nickvanw

Hi! I'm the CTO of PlanetScale - the PostgreSQL offering we launched today is built on top of pure Postgres and doesn't come with any limitations.

The future sharded version will also be based on Postgres directly, and will be as compatible as possible. We're not looking to just speak the PG wire protocol to a different backend store.

Our experience has been that they do fire, but not reliably enough or soon enough to be worth anything other than validating the problem after the fact.

Author here - it's not that we're detecting failure better than they are (though certainly, we might be able to do it as fast as anyone else) - it's what you do afterwards that matters.

Being able to fail over to another database instance backed by a different volume in a different zone allows for a minimization of impact. This is well inline with AWS best practices, it's just arduous to do quickly and at-scale.

Answering on behalf of PlanetScale (I'm the CTO!). I don't remember exactly what was different from upstream, but it wasn't a whole lot of changes.

Fortunately, PlanetScale runs a well-maintained fork ourselves, so we're very used to taking custom changes and getting them deployed. In this case, we asked the Block team for all of their changes and went through them one by one to see what was needed to pull into our fork.

By the time we did the migration, we made sure that any behavior wouldn't be different where it mattered.

This is the un-fun work needed to get open source software into many different parts of the enterprise and government. It's not fun, and sometimes it's not even very difficult, but its usually very tie consuming and full of arcane knowledge.

Signed, someone who was dropped a big application and asked to make it FIPS compliant ASAP.

I'm pretty happy about this, I don't think Apple should be forced to open up iMessage, but not adopting the RCS standard always seemed a bit underhanded to me. Even if it sucks, better cross-platform messaging is a win for everyone.

What monopoly? Android has a larger market share than Apple by quite a large factor in the European Union.

Saying that Apple does not provide value is laughable - saying that it isn't worth 30% of the transaction value might be one thing, but they provide the R&D to create the device, the platform, the review infrastructure, update infrastructure, development environment, etc.

I'm not even sure I disagree with you, but you have to at least describe what you are against correctly.

This is useful - using an exit node with an Apple TV is useful as well for navigating around certain tools that are geo-blocked. Before, you'd have to handle it outside of the device which is much more difficult.

I'm going to play around with this later in the week.

Here in the PNW there is basically one corridor that would make sense as a semi-high speed (160+ kph) rail, which is Portland-Seattle-Vancouver. They are all under 200 miles from each other and connected by one road that is often very congested.

The current Amtrak route is not frequent, fast or cheap enough to be a good alternative to driving for most people.

Hourly service between them would be a boon to the whole area, and allow for a ton of flights to not happen between the cities for connecting traffic.

I'm in Seattle, my new-ish townhouse has a heat pump and it's never been too cold for it to be functional - it's worked hard some of the really cold+snowy days the last few years, but never to the point where it wasn't heating the house up perfectly fine.

I am not sure I would pay $27k for the whole install, but once it's there I've found it to be great. Extremely inexpensive to run and with all of Seattle's power being carbon-neutral, totally guilt free to set it to 68F at night during a hot summer day.

I don't even have a dipstick in my car at this point - the computer will warn you when the oil level is low, otherwise you're to assume it's fine. It also warns me when the windshield wiper fluid reservoir is low so that I can fill it before running out.

Not that gas stations in Oregon were doing any of this anyway, they were pumping gas and nothing else.

I'll take SSDs over hard drives spinning up, and the rest of it is pretty much a clear improvement over what existed before. The fact that my M1 MBP doesn't usually spin up any fans is a bonus as well.

They do generally receive favorable marks by the IIHS: https://jalopnik.com/volvo-is-the-first-carmaker-to-receive-....

Even updated tests (released post-launch of the car) tend to treat them pretty favorably: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-small-suvs-fail-insurance-...

I think of the IIHS as a sort of benchmarking organization - not representative of the real world like any microbenchmark, but also correlated with production performance on some level. They seem to do quite well in their microbenchmarks.

I have my issues with what 1Password has become as a product, but this seems like a very good stance to take. As a product owner, it's essential to know what and how people are using the product, collecting some straightforward telemetry that's anonymized and doesn't contain and Vault data strikes me as reasonable.

Asking ChatGPT "Why does the price of a Credit Default Swap rise?" gets you:

The price of a Credit Default Swap (CDS) rises when the market perceives an increased risk of default by the underlying entity, such as a company or government.

A CDS is a financial instrument that allows investors to protect themselves against the risk of default by an issuer of debt. The buyer of a CDS pays a premium to the seller, who agrees to pay a fixed amount in the event of a default. The price of the CDS reflects the perceived risk of default by the underlying entity.

If the market perceives an increased risk of default by the underlying entity, such as due to a weakening financial position, deteriorating economic conditions, or a downgrade in credit rating, then the price of the CDS will rise. This is because investors will demand a higher premium to compensate for the increased risk.

Conversely, if the market perceives a reduced risk of default, such as due to an improvement in the financial position or a credit rating upgrade, then the price of the CDS will fall, as investors require a lower premium to compensate for the lower risk.

I think it sounds that way because it probably was!

SVB shares are worth $0 because there was a run on the bank and the US Government did not step in to save the bank, only the depositors.

If the same thing happens to other banks - everyone withdraws, they shut down and the government steps in - the assumption is that their equity will eventually be worth $0 too. So, everyone sells at >$0.

It's not going to be all banks, though.

Well, in my opinion, it remains to be seen whether big tech compensation for this style of work is sustainable long-term. Of course, if you're already pulling 800k/y in TC at Google/Amazon/whatever, great, you did wonderfully. If you're a brand new engineer starting your career, are there going to be a lot of those 800k jobs that offer you free daycare, dry cleaning, lunch and massages? I wouldn't bet on it. I say this as someone that has also not taken this path, but have nothing but respect for people who make a great living that have.

Otherwise, I think this is exactly how big companies succeed - they build career paths, tools and workflows to bring context to large groups of smart people to get them moving in the same direction. Ultimately there still have to be people to create the bridge, but the lever you get is massive when you have 1000s of talented engineers. You can't expect them all to understand how $x works, but you can pepper teams with extremely smart and talented experts and professional managers who collectively get them working on the impactful parts of the problem.

TL;DR there isn't a linear path, my advice is mainly for people thinking about how to be able to build value. If you can do that, you'll always be able to get a job.

I would put it even more simply: just knowing Engineering isn't enough if you want to excel past a certain point, unless you're going to go extremely deep and become a subject matter expert in something (storage, hardware, etc). That is something most people are not going to do, because it requires dedication and to be extremely intelligent.

Instead, you can go very far by understanding a job one "hop" from your own - sales, marketing, finance, you name it. People who can understand the domain and translate that into code are worth 10x more than people who need to be told what to do and have it spelled out to them. If you haven't actually had butt-in-seat time understanding that domain, you probably know less of it than you think you do as well.

I see plenty of people who assume they could do the job of a sales engineer, marketer, whatever. I'm confident that many people are smart enough to do so, but having the capability does not mean having the knowledge to do a job well. Learn that knowledge.

This appears to throw a 404 for me.

It is worth noting that the USB-C interface currently used by Apple in the 10th-generation iPad, iPad mini, iPad Air, and iPad Pro, do not contain an IC chip for authentication, meaning that this would be a first for ports of this kind offered by the company.

These are rumors, easy bait for clicks. I'll happily eat my words when this comes to fruition, but at this point is there any evidence Apple is actually interested in doing this?

I've never worked at AWS, but I have worked on smaller systems where people depended on defaults. Speaking first hand, it is EXTREMELY difficult to get changes to defaults shipped on a system with as much usage as S3.

You are, inevitably, going to break someone's workflow for a reason that you cannot possibly fathom. They are going to be unhappy. At least one of them is going to come across your boss' boss' desk and they're going to wonder if this change is _really_ necessary.

Every incentive, even with this default behavior being bad, is to leave it the way it is.

Respect to the AWS people that got this across the line.

Hi! I'm the VP of Engineering at PlanetScale and was at the company when we made this decision.

We had the advantage of being able to decide to do this up front when we were first building the current product. The marginal work for this was nearly zero because we did not have to migrate anything existing, we just decided to address our resources using this strategy. In that way, there was nothing procrastinated -we just decided this was a good idea, and did it.

I can speak from firsthand experience, however, how useful it is to be able to copy/paste links and references to resources. It makes support, collaboration and work much easier when you can easily share links to resources.

Oil is significantly more valuable than water - the added cost per gallon of water would be astronomical.

1 oil barrel is 42 gallons and costs around $75 today. I pay about $6 per CCF of water which is 748 gallons. It might be worth doing this with oil, but even if you scaled it up, it would be hard not to have the transport cost more than the actual water.

These stories are awful - this wasn't just an administrative headache for people, they served real time and has real consequences.

Filing a false police report is a crime, it would be nice to see that enforced against the company in one way or another.

Thank you as always for everything that you do @dang!

Great question! We have a technical blog post about how PlanetScale Boost is implemented: https://planetscale.com/blog/how-planetscale-boost-serves-yo...

In short, it can be compared in consistency to an up-to-date read replica; PlanetScale Boost uses Vitess' VStream to process events as they happen and keep itself up to date. The blog has much more information if you're curious.

I would bet money on the opposite happening: The Fed is not going to release a social app that interrupts the network effects of all of those systems. Zelle may be the one that has the most to worry about, because it is partnered with big banks and powers a lot of their transfer systems.

PayPal, Venmo, etc. will all start to use FedNow in the backend to provide for a better product experience and charge the same fee, but spend less on settlement.

These are better payment rails, not the wholesale replacement of how people send money to each other in the USA.

Airlines have been doing this with 757s for quite some time. This is the best spiritual successor to the 757, which is going to have to be retired in a lot of fleets sooner rather than later.

The layout makes much more of a difference than the number of aisles - I am fine with a 757 but have hated my economy experience in a 9-abreast 787.

I have been on the other end of this somewhat often, as one does when they take the subway to/from work every day.

Some of this is very self-serving for the median commuter as well. Someone struggling with a stroller or luggage is likely blocking some portion of the way for people getting in and out of the Subway, and the easiest way to fix that is just to help the person.

I've carried a number of strollers, suitcases and whatnot for people without barely a word. The same is true for helping people get their cars out of the snow, giving directions or anything else.

If you're that close to the beach that you can string a cable, do you not have 4G LTE/5G services available? With a high-gain antenna I would imagine you could get speeds and latency that would rival Starlink in many places. Of course, this will vary wildly and depends on how remote you are mooring.