Jobs are the only way that you survive in this society (food, shelter). Look how we treat unhoused people without jobs. AI is taking jobs away and that is putting people's survival at risk.

It's such a shame, because they had one of the best services out there. Being able to push via Git and end up with a running deployment was a killer feature. It may not have been the first (Elastic Beanstalk was way older but when it first came out it was Java only iirc, ick) but it was incredibly popular.

Seeing them now chasing AI as a "me too" after being acquired by Salesforce just shows that huge companies will acquire something then sit on it for years and let it rot.

Yup, their Git Push Deployment was really a killer concept and a huge gateway for people just writing good apps not needing to care about infra and still being able to get a production-ready setup.

Even when you build cool things it's respectful not to plant them in HN comments :)

I think the usual solution to this is to talk about cool stuff you've done that is only incidentally relevant to the product you're selling. For example, some detail on how you built a technical system or solved a problem, etc...

I think it's a good idea, as a decades long user of InnoDB. I hope that the work can be shared with other forks of MySQL

Great article, shows a lot of interesting PostgreSQL features. I have used PostgreSQL and MySQL for decades, and this article showed me that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

I've used Postgres for more than a decade and everytime I wade into the docs I feel the same way, I'm barely scratching the surface. It's so immensely powerful.

I love what LLMs are doing for me in PG's SQL. I discovered many features by having LLMs write them for me, often spot-on 100% on first prompt.

Since I know conceptually how RDBMSes work, I can ask vey specifically what I want. Also asking for feedback on schemas/queries really helped me. I use a lot more of PGs features now!

PostgreSQL is like Emacs. It's an operating system disguised as something else.

the way PG was originally implemented does have some overlap with operating systems design IMHO.. PG internals define and use PG tables in internal schema to implement core architectural features. The PG code that bootstraps the PG environment is minimal in important ways.

I've heard Postgres described as a "database framework".

"AI might be destroying knowledge, causing harm to society, and making people intellectually lazy but it benefits me for a small period of time!"

Socialized losses, private profits

You completely missed the point of that quote. The point of the quote is to highlight the fact that automated systems are amoral, meaning that they do not know good or evil and cannot make judgements that require knowing what good and evil mean.

They are on a international body that is investigating allegations of war crimes and genocide that the United States and Israel have committed in Gaza

When Starcloud put together that whitepaper the first thing I looked at was the launch costs[1]. It references a $5M cost to launch, which right away made absolutely no sense to me. Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch, if not more.

It's great that this site drills down even further to demonstrate that there is absolutely no point at which the launch costs ever make this economical or viable, so I really don't understand what people are doing.

Especially because this site was harping for years about the cost of launches and putting things in to orbit, the whole reason why SpaceX got started and has grown as it has. As soon as that became an inconvenient number, we now just make things up (Just pretend that launch costs are 10% of what they actually are to get people to invest?).

[1]: https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

Don't confuse launch _price_ with launch _cost_. It's been estimated the internal F9 launch costs are around $15M-$20M.

The $5M is a marginal cost-target for fully reusable Starship.

> Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch

I think datacentres in space are predicated on Starship bringing launch costs down. Way down.

Spinlaunch is also promising drastically reduced cost per launch. The payload size for their first launcher is pretty small and they appear to be struggling to get the kinetic launcher online.

Spinlaunch is an outright scam. Their main product is taxing people for inadequate knowledge of basic physics. And engineering. Also… common sense.

This does make me appreciate some of the decisions that Zig has made, about passing allocators explicitly and also encouraging the use of the ArenaAllocator for most programs.

Since Zig built up the standard library where you always pass an allocator, they avoided the problem that the article mentions, about trying to retrofit Go's standard library to work with an arena allocator.

Although, that's not the case for IO in Zig. The most recent work has actually been reworking the standard library to be where you explicitly pass IO like you pass an allocator.

But it's still a young language so it's still possible to rework it.

I really do enjoy using the arena allocator. It makes things really easy, if your program follows a cyclical pattern where you allocate a bunch of memory and then when you're done just free the entire arena