I still can't understand why they decided to use a single database for all their customers. If each customer needs access to its own data, why not a dedicated database for every customer?
The difference between "pets" and "cattle" are that pets have state and need to be taken care of, you can't recreate them from scratch trivially. Cattle are stateless and can be created and destroyed easily.
The whole point of a database is to contain the state - as a pet - so the rest of your application can be stateless - as cattle.
To really get cattle database systems, you need a self-managing cluster architecture that puts things on autopilot like Neon where you've got >=2 copies of each row and can tolerate losing any single box without unavailability.
Multi-tenant design is a huge win in terms of reducing developer toil and expense.
Many customers will have a tiny amount of data. For those customers a dedicated database is huge amount of overhead. There may not be any single customer who it makes sense to allocate dedicated "hardware" for.
Sure you have to deal with a one-time pain to shard your thingy, but you don't need to pay for tens-of-thousands of individual database servers, write interesting tools to keep their schemas in sync, wrangle their backups, etc.
I don't mean one database server for each customer. I say one database for customer. Hundreds or thousands of customer can be on the same database server. When you need more resources, you add another server. If customer grows too much, you move it on another server.
There is a bit of overhead, but not huge by any means.
Being able to update schema one customer at a time is a huge plus in my view, as it gives you a lot of flexibility in rollout. You deploy a new version of the application on a new application server and move the customers on the new servers updating their schema one by one (automatically, obviously)
I've done this before where we ran a schema per customer and it was fabulous. Once the customer was large enough we could justify allocating a separate DB for them. The application was written in such a way that it knew which data store to query based on the user.
Well there's trade-offs with this too, whether needing aggregate data across shards for features, reporting, etc. Shared data between customers, users, etc. API access, etc.
Sure there are trade offs. If a significant part of the value of the app rely on data sharing or transactions between customers this is clearly unfeasible. But if the app mostly deals with a significant amount of private data of the customers that occasionally needs to be shared, I think using separate databases (not servers) is the safest option.
Well, this sound weird to me in the sense that I don't feel that I think in _words_. I only convert my thoughts into words when i need to speak or write them down; So when I need to communicate them to others, when I need to remember them for later, or when I am stuck and I need to clear things up.
I was actually convinced it was the same for most people, and that for this reason "Rubber duck debugging"[1] is a thing.
Am I the only one visualizing some of my most creative thoughts in a mental palace that is formed by many distinct (euclidian) spaces, whose axis connect to each other through a graph ? Closest thing that can describe this I found are simplicial sets:
I wish I had something like this in my head to tie things in together. Right now I feel like my understanding of things is so disorganised and "lucky" in a sense. I feel lucky that I have grasp of anything.
Wow, well expressed. That's exactly hoe i feel. Not momentarily, but with everything. Though i am actually not intelligent, i just have good intuition and luck to grasp some of what i need to "unddrstand".
Reminds me of the saying about a poet vs mathematician, the first gives different names to the same thing and the latter the same name to different things. Maybe that's why I can't stand highly descriptive prose (aka describing the water while I'm drowning over here).
Now what if you're a poetic mathematician (or mathematical poet), what's that mind map look like?
Well... what about that palace of mind thing, and the ability to rewind into almost all older memories at will, and on demand being able to look up things from there, like reading, without having it memorized at all? Also full stream of consciousness, like smells, tastes, light wind on your skin, 'silken air' at just the right temperature and humidity.
All of that arranged in something like 'eigengrau', represented by glitterlike points connected by graphs, mostly in 'phospene' colors, but not exclusively so.
Sometimes very non-euclidean, moving/warping.
KNOWING what's behind every glitter point, like small cinema, large home theatre, from several points of view at the same time.
No words involved. Just visuals.
Thinking, like juggling/weighing blobs, like that glowing stuff which moves slowly up and down in a lava-lamp.
Somehow 'knowing' what each blob, its size/form/viscosity/weight/speed/color/brightness/'feel'/smell represents.
Slowly emerging new 'visuals' from this. Which are then translated into 'language', if ever.
Not sure whether you talk about the uranium yellow/green color, or the brief hallucination of a light spot (happened to me just a few minutes ago, hadn't had one in a long time).
I don't have such an hyperbolic mental palace, and this doesn't really give me the ability to establish a global map but I relate a lot to what you wrote. Sometimes as I reach the climax of a long deep thought, I'm thinking via vision exclusively to the extent I don't even pay attention to what my outer eye sees and I stumble upon some insight that is sometimes almost impossible to convey in language, not because it lies beyond, but because the intrusion of language causes the idea to collapse: words points to dangling shapes that mean barely anything because the rest of the painting has gone away.
To those that have read this far and can't relate to this way of thinking, this isn't a superpower, those are rather rare experiences of altered states.
Talking about this is a kind of taboo and may cause some smiles, and indeed if there is a deeper truth to these experiences about the computational or geometric nature of the mind, maybe in the same way synaesthesia mirrors spectrograms, it won't help people working in machine learning a lot (even though some like Lecun seem to use their own visual introspective abilities as a source of inspiration).
However they may prove to be crucial in conceiving what kind of use brain chips should be put too. For now it seems we're walking through a thick fog in that direction with envisioned application being confined to interfacing to external computers or increasing cognitive abilities quantitatively, such as perfect memory and so on. If I could sustain such experiences durably, with a high level of control and enhanced geometric/mathematical understanding, I believe this would be akin to a superpower, yes.
>Now what if you're a poetic mathematician (or mathematical poet), what's that mind map look like?
Well look at the drawings I posted below: mathematical notions mixed with ad-hoc diagrammatic distinctive elements such as colors and marks. With maybe a theorem that posits that every mixed representation like theses matches a colorless, unannotated, rigorous mathematical object ?
In fact I come from a structural linguistics background, and when I pictured how one could extrude a semiotic square into another one, I felt like I understood the vague intuition behind homotopy type theory: the metaphor goes like this – the extrusion volume must be water tight for the squares to make sense.
Suppose you read Dostoyevsky's short story "Another Man's Wife and a Husband Under the Bed." In that case, you might notice that the protagonist's vertical position, as he eavesdrops on what he believes to be his wife through the wall of another man's apartment while standing alone in a corridor, mirrors the horizontal position he later assumes when hiding under the bed of his wife's presumed lover. This physical positioning reflects his moral descent, particularly as he is not alone this time. Beneath the bed with him is another man, clandestinely involved with yet another man's wife. This leads to help us picture that our protagonist is just as disconnected from his wife as the man lying next to him under the bed or the husband unknowingly sleeping above them—if not more so.
Granted I don't have the detailed vision of this semiotic diagram, but coming up with the skeletal structure is exactly what the job of a semiotician consists in (which I'm not). What matters is that all these equivalence classes the writer lays down, just like in mathematics, allows meaning to flow. His vertical loneliness must match his horizontal promiscuity for the story to operate this crescendo. Clog theses connections, and the inner structure of the object they tie together disappear too. Digging into Saussure and Voeivodsy one can realize they shared a common obsession about identity, for it is precisely when physical objects become indistinguishable that they can be referred to with the same terms and that conceptuality arises (Aerts, 2010s and onward).
"Different names to the same thing" and the "same name to different things": the two directions on the homotopical ladder.
Note: I'm 100% in postmodern mode here, this goes way above my head of course.
I don't know what a simpilician set is and wikipedia didn't really helped me. However I could roughly describe my "mind" as many mental maps where concepts are laid out and connected in different ways. Learning means putting new things on these maps a thinking is navigating through them.
This is just a deleuzian metaphor for the weird kind of space I perceive certain abstract thoughts with.
>many distinct (euclidian) spaces, whose axis connect to each other through a graph
Imagine having pictures hanged on the walls of your mental palace that act as portals to others rooms and corridors within that palace, and that must exist parallelly to each other, in different "universes" otherwise their volumes would intersect. The kind of geometry the Antichamber video game features.
Or picture this: a representation that relies on its axis to convey meaning, for instance the political compass meme. Walk along an axis long enough and it will connect orthogonally to another axis, for instance, authoritarianism may connect to anger from the emotional compass.
Simplexes: a generalization of triangles to n dimensions. A 2-axis representation (the political compass for example) could connect to spaces with 3 axis (the ascended political compass: https://external-preview.redd.it/UQgZCVQ4OLg_Hz16FGdu9-qxfq9...).
To represent this you could connect one tip of a segment (a 1-simplex) to the tip of a triangle (a 2-simplex), each vertex in these figures representing an axis. This is where my deleuzian metaphore collapses because I'm conflating the notion of axis with the notion of the "left" and "right" part of an axis. And I'd also be tempted to consider that planes should be allowed to connect to axis (to support that portal through a painting I mentioned above).
So this is just a sketchy thought, but this seems legitimate as it's not something I conceptualize but something I perceive (sometimes). But I think there may be something interesting behind these perceptions because it seems they deal with separate concerns through some kind of orthogonal geometry that is structured: putting a concept in a dimension orthogonal to another concept doesn't lead that dimension to be orthogonal to all other dimensions/concepts in your mental palace, as that would be the case if it took the shape of a n-dimensional space. And because the orthogonality is structured, it allows to deal with more than 3 concepts spatially at the same time and embed them within something your eye can picture in 2D or 3D, using diagrammatic annotations (colors, marks, etc). Finally it allows to put a concept C in several orthogonal relationships to distinct concepts, for instance A and B, and to keep these different instantiations of concept C orthogonal to each other.
This is what my mind pictured as I was explaining this ; colors and graduation marks/boxes faithfully representing what I just perceived: https://pasteboard.co/kMecyenyZdzg.png
Note that the two colors, the green of the axis and of red of the sticks could be thought as two individual concepts of their own, orthogonal to each other.
Really interesting. I could guess that people that "think in words" are more likely to share their thoughts on social media, since they don't need to translate them into text/speech like people that "think in concepts"
I guess from the results of this thread a larger percentage of HN has this condition, but my understanding from reddit threads is that it is quite abnormal. I also lack an internal narrative, and I was quite shocked to find out that most people literally have a voice that they 'hear' internally.
I'll paste my reply to another comment on this thread:
> I could guess that people that "think in words" are more likely to share their thoughts on social media, since they don't need to translate them into text/speech like people that "think in concepts"
So, maybe word-thinker are just over represented in "mainstream" social networks, and concept-thinker are over represented in engineering circles?
Same. If I try to visualize my thoughts it’s like a cloud that coalesces into various forms, to show different scenarios. It definitely isn’t word-based until I decide to actually translate it into that mode.
Interesting. I think all of my thoughts are this record I'm listening to as if it's an audiobook almost. Sometimes, it's like multiple parallel streams of different thoughts at different strengths that I can observe, like a thought line that is going on, on a more subconscious level, and it's something that if I notice, I might want to pay attention to.
Like multiple LLMs are generating tokens in my head in parallel, but like in my field of view, some I can only listen/see barely because I'm not focusing on them.
In what way does it look bad? Historically, digital-focus fonts have been drawn specifically to handle very lo res displays, or very small print applications (optical embellishment, ink traps, etc)… but given that type designers are notoriously detail oriented and that font files are collections of vectors, I can’t see a reason why the design would lead to these effects. Ironically (since this is a Microsoft post) Windows often mangles type display, so can browser settings and CSS defaults/resets.
It’s also possible this commenter is seeing a fallback default font if Atpos is not available / didn’t download correctly on their system configuration
It may as well be down to a matter of taste, but I found it quite harder to read.
I tried to find what exactly i dislike about it, and the impression I get is that the weight and the spacing (kerning?) is inconsistent on the line. It reminds me a bit of linux desktop before the availability of decent free fonts.
Before the web, the typical "client/server" application was a Windows program with a GUI that invokes queries and stored procedures directly on the database and shows the results.
If someone is tasked to port a similar application to the web, writing a PHP application that does the same is not a bad idea.
> The key is not unique. There is no primary key. So to hunt down all the properties of User 1, you have to do a query for all the records whose Key is 1.
In this example, the primary key would be ([User ID],[Key]). The primary key does not need to be a single field.
