If anything I've written on this site seems interesting, or confusing, or you think I'd be interested in something you've written/read, please let me know: hn@justinblank.com.
- hyperpapeCI systems operate according to rules that humans feel they understand and can apply mechanically. Moreover, they (primarily) fail closed.
- Salesmen making bad deals that boost their numbers and then don't make money in the long-term is one of the first things you learn when you work in an org that sells in the enterprise market.
- Those are two unrelated points and the connection between them was unclear in the original post.
- Your comment is sufficiently generic that it’s impossible to tell what specific part of the article you’re agreeing with, disagreeing with, or expanding upon.
- The thing is, none of us are mice, but many of us use Postgres.
It would be the equivalent of "if you're a middle-aged man" or "you're an American".
P.S. I think some of the considerations may be true for any system that uses B-Tree indexes, but several will be Postgres specific.
- Note that the author does not mention a single specific SaaS subscription he’s cancelled or seen a team cancel.
The only named product was Retool.
- The reality is that the HTML+CSS+JS is the canonical form, because it is the form that humans consume, and at least for the time being, we're the most important consumer.
The API may be equivalent, but it is still conceptually secondary. If it went stale, readers would still see the site, and it makes sense for a scraper to follow what readers can see (or alternately to consume both, and mine both).
The author might be right to be annoyed with the scrapers for many other reasons, but I don't think this is one of them.
- Being a little bit clever can lead you to make some pretty bad mistakes.
Yes, the distance according to roads can be different from the distance as the crow flies. No, it cannot realistically be 10x the distance when the crow's distance is 2500 miles.
- Since it clearly runs afoul of anticompetitive laws, it will be easy for you to find case law that demonstrates that, alongside credible sources stating that OpenAIs actions are prosecutable that make that case.
This is big news, it's not like the folks who write about antitrust would just ignore it.
- I know.
My point is that almost everyone refers to it as Postgres, because they do not actually value the descriptiveness of "PostgreSQL".
- That's a really nice mnemonic. I wish I lived in an alternate universe where Postgres was called PostgreSQL so that it was easier to remember. Perhaps if we start using that, it will take over, like how everyone calls the Go project Golang.
- > PostgreSQL isn't "Generic SQL Database 47" it's the successor to Ingres (Post-Ingres-SQL).
Indeed. This helps me know that I'm using a database more modern than Ingres. I chose not to use Oracle or SQL Server because they might have predated Ingres.
Just one question: what's Ingres, and why do I care about it? Of course, I don't, which makes Postgres no more useful of a name than "fluffnutz" or "hooxup". That said, over time, I've come to like the name Postgres.
- It's awful that there are these hallucinated citations, and the researchers who submitted them ought to be ashamed. I also put some of the blame on the boneheaded culture of academic citations.
"Compression has been widely used in columnar databases and has had an increasing importance over time.[1][2][3][4][5][6]"
Ok, literally everyone in the field already knows this. Are citations 1-6 useful? Well, hopefully one of them is an actually useful survey paper, but odds are that 4-5 of them are arbitrarily chosen papers by you or your friends. Good for a little bit of h-index bumping!
So many citations are not an integral part of the paper, but instead randomly sprinkled on to give an air of authority and completeness that isn't deserved.
I actually have a lot of respect for the academic world, probably more than most HN posters, but this particular practice has always struck me as silly. Outside of survey papers (which are extremely under-provided), most papers need many fewer citations than they have, for the specific claims where the paper is relying on prior work or showing an advance over it.
- I think you're misreading that article.
> In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers.
> I call this the Shadow Hierarchy. You don’t need your VP to understand the intricacies of your code. You need the Staff+ Engineers in other critical organizations to need your tools.
> When a Senior Staff Engineer in Pixel tells their VP, “We literally cannot debug the next Pixel phone without Perfetto”, that statement carries immense weight. It travels up their reporting chain, crosses over at the Director/VP level, and comes back down to your manager.
Visibility is important, it's just not the same kind of visibility.
- > Capital is something you expend
Or hoard
- I agree that there is no right to arbitrarily block traffic for prayer. But this does not require a ban on public prayer, it requires a law saying that one must allow traffic to flow (which I suspect already exists), and a clarification that prayer is not an exception. Prayer need not be specifically targeted more than board games, or bike protests, or just parking in the middle of the street.
- The problem with citing cartels and greed is...when prices are low, is it because the industry is momentarily altruistic? Did the industry wake up in late 2025 and think "holy shit, I've been being nice, but it's time to turn over a new leaf and start gouging people?"
I mean, don't get me wrong, they are greedy. But that's been true for years. What's changed is the market.
- For zero/one days, the trick is that you'd pair dependency cooldowns with automatic scanning for vulnerable dependencies.
And in the cases where you have vulnerable dependencies, you'd force update them before the cooldown period had expired, while leaving everything else you can in place.
- I'm of two minds about this comment. A glance at the website suggests it has a lot of content and a full overhaul for 4.1m AUD (2.6m USD) might not be that that high of a price.
But the problem is with the assumption that the website needs a full overhaul. So often a full overhaul is where projects go to balloon in cost by 20x. An outside agency sells the leadership on a big picture full of fluff about "modernization" without any connection to real improvements.
A better approach would be to determine the most important weaknesses of the existing website, and incrementally improve them. But big organizations struggle with this. Government agencies are probably even worse than big corporations, but big corporations are terrible too.