changed the behavior) is a really bad sign for how your code and data will be the treated.
sanbor 5 hours ago [-]
I missed the news about SpaceX acquiring Cursor for 60 billion. Good to know.
mempko 5 hours ago [-]
Same. Sometimes you have to live with inconvenience to keep a moral stand. Those down-voting don't understand why any sacrifice of convenience or tech is worth it.
newspaper1 5 hours ago [-]
I agree, although I don't think their offering is even convenient. I also don't use Cursor (I think most people have moved on to Claude Code/Codex), so also not helpful from that point of view. Regardless, not only do I find it morally wrong to give Musk money, I think it's a bad business idea. He can't be trusted and your code is at risk on his platform.
> Those down-voting don't understand why any sacrifice of convenience or tech is worth it.
FWIW my comment was actually highly upvoted but it looks like X employees and/or Musk fans showed up and downvoted all criticism in this thread.
This solution with WAL and compact resembled the database internals as taught by Martin Kleppmann.
I asked Claude about this observation, and learned that the author (Vicent Martí) wasn't only core Github developer but also worked on Vitess from PlanetScale.
So no surprise these two contexts resulted in the design of Continuity as it is.
https://vitess.io/ - Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL.
<edit>: there is lots of demand for a GitHub alternative due to poor uptime, poorly implemented components (CI), and Microsoft stewardship. Switching, especially at this early stage requires a huge component of trust.
He still pushes his agenda, he still has lots of followers who believe his nonsense
Members of he Kushner family got rich via the outrageous $60B payment for Cursor, and I'm sure Musk will be rewarded later with government deals.
You either know this, or willfully ignore. Can't say which is worse.
In what way does it improve humanity's future to promote a racist film by Uwe Boll while claiming it is banned in Germany, when it actually isn't?
How low do you have to sink to promote a Uwe Boll film?
That doesn't count other consequences of his election interference, of course.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2090483357456990564
Again reminded of what an amaizing piece of engineering S3 is (99.999999999% - 11 nines of durability) [1]
1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDu...
How many startups and corporations built on top of S3 semantics?
Snowflake and the big lakehouses are one of them. They use S3 as giant disk in the sky.
Ears wide open for a model that does better for the same parameters. Pareto efficiency is important, but Anthropic doesn't seem to care about it. They desperately need a Haiku 5, IMO.
It can't be any worse than current github, and since we've heard plenty of people express their dissatisfaction with github recently, this is actually a good direction for Cursor. A product people may want. We'll see.
Yeah, and the grass is always greener somewhere else.
The only way to finally end up in a happy state about your git hosting and automated workflows running, is by running the whole shebang yourself. Saves you so much sanity in the long-term, even if starting and scaling is slower.
I've got no dog in this fight and no specific rationale, but it smells like a shortcut that's going to make some assumptions that might surprise later (maybe not at the global level, but a local level)
Which is not to say that TFA’s approach is invalid or uninteresting, but the mechanics of how “an S3” works are really obscure to those of us not in the know.
Last time I looked many of the alternatives didn't have as good support for some of the transaction-friendly things like conditional writes.
Hopefully if you're trying to build something complex on top of S3 and have any expectation of potentially needing to run on top of other infra in the future, you know which magic features you need and can see which of them are supported by what vendors/OSS projects. :)
But it's not really that different than doing cool stuff by pushing a bunch of things into Postgres or Kafka or [other thing] and not explaining how those things work.
The first step is to separate the problems. The content addressable object storage and storing the refs. libgit2 has two backends for those already.
Then use appropriate distributed dbs for the two backends. With large scale something like Cassandra for the objects (AP) and FoundationDB (CP) for the refs (or the equivalent Amazon services).
For performance the objects need to be cached locally and requests routed to nodes where the objects are cached locally.
Doesn't 3PC require all nodes to agree, not just a majority?
IE - the interactive diagram and note about latency being bounded by the slowest replica
Will free Git hosting continue to be sustainable, though, without architectural improvements like this?
Not sure the last month GH had fewer than five minutes of downtime - but I think it's been a while
https://blog.fnil.net/s3-at-twenty/
Cursor Origin Code Hosting
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49334209
I feel like the article is a bit light on the design of the WAL and maintenance operations, but maybe it's me.
Anyway, I'd love to have a friendly chat with the author.
When I look at one of the recent blog posts (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...) I see crazy charts of PR merged, Commits, Repositories created. These are all git operations and not just some slow Rails app.
> Short term, we had to resolve a variety of bottlenecks that appeared faster than expected from moving webhooks to a different backend (out of MySQL), redesigning user session cache to redoing authentication and authorization flows to substantially reduce database load. We also leveraged our migration to Azure to stand up a lot more compute.
The scaling issues they have don’t have git as the bottleneck from what I understand
> The number of repositories on GitHub is growing faster than ever, but a much harder scaling challenge is the rise of large monorepos. For the last three months, we’ve been investing heavily in response to this trend both within git system and in the pull request experience.
They also mention large monorepos and git read operations as a core issue in the other incident post that's on the HN front page right now:
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17...
They should have just failed to scale git and leave place for the less idiosyncratic bazaar or mercurial to take the lead. These were slower, but would probably have scaled much better in the long term.
Github's core innovation was re-centralizing a decentralized SCM (as per article) by giving it nice web UI and features such as PRs. Oh and also free code hosting space. None of which relied on git's peculiarities.
I've been working on another project where I have binary files checked in, assets that move or are moved and then changed that git "loses track of" due to the significant change. This just may be me doing silly things like moving a file and then editing it and then committing it and git thinks I deleted it and created a new file.
When I've worked at big companies they had bespoke SCM that resolved this. But i'm curious about mid size teams that are big enough to overwhelm git but not so that they can rewrite it.
The problems start when there is a lot of changes on one branch and usually the first band-aid is to put a commit queue in place. The few very big companies that need even more than that probably aren't going to put their code on a new git hosting provider tomorrow.
> Those down-voting don't understand why any sacrifice of convenience or tech is worth it.
FWIW my comment was actually highly upvoted but it looks like X employees and/or Musk fans showed up and downvoted all criticism in this thread.