HN user
CEO of Altinity and database geek. You can contact me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/berkeleybob2105/
I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported.
That's never been true for financial services, many of which offer very high-paying jobs for high-frequency trading, hedge fund management, market operations, etc. There are many other industries with high value IT jobs that are not ad-supported.
(Edit: typo)
I love Proust, but you need mental space to read his books. It also helps to be a little bored. That's hard to achieve while connected to the Internet.
How's this any different than say, tractors, or the mechanical loom? After all, agricultural employment went from 90% in the past to 1% today.
Regarding US agricultural labor displacement.
* It happened over a period of 200 years or so in the USA. [0] That's a key difference.
* Starting in the late 1800s manufacturing rose to a peak of 38% in 1944. [1] This absorbed a lot of the available labor, often at better rates of pay than farm work. It's a common pattern in industrializing nations where manufacturing absorbs labor freed up by more productive agriculture. Manufacturing labor is no longer growing, so that cannot help with employment.
That's not to say it was pleasant for all concerned. I would argue, however, that black swan events like the Dust Bowl caused more disruption and trauma than the steady displacement of farm labor by technology.
[0] https://u.osu.edu/beef/2022/07/06/the-history-of-american-ag...
[1] https://humanprogress.org/trends/the-changing-nature-of-work...
Edit: clarity
What's the difference between pgdog and vitesse?
That’s what a small earthquake with a nearby epicenter feels like. The first time it happened to me it felt like a tree hitting the house. (“Small” is circa 3.0 magnitude.)
That was my 8th & 9th grade Latin teacher. Failure was not an option. I can still decline nouns and demonstratives 50 years later.
Mark Zuckerberg is a builder in the context of the encyclical.
A lot of enshittification is driven by market consolidation. I really don't want my economic interactions to be with massive chains in a race to the bottom. The cure is to enable new competitors to offer alternatives. It starts with anti-trust but also includes reducing regulations and barriers to market entry. And maybe not so many billion-dollar, me-too AI investments and more focus on things like building delivering healthcare cheaply.
By the E gates, right? I love that one. https://www.sfomuseum.org/public-art/public-collection/18th-...
SFO art shows are well-curated and interesting. There's a causeway in Terminal 3 to reach the F gates. It's now under construction but in years past it used to have outstanding art exhibitions that you could take easily while walking to your gate. I used to go out of my way to see them. The international terminal has a beautiful exhibition of flight attendant uniforms across the West face of the building.
Overall SFO is my favorite large airport. Things just work. The fact they went through the hurdles to get a private contract for TSA now looks like a prescient move. Only about 20 US airports have it. [0]
It's a source of jokes in the UK at least. Most Americans don't know the difference. As the saying goes, "two countries separated by a common language."
I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.
So do I. At the same time, GitHub has evolved into a SPOF for the entire software industry. It badly needs some real competition.
I’m convinced that it’s impossible to write good SQL without peeking into the data.
That's been my experience as well. One question that comes up is how to ensure confidential information does not leak out of the database and into somebody's model or otherwise escape containment. Is that an issue you considered in the design?
There does not seem to be an easy answer for which political system delivers the best benefits.
Direct democracy has defects that have been apparent for thousands of years. I believe Plato was one of the first to argue that democracy turned into mob rule.[0] It seems unlikely that this was entirely original. Similar ideas must have been current in Athens well before his time, since they had abundant experience with demagogues and other problems during the Peloponnesian War. I don't think Plato's solution (Philosopher Kings) was correct, but it's harder to argue against his framing.
It therefore seems like a question of which approach is less bad up front and whether it decays into something worse. Personally I would satisfied with a functioning republic in the US, which is where I live. What we have now is an oligarchy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_political_philosophy
That's how it works in California. I had a 3 year non-compete with VMware after we sold a business to them. It was restricted to the specific market and technology our business covered but didn't limit activities in other areas. It seemed completely fair to me.
Besides, competing would have meant doing exactly the same thing over again. What's the fun in that?
Does anyone else find it a bit disorienting that we're essentially implementing the Blade Runner Voight Kampff test?
Don't forget the Duke of Buckingham - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Villiers,_1st_Duke_of_B.... Dumas' fictionalized version was far better than the real person.
The Three Musketeers is my favorite adventure story of all time. The story of how D'Artagnan insults all three musketeers in succession at their first meeting, challenges them to duels one after the other, and ends up fighting on their side in a melee against the royal guards is just one of countless, hilarious adventures. The book just gets better from there.
You can't make that up.
Unfortunately it seems quite believable. This is the same outfit that fired a bunch of people responsible for overseeing the US Nuclear Arsenal. [0] The combination of arrogance and stupidity was breathtaking.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2025/04/doges-staff-firing-fiasco-at...
Nice summary of lessons. Thanks!!
If items are comparable the lowest unsold item should be an upper bound on price, no?
That sounds like a bad hire, not a junior. Why didn’t your manager help fix that?
What a passive way to say executives kept a larger share of profits for themselves, forcing workers to be stressed and do a sub-optimal job.
This is a very limited view of why things don't work. The main issue in my experience is whether the company values the outcome and ensures focus on optimizing for it. That can include everything from adequate staffing to comp to training to management focus. (A lot of the last one.)
You can spend a huge amount of money and still get a crappy outcome. US healthcare provides a rich field of examples.
The Grokipedia article on Malleus Maleficarum is almost unreadable. It’s long on wordy, thinly sourced disquisitions on marginally relevant topics. The section on historical and theological context is a case in point. It seems to be largely summarizing easily available primary texts like the Bible, not evaluating arguments based on scholarly works. Personally I can’t judge how much of that section even makes sense, despite having a reasonably good background in late medieval history. The Wikipedia article is much more sound.
P.s. humans do this too. Max Weber was pretty thin on the ground when it came to sources as I recall.
This. And the wonderful thing about LLMs is that they can be trained to bend responses in specific directions, say toward using Oracle Cloud solutions. There's fertile ground for commercial value extraction that goes far beyond ads. Think of it as product placement on steroid.
The problem is enforcing those laws now the Trump administration is using X and other social networks as instruments of national policy and forcing others to use them, to the detriment (potentially considerable) of European societies.
This is a great comment. At the same time GDPR and other standards do not address practical issues that (arguably) cause real harm like including features to generate undressed images of women and children.
It's the same dynamic that has warped the California housing market by adding a forest of regulations that make it almost impossible to build new housing. Those regulations for the most part add nothing but cost and time to projects. Meanwhile housing prices go through the roof.
That's very kind of you. We love working on ClickHouse and real-time analytics.
ClickHouse effectively has a number of personas. Time series is one of them, and ClickHouse has steadily absorbed market share from pure play time series databases over the last few years. Other personas include real-time observability backend (the single biggest use case in my experience) as well as real-time data lake engine. Time series support, column storage, and real-time response are key underlying capabilities. It's quite versatile and fun to use.
Disclosure: I run Altinity, a vendor in this space.
(Update: Disclaimer -> Disclosure. Sigh.)
FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...
It's honestly hard to pick a pattern out for older open source project contributions. PostgreSQL started at UC Berkeley but people contributed to it from all over. Key engineers like Tom Lane worked a number of companies in the database field, some dependent on VC funding, some not. He's currently at Snowflake. [0] A lot of recent innovation around PostgreSQL today (Neon, Supabase, etc.) is VC funded.
That pattern changed with projects like Hadoop, which was about the time that VC funds recognized a standard playbook around monetizing open source. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lane_(computer_scientist)