eterm

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.

You're right, the main decline was AI, but it was on a downward trajectory anyway.

This graph shows a distinct change pre-dating AI, starting 2014, there's explosive growth which suddenly stops around then.

A soft decline which carries on until Covid caused a temporary reversal of that.

The soft decline then continues at a pace around where it was, until November 2022, when it suddenly accelerates to its death. That's ChatGPT of course.

But the site was already in decline, against the backdrop of vastly increased software developers and software development, because of hostility.

Software developers used Stackoverflow despite the hostility, because there was no alternative.

The early growth wasn't caused by the moderation, because the early moderation was a lot softer.

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.

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.

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.

$25 is an exaggeration, because that wouldn't even cover lunch for your friends to say thanks for the favour.

OK Go blew up early youtube with Here It Goes again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTAAsCNK7RA .

But these are exceptions to the rule, most people don't have the ability to do much creatively with a shoestring budget.

( Which isn't to say this slop is better. This slop is far worse, it's utterly dreadful. )

I thought that was satire but I've googled it and you're not even joking.

For Americans: this is roughly 3500 sqft.

LinkedIn tier generated rubbish!

It's also likely an AI generated blogpost over the original content.

They did. It was the Soviets winning the space race that caused the USA to sink everything into the Apollo mission, to prove they could go bigger.

Russia were first to almost every other milestone, first orbit, first man in orbit, first woman in orbit, first EVA, first moon orbit, first (unmanned) moon landing, and many others.

Edited "Russians" to Soviets because lot was done by non-Russian parts of the union, my original reply just mirrored the OP use of Russians.

In really grinds my gears that the buying companies take out the debt to take over against the companies themselves.

So many well-known UK companies have been sunk by debt interest on loans taken out to acquire said companies.

By all means use the companies to secure loans, but the liability should be on the books of the parent companies not the companies being acquired!

There have even been cases where the companies have been effectively asset-stripped by "sell and lease back" of property, leaving the companies a shell of their former selves with no meaningful assets, so as soon as there are any unexpected headwinds they collapse.

AI has got better.

It read to me to be entirely generated. The lack of details that people would normally mention tripped my spidey-sense. ( Who wouldn't name-check the restaurant in the opening paragraph? )

A double check, the author appearing to take up blogging in 2023, mostly about data science, with all the tell-tale signs of generated posts.

It's completely made up, that kind of "wait, that doesn't make sense" is a hallmark of LLM writing.

It's got so good at writing generally that it catches us off-guard.

You're being too polite, it's quite clear that no human was involved.

60k is tiny, if it's making recall mistakes that early then you might have some false memories or incorrect instructions in your CLAUDE.md.

60k isn't much bigger than the system prompt.

It's funny, mine did the same, but it quickly found edge with a --screenshot parameter.

Weird to come back to a terminal running edge unprompted and the auto classifier waving it though as 'safe".

My reaction was also, "I need dev containers ".

And that includes London, it lists "excluding London" as £65k.

People overestimate how much senior devs in the UK earn, even after knowing they're not well paid, my usual response to hearing we should be earning £90k+ is, "well give us a job then"!

That's a fairly standard wage outside London for senior developers.

UK wages are not great.

But it sounds like it's not even a harness issue if they have a process where they send a reset email to an address that isn't associated with the account.

This isn't (just) a validation issue, and shouldn't be at the harness level.

I'm saving this comment, thank you for a great explanation of what it is like.

I was in my late 20s when I realised I was "face-blind", but I should have realised a lot earlier, I remember reading in a book as a child about how "people can recognise a person by their face from a long distance, but find it difficult to recognise a voice", and I could not relate whatsoever to that passage.

I thought I regularly struggle to recognise someone until they start speaking, but it wasn't until a decade or two later that I read about prosopagnosia and then suddenly a lot of things made sense.

Your explanation is so much better than the rubbish illustrations of blanked or blurred faces, because it isn't like that at all, indeed sometimes I might rely on a detail about their face to recognise someone.

It's why face-blind isn't a great term either, because it's not a kind of blindness, I can see just as well as anyone, it just doesn't trip the automatic and instinctual recognition that I understand most people have.

Yes, there's plausible deniability, but I choose not to believe it for a second.

The interesting mitigation would be snapping I/O to a course clock.

You could then set it to hold the result until the next tick.

E.g. An I/O tick of 20ms, and it would only return on 20ms boundaries, then almost every SSD would look the same.

It would slow down the API a bit, but privacy has tradeoffs.

Obviously SQLite is the best choice for a mobile or desktop app, that's not what's being discussed here.

Because you don't add a network layer by running a database locally.

Or you can run postgres on the same machine as the application, which lets you much more easily migrate if the time comes when you need to scale to multiple application servers.

There's a world between "local file" and "network DB server", running a DB server locally has lots of benefits from being able to easily query from outside if needed to forcing you to consider concurrency without the latency overhead of a network hop.

Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month

The crazy thing is that SO is dying so quickly that it's already under half that amount.

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...

I can relate to being distracted for a time before a meeting and unable to focus on something else in preparation for it, but these lines stuck out in a way I can't relate:

unpleasant if I end up not liking the person Their tone, manner of speaking, their emotions. That can ruin my whole day.

Why should this person demand that they like or are liked by everyone, and why should it ruin their day to keep things professional? That sounds extremely highly-strung.

You've never hit the wrong button by mistake on a phone touchscreen?

I can only envy your adroitness.

No, because the default is to present you 3 numbers and asks you which your number is!

1 in 3 and easy to hit by mistake.