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It's not so much about size but about usage pattern.

If your workloads require fast writes and reads, SQLite will probably work fine.

If you're looking to run analytic, columnar queries (which tend to involve a lot of aggregation and joins on a few columns (say less than 50) at a time), then DuckDB is way more optimized.

Oversimplifying, Sqlite is more OLTP and DuckDB is more OLAP.


Also, I learned that Hive-partitioned Parquet on S3 is much slower than on disk.

S3 is high latency unless you use for S3 Express Zones (the low latency version).

We used EFS (not EBS) and it was much faster.


Test out the nvme drives though. It’s blazing.

I'm hoping someone writes a Python LSP that understands DuckDB SQL.

I use DuckDB and I typically write correct SQL, but having LSP assistance would greatly enhance my quality of life.


I think I used it twice this year to turn it back on because of power outages.

But yeah, I just sleep my Mac Mini. I have never needed to turn it off.


macOS can set to reboot on power loss, so I wonder if that's part of the rationale...that most machines are set to reboot when power (from the wall) resumes.

Oh I didn't know that! Found the setting. Now I really don't need to touch the power button.

Seems like reducing power consumption isn’t a thing anymore

When in sleep mode, Macs consume less than 1-3W of power, which is about the margin of error for most plugged-in devices. It draws ~5W idle and awake.

0W of a pulled plug is hard to beat

Are you unplugging your devices when you're not using them?

Yes

I do use LLMs to bootsrap my unit testing (because there is a lot boilerplate in unit tests and mocks), but I tend to finish the unit tests myself. This gives me confidence that my tests are accurate to the best of my knowledge.

Having good tests allows me to be more liberal with LLMs on implementation. I still only use LLMs to bootstrap the implementation, and I finish it myself. LLMs, being generative, are really good for ideating different implementations (it proposes implementations that I would never have thought of), but I never take any implementation as-is -- I always try to step through it and finish it off manually.

Some might argue that it'd be faster if I wrote the entire thing myself, but it depends on the problem domain. So much of what I do is involve implementing code for unsolved problems (I'm not writing CRUD apps for instance) that I really do get a speed-up from LLMs.

I imagine folks writing conventional code might spend more time fixing LLM mistakes and thus think that LLMs slow them down. But this is not true for my problem domain.


I couldn't see myself living in Northern Ontario either, but for some people, small town life is idyllic. There was even a popular Canadian sitcom portraying such a life ("Corner Gas", set in rural Saskatchewan). As a "city-slicker" I really enjoyed watching Corner Gas. It's like the Canadian version of Parks and Recreation except more rural.

I watched a lot of Corner Gas growing up, and once spotted Brent Butt with his wife in Vancouver where presumably they live. I think it's a wildly different perspective to have if you've either been born in a small town like that or have a legitimate reason to be there, such as being a farmer, than it is just pick an arbitrary place as a remote office location. For some, working remotely is a relief, and they do feel like they can finally get away from the city, but I feel like those people often don't do anything in the city anyway that cities are great for; they've not bothered to try and form much of an intimate connection with their community, or feel like their whole life can just be picked up and dropped off somewhere else without much sacrifice.

Yes, why would it not be? It’s still skin in the game.

If we think it’s a symbolic gesture, which it may well be, it is still a gesture that most CEOs would not have made. Unlike most here, I don’t think with this he’s saying please punish me for wrongdoing, but more I take responsibility for this failure (which could have happened many levels below him) and will take the loss personally.

Sounds like HN folks would love for Nadella to completely reduce his salary compared to last year. I don’t know that I agree. I’d say, let’s see you do it.


> Yes, why would it not be? It’s still skin in the game. [...] and will take the loss personally.

Because there isn't any loss overall? His compensation went up 63%, what are these losses you're talking about?

If his total compensation actually went down, I'd totally agree with you. But it didn't, which is why I don't understand how this is seen as "great leaders punish themselves".


He would've had 5 million more dollars this year if he didn't ask the board to change the terms of his contract to give him less money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost


Yeah, so he would have gotten $84.1 million instead of what he really got, only $79.1 million. Imagine being a CEO yet so poor.

So if I’m hearing you right, it sounds like you’re looking for net loss to justify the statement that “good CEOs punish themselves”, a statement made by another HNer and not by Nadella himself?

He did take a loss but not a net loss, so it didn’t go far enough is what I’m sensing?

Thus it’s an empty gesture devoid of any commitments to improve?

For me when I see gestures like this, I’m like oh ok. At some level I know it’s symbolic but it still sends a good signal. It doesn’t scream hypocritical to me.


Apple storage is indeed undersized.

But most of us work around this with a $2.99/mth iCloud+ subscription which gets us 200GB storage on the cloud. Not a deal but a trivial enough cost to not worry about running out of storage.

As a non pro user, this is perfectly ok for storing all of my 33k photos since 2007.


I think reading is necessary but insufficient for wisdom.

Reading lets you acquire the experiences that you personally cannot live out in your own life. It does provide leverage in that way.

However syntopical reading isn’t sufficient to produce good work. Mortimer Adler himself tried doing it (I believe the Syntopicon was a product of syntopical reading) but those works never did well and were soon forgotten.

Books encode canonical knowledge and this works in established domains but in a domains without much existing knowledge, taking action in perturbing the world actually produces more useful knowledge.

This is why in these spaces it’s important to test ideas in reality and learn from them, rather than only constructing mental models. (We should strive to do both instead of the just latter)

Action often produces more information than reading alone. Having ideas is often the easy part — executing on them is the hard part. If Mortimer Adler actually had some gauge on the market before pursuing the very ambitious multi year effort of producing the Synopticon, he might have produced something noteworthy (which he did with the much smaller experiment “How to read a book.”

To me, wisdom isn’t about thinking rightly (which is what rationalists hold) but about being able to make good decisions with good judgment.


It sounds like the topic is perceived wisdom (“what makes a person seem wise?”) rather than actual (practical) wisdom which is good use of knowledge and experience to make good decisions.

I say this because I know folks who seem wise (perceived as high IQ and EQ) but lack judgment, because they are working off models of the world that does not comport with reality, so their utterings do not work in real life. Wisdom isn’t about batting a thousand of course but wisdom is about always allowing reality be the teacher.

Many people who present as wise are academics and gurus and they sound really good on podcasts but don’t have much empiricism and experience doing hard things.

Ironically people who are reflective and have gone through the crucible of running a business (or doing something with a lot of headwinds) end up being actually wiser because they have to deal with world (and its flaws) as is, not as they think it should be.

Stonebraker is an opinionated figure in the database world but he has started so many companies and have dealt with the realities of how people use databases that his judgement (which could still be wrong by the way) would carry more weight than a pure database researcher who says all the right things.


Excellent point. That's why the truly wise people use "results" in terms of judging wisdom. If your thought is coherent, when you put it to practice - it works. And if it works - the desired result is produced. Doesn't mean all thoughts that lead to practical desirable results are borne of wisdom, but empirical success is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.


Right. I read a ton of business books in my day, many of them with great ideas, but when I came across Andy Grove’s High Output Management, it just hit different. Andy Grove being former CEO of Intel spoke from experience actually doing hard things, whereas many of the other books were written by people who were peddling wisdom to sell books. Not bad wisdom, just untested and not generalizable.

Working Backwards is another book full of practical wisdom that has actually been battle tested.


I've read Grove's work, and I agree with the "output" aspect being important. But I wouldn't consider "output" the only thing that connects to wisdom. I've heard of people I consider to be "wise" criticizing many of Andy's approach as well (I tend to agree). For me - say someone like Lee Kuan Yew - was quite a wise and practical man. Highly developed intellectually, socially, both pragmatic and respecting of scholars, etc. Wisdom can be considered a cluster of qualities if you will, of which "ability to get results" is a big factor.


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