evanelias

If you steal an unpopular product from a store, the damage is also only to "potential profits", so how does that differ? It's entirely possible no one would have purchased the product and it would have eventually been discarded/destroyed.

Or with services, if a barber cuts your hair and then you run away without paying them, do you not consider that theft, even though there's no change in ownership occurring?

My point is that the number will entirely vary for each user, depending on how many poor DB-related infra decisions they've made. Some users may save 99%, others may save almost nothing, right? So why say 40% here? Where did this number come from?

Personally, I will instantly distrust a new product claiming an exact number of 40% savings -- not even "up to 40%" or "over 40%", which would still be misleading, but less weird than claiming exactly 40%. Especially in the second line of the homepage, without any supporting link or information.

we removed the retool and appsmith licenses, another $2k savings.

These aren't DB-specific tools though? Why would this count towards the savings?

6 YC companies [...] in some cases almost every column is indexed

If your savings math is based on very early-stage startups who made horrendously bad indexing mistakes, honestly that would reduce my trust even further. That said, I'm definitely not the audience for your product.

cut database costs by 40%

Where does this number come from? It feels completely arbitrary.

MySQL

You still haven't indicated what version. For example there's a substantial join planner improvement in the latest LTS (MySQL 9.7). And in any case the original thread was about MariaDB, not MySQL.

I disagree

OK, but again MariaDB literally solved the anomaly in the Jepsen report. So if this particular problem is so important to your use-case, why are you still using MySQL?

In my experience people tend to expect correct, up to date data from their database

Then why do the vast majority of Postgres users stay with their default READ COMMITTED isolation, which provides weaker guarantees than MySQL's supposedly-problematic version of REPEATABLE READ?

MySQL doesn't support synchronous replication - so semi sync is the next best thing

Despite not being fully synchronous, MySQL Group Replication has been available for years and is more synchronous than traditional semi-sync was. It solves the semi-sync problems you are describing. Ditto with Galera in MariaDB. They're just not a great fit for extremely high-write-volume OLTP, since they make the latency tradeoff you're describing.

if write performance matters that much to you - you shouldn't be using a dinosaur like MySQL anyways

Properly-tuned InnoDB provides excellent write performance on par with competitors. Ditto for MyRocks. This is why many of the largest tech companies are still using MySQL as their primary database.

"Mid thirties" is absolutely not a common definition of mid life. For reference, Wikipedia defines "middle age" as being the age range from 40 to 64, based on citing nine different sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_age

And also why do you believe the life expectancy for HN users (mostly adults, large portion based in US) is only 72?!

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.

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!

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.

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...

How do you figure? Commodore had strong sales through the late 80s, and the C64 wasn't discontinued until 1994.

My family's C64 was the first computer I ever used, and I am barely in my mid 40s. And although my family later purchased an IBM PC clone around '89 or '90, that just meant the C64 moved into my older brother's room, where we used it even more.

Yeah, this article was clearly written by someone too young to have any solid understanding of the time period they're attempting to describe.

For starters, they don't seem to realize that AOL usage at the time was still very much undergoing the transition/hybrid from the earlier "online service provider" model (like Prodigy, CompuServe, etc), with much of its exclusive content only accessible by "AOL keywords" and not being web/internet-based.

The anecdote about the AIDS patient is especially weird, since the linked post does not reference this AOL outage at all -- they explicitly call out their regional ISP, "The Loop", for being down multiple days. And the BBS they reference in another post is almost certainly a dial-up text based system.

So this article's claim that due to this AOL outage, "perhaps that BBS post would have been bumped off the front page by the time he checked" is simply nonsense: this guy wasn't using AOL, and a dial-up BBS wouldn't be affected by an ISP outage, and forums on a dial-up BBS had no notion of a "front page" whatsoever in the first place.

Not to mention, claiming "bell-bottoms are back in style" in 1996, what?

I don't like JS either, but lots of people do. And if you're expanding a DB beyond SQL-only, JS is an obvious first choice before adding further languages from there. (The MySQL feature is called "Multilingual Engine Component" and not "JavaScript Engine Component".)

As for the versioning, it's a nightmare for third party vendors like me, because it will absolutely increase the number of companies who are unintentionally running unsupported non-LTS "innovation" releases because they can't keep all these versioning changes straight. The major-version only changed 3 times in the past decade because 8.0 was "evergreen" for most of that time, which was also not a good strategy, yet the most obvious solution (SemVer) is always ignored by Oracle in favor of more confusing alternatives.

This continues the faulty line of thinking that open source is just for hobby-level projects or early startup throwaway infrastructure.

How so? I don't understand your comment at all. A huge chunk of the world's economy runs on async replication in FOSS MySQL/MariaDB, my whole point was that you literally don't need Galera to do that.

If you've ever had to work with nontrivial procs in MySQL/MariaDB, it's immediately clear how the status quo is deficient there, and why e.g. Postgres's multi-language support is so much better in comparison.

And how is it "minutiae" to be able to figure out "is my database version actually supported"? This is the fourth versioning scheme they've used in less than a decade, that's a bit nuts I think.

I don't think your last sentence is fair. Many workloads don't need something like Galera, as standard async replication scales to extreme levels, and you can achieve excellent HA with external orchestration and/or proxies. FOSS MariaDB is definitely not toy-scale only.

Oracle has also been guilty of locking modern table stakes behind the MySQL Enterprise / Heatwave pay gate, such as vector indexes and JS stored procedures. And while they've recently announced more of this stuff will move to FOSS soon, at the same time their response rate to new bug reports has become worse than ever before, which is deeply worrying.

And a couple days ago Oracle announced that they're nonsensically changing their MySQL versioning/LTS naming yet again. So now the way you identify an LTS is "major version is an even-numbered last two digits of a year, while minor version is exactly 4 to represent LTS releases always being in April." So for example MySQL 28.4 will be LTS, but 28.7 and 28.10 are not. But prior to this, 9.7 and 8.4 are LTS, and 8.0 was de facto LTS but now EOL. It's bizarre. I wish I was joking!

I had the same immediate reaction. It's a completely nonsensical comparison which just demonstrates the author is extremely confused about the relationship between MySQL and MariaDB, in terms of their corporate entities and project structures.

That said, it seems to be a common point of confusion among FOSS die-hards, but still super unfortunate to see it repeated in this context!

Same! They actually still put out new issues, in the form of a new 4-issue mini series roughly once per year. It's the only comic book I regularly read as an adult. Pretty amazing that Sergio is still doing this at age 88!

Despite the mediocrity of the Garfield comic strip, I think a lot of Garfield's enduring popularity among late Gen X / early Millennials can be attributed to the late 80s Garfield and Friends cartoon [1]. It was actually funny, largely due to the writing by Mark Evanier. He's also known for his snappy dialogue on Groo the Wanderer, among other comic books.

And then in the late 00s, Garfield got an indie-cred boost from Garfield Minus Garfield [2], the surreal and often humorously bleak webcomic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_and_Friends

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_Minus_Garfield

The DJ analogy is useful actually.

Maybe, but the author's DJ analogy in the post was rather off the mark. Skill-wise, DJing is actually a perfect example of "it used to be hard" in pretty much every aspect -- beatmatching on vinyl, mixing in key, discovering new records, building and reaching a fanbase, getting distribution for mixes, physically carrying tons of records around and sometimes getting them stolen or damaged.

If everyone is a DJ now, it's because software and technology has made it so much easier than it used to be. Although to be clear, I completely agree with your comment on how successful DJs are the ones who leverage modern tools and understand the market.

But in terms of the analogy in the original post, the author is making some weird comparison between guitar players and DJs, which is totally apples to oranges... not to mention that selling out stadiums solo has never been easy for anyone, regardless of year or whether you're a guitar player or a DJ.

Even when MySQL development velocity was more rapid, they maintained binary table format compatibility across major version upgrades the vast majority of the time. Literally the only exception I can think of, which necessitated a table rebuild, was the fractional timestamp storage change when going from MySQL 5.5 (2010) to 5.6 (2013).

More accurately, MariaDB has Galera for that. MySQL Galera is EOL in a few months [1], which is understandable given the change in ownership.

[1] https://mariadb.com/resources/blog/upgrade-now-announcing-my...

Same here, I was just about to comment about this exact problem with TIAA specifically, after receiving yet another marketing spam email from them today.

For a while they all had a footer like "This service communication provides information about your plan benefits to help you make informed decisions. It is sent as part of our plan services and is not subject to communication preferences. Thank you." But today's spam didn't even bother with that song and dance.

It's infuriating.

I'm sure they still exist here, but the economic realities make it challenging in my area (NYC)... even smaller events must be totally oversold, in order for the promoters to not go broke. So it's hard to find room to dance, and there's lots of people talking loudly everywhere, etc. And the headliners often start their sets at an absurdly late hour.

There are still some underground parties, but most of the ones I've been to in modern times have been a bit "off". In some cases the promoters are attempting to recreate a 90s/early'00s vibe, but they aren't old enough to have actually experienced one, so they're just basing it off the ridiculous exaggerated thing they saw in some movie. They'll overspend on decorations but underspend on DJs. And they'll do things like wait to send out the address of the "super secret underground venue" until the day of the event, but then it turns out to be some totally normal event space that anyone can rent.

Probably there are still some actual unlicensed/renegade parties somewhere here but I haven't found them. The only ones I have come across have been a bit of a different scene, more like experimental electronic that doesn't lend itself to dancing, no real overlap with the genres that were played at raves.

edit to add: no idea why you're getting downvoted above. fwiw your comment about PLUR totally aligns with what I've heard from others in Europe.

In the US, it's been a concept for almost the entire time the scene has existed. In the early 90s, PLUR was popularized by Frankie Bones, who had essentially founded the east coast US scene a few years prior.

By the late 90s it was more of an implicit ethos -- you'd read about it and see it on flyers, but running around and saying it too often would indeed be considered inauthentic and rather cringe. Although, a bigger one around that time was use of the word "rave"; it was always "party" instead, to the extent that using the r-word in person was a huge faux pas which basically indicated you were either a poser or undercover law enforcement. And a "party" was always distinct from a weekly or monthly event at a club, and definitely not the same thing as a festival.

That's all quite a bit different in today's scene though, which has been thoroughly commercialized and mainstreamed for the past 15 years, ever since SFX started pouring major dollars into "EDM" events.

Take another look at this blog's index https://kingy.ai/category/blog/ and click through more posts, and pay attention to the post dates.

Do you really think this singular author is writing multiple excessively-long blog posts about AI per day? There are ~650 of these posts over the past 18 months. And over on LinkedIn, the author describes himself as a "Specialist in Digital Marketing, Videography / Video Editing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, and B2B Sales."

YMMV but this post and entire site absolutely screams "slop" to me.

Reading means downloading. Downloading is equivalent to making a copy. To make a copy of a copyrighted work, you need a license, unless your activity is fair use. Licenses have terms and conditions that must be followed, such as retaining attribution in all derivative works.

That said, FOSS licenses are non-exclusive. Regarding the original upthread topic of GitHub's copilot training, iirc GitHub's terms and conditions involve granting them a license in order to host your code. Depending what else is in those terms, they may have had the ability to use all hosted code for LLM training through that license, instead of the FOSS licensing on any given Open Source repo. But that would only apply to GitHub/Microsoft, not third party scrapers.

I also agree that there is a place for other licenses. It's better that there's space for kinda-open, rather than it being open vs completely closed repositories.

That's good to hear, sincere apologies for assuming otherwise. There are a lot of folks on HN who take a much more extreme view there, and I seem to have incorrectly conflated them in the "open source" vs "Open Source" debate.

having to explain the difference to folks between what it meant to be "open source" vs "Open Source", and the fact that a lot of folks generally don't understand the difference and some of the nuance

This speaks to the core naming problem though: the original OSI folks should have picked a better term! They thought "Free Software" wasn't a good term in part due to the gratis vs freedom confusion (totally agreed here), and yet they picked another equally-confusing term to use instead, that had a pre-existing generic meaning which wasn't related to specific license terms in any way.

Totally agreed. They don't have a trademark, and their superfans have no right to tell people how to capitalize or punctuate the term.

I also get the sense that the author has an inherently negative view of non-OSI-approved "source available" licenses -- and in particular the Business Source License, which he uses as a counterexample twice.

Yet, OSI cofounder Bruce Perens helped improve that license and specifically said "I feel it’s worthy of my endorsement. The new BSL will be a good way for developers to get paid while eventually making their works Open Source." [1]

Why do so many vocal people in the Open Source world have a much more extreme worldview than even an OSI cofounder?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250629110730/https://perens.co...

The final sentence says it all

Not sure if the article was edited later, but there are five sentences after that one, expanding on the author's reasoning for their position.

Next time, lead with that.

The post is titled "I Will Never Use AI to Code"... whether you agree or disagree with the author's position, he's certainly not burying the lede here.

I also can't help but notice the author isn't telling other people not to use AI, he's merely stating his own preferences and articulating his reasoning in depth. Why attack him for expressing his personal preferences in how he goes about his own work, which presumably does not affect you in any way?

"smaller custom data centers into public cloud" is talking about their Azure migration, so "multi cloud" would almost certainly mean extending a presence into AWS and/or GCP (or maybe others like OCI).

I'm sorry but I really don't see how you're drawing conclusions about this meaning a move off of Ruby and MySQL entirely. That's a huuuge logical leap away from what is written in this post, and you originally stated it in a way that indicated this was a fact.