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jashmatthews commented on PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA   planetscale.com/blog/plan... · Posted by u/munns
rcrowley · 3 months ago
The question isn't how many orphaned rows do you have, it's whether it matters. Databases are wonderful but they cannot maintain every invariant and they cannot express a whole application. They're one tool in the belt.
jashmatthews · 3 months ago
Most companies can afford not to give a shit until they hit SOC2 or GDPR compliance and then suddenly orphaned data is a giant liability.
jashmatthews commented on PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA   planetscale.com/blog/plan... · Posted by u/munns
petergeoghegan · 3 months ago
> In a previous use case, when using postgres as a WAL-like append only store, I noticed that indexes would get massive. Then, after a while, they'd magically shrink.

It's possible to recycle pages within indexes that have some churn (e.g., with workloads that use bulk range deletions). But it's not possible for indexes to shrink on their own, in a way that can be observed by monitoring the output of psql's "\di+" command. For that you'd need to REINDEX or run VACUUM FULL.

jashmatthews · 3 months ago
Does vacuum not release free pages at the end of an index file in the same way it does for the heap?
jashmatthews commented on PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA   planetscale.com/blog/plan... · Posted by u/munns
bri3d · 3 months ago
At large scale I'd say MySQL is still a competitor for a few reasons:

* Scale-out inertia: yes, cloud vendors provide similar shading and clustering features for Postgres, but they're all a lot newer.

* Thus, hiring. It's easier to find extreme-scale MySQL experts (although this erodes year by year).

* Write amplification, index bloat, and tuple/page bloat for extremely UPDATE heavy workloads. It is what it is. Postgres continues to improve, but it is fundamentally an MVCC database. If your workload is mostly UPDATEs and simple SELECTs, Postgres will eventually fall behind MySQL.

* Replication. Postgres replication has matured a ridiculous amount in the last 5-10 years, and to your point, cloud hosting has somewhat reduced the need to care about it, but it's still different from MySQL in ways that can be annoying at scale. One of the biggest issues is performing hybrid OLAP+OLTP (think, a big database of Stuff with user-facing Dashboards of Stuff). In MySQL this is basically a non-event, but in Postgres this pattern requires careful planning to avoid falling afoul of max_standby_streaming_delay for example.

* Neutral but different: documentation - Postgres has better-written user-facing documentation for user-facing functions, IMO. However, _if_ you don't like reading source code, MySQL has better internals documentation, and less magic. However, Postgres is _very_ well written and commented, so if you're comfortable reading source, it's a joy. A _lot_ of Postgres work, in my experience, is reading somewhat vague documentation followed by digging into the source code to find a whole bunch of arbitrary magic numbers. If you don't believe me , as an exercise, try to figure out what `default_statistics_target` _actually_ does.

Anyway, I still would choose a managed Postgres solution almost universally for a new product. Unless I know _exactly_ what I'm going to be doing with a database up-front, Postgres will offer better flexibility, a nicer feature-set, and a completely acceptable scale story.

jashmatthews · 3 months ago
> hybrid OLAP+OLTP .... in Postgres this pattern requires careful planning to avoid falling afoul of max_standby_streaming_delay for example

This is a really gnarly problem at scale I've rarely seen anyone else bring up. Either you use max_standby_streaming_delay and queries that conflict with replication cause replication to lag or you use hot_standby_feedback and long running queries on the OLAP replica cause problems on the primary.

Logical Decoding on a replica in also needs hot standby feedback which is a giant PITA for your ETL replica.

jashmatthews commented on Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth   twitter.com/premqnair/sta... · Posted by u/rfurmani
mikert89 · 5 months ago
seen many many cases first hand in NYC. Also, as an individual its very hard to sue a company with a huge amount of VC funding. you need a 100k to burn on it to even have a basic chance, and most cases are a legal gray area, most lawyers wont even take the case.

even finding a lawyer with the expertise to handle a case like this is not easy, its a very small world among those types of lawyers

jashmatthews · 5 months ago
Make friends with lawyers.
jashmatthews commented on NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency   lewiscampbell.tech/blog/2... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
xupybd · 5 months ago
The author is from New Zealand. You have to understand the Number 8 wire[1] mindset the has taken root there to put this in context.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_8_wire#:~:text=Accordin...

jashmatthews · 5 months ago
Purely vibes but as a Kiwi I feel like Number 8 Wire mentality has been dead for at least 20 years now.
jashmatthews commented on Ruby 3.4 frozen string literals: What Rails developers need to know   prateekcodes.dev/ruby-34-... · Posted by u/thomas_witt
corytheboyd · 5 months ago
I’ll just kill the comment. It said Symbol isn’t garbage collected. It has been since 2.2 and I wasn’t aware. Sorry.

Good reminder that anyone can go on the internet, just say stuff, and be wrong.

jashmatthews · 5 months ago
Symbols have been GCed since CRuby 2.2 https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9634
jashmatthews commented on GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom   techinasia.com/news/githu... · Posted by u/andrewstetsenko
soulofmischief · 6 months ago
That's a combination of current context limitations and a lack of quality tooling and prompting.

A well-designed agent can absolutely roll back code if given proper context and access to tooling such as git. Even flushing context/message history becomes viable for agents if the functionality is exposed to them.

jashmatthews · 6 months ago
Can we demonstrate them doing that? Absolutely.

Will they fail to do it in practice once they poison their own context hallucinating libraries or functions that don’t exist? Absolutely.

That’s the tricky part of working with agents.

jashmatthews commented on GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom   techinasia.com/news/githu... · Posted by u/andrewstetsenko
lunarboy · 6 months ago
It was only 2 years ago we were still taking about GPTs making up completely nonsense, and now hallucinations are almost gone from the discussions. I assume it will get even better, but I also think there is an inherent plateau. Just like how machines solved mass manufacturing work, but we still have factory workers and overseers. Also, "manually" hand crafted pieces like fashion and watches continue to be the most expensive luxury goods. So I don't believe good design architects and consulting will ever be fully replaced.
jashmatthews · 6 months ago
Hallucinations are now plausibly wrong which is in some ways harder to deal with. GPT4.1 still generates Rust with imaginary crates and says “your tests passed, we can now move on” to a completely failed test run.
jashmatthews commented on The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs   qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-c... · Posted by u/booleanbetrayal
hiatus · 6 months ago
> That one is incompatible with copyright laws in many countries outside USA.

How so? You can't sign away your interest in a copywrighted work?

jashmatthews · 6 months ago
The USA hasn’t managed to completely impose their idea of intellectual property on everyone yet. Some countries you can’t sign away authorship even if you can commercial rights.
jashmatthews commented on Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%   electrek.co/2025/05/27/an... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
tlb · 7 months ago
The original Tesla Model S went through a set of tires every 15k miles, not because of anything inherent to EVs, but because they came standard with super-soft Michelin Pilot Sport tires which give slightly higher grip than high-mileage tires. You can put harder compound tires on that last 50 or 75k miles.
jashmatthews · 7 months ago
Yeah the older Pilot Sport tyres wore out quickly. I had PS4 before and now PS5 and they are wearing at something like half to a third as fast? Very happy. Only slightly less grip in cold weather.

u/jashmatthews

KarmaCake day969January 21, 2018View Original