Ty is still under very active development, so it either works or very much doesn't. I run it occasionally to see if it works on my codebases, and while it is getting closer, it isn't quite there yet.
For certain definition of realtime, certainly (as would any system with bounded ingestion latency), but it’s not low-latency streaming realtime. Tens of seconds or more can pass before new data becomes visible in queries in normal operation. There’s batching, there’s merging, and its overall architecture prioritizes throughput over latency.
Not defending mozilla adding AI to firefox, but...
If you've tried chrome recently, you'll know that it's jam packed full with even more stuff you don't want. And the article lays out how to easily disable all AI in firefox (which you cant do at all in Chrome)
I'm very pleased that disabling browser.ml.enable doesn't disable local translation. I don't need a dedicated UI for chat bots, but I find local translation very useful.
I think they make a pretty good browser. It is performant, supports blocking ads easily, standard compatible, customizable and recently even added support for vertical tabs. What are you missing?
I recently discovered that the sponsored sites on the homepage I had previously removed have reappeared. I've had similar issues with a few of the buttons on the browser chrome I had also removed. I'll still use it because I don't want to deal with the security and privacy nightmare that is ads. But it's a bit annoying to have to play this game of whack 'a mole.
I was mainly thinking about userChrome.css changes, which allow you to more or less rebuild the whole UI with code. Can't think of many other browsers that let you do that.
Vertical tabs are a native feature of Firefox for a few months now, and before that they were supported with an extension. userChrome.css was (then) used for hiding the original tabs.
I'm not sure what you mean with the context menus, but Web Extensions can add things to context menus.
Personally (I’m not the person you asked) I’m missing AppleScript support. Firefox is the only major browser without it, and the bug report for it is old enough to drink in every country.
That lack of capability prevents it from being my daily driver, even if the rest were good enough (I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m saying I have no reason to find out).
I am certain I have inadvertently pushed many people away from Firefox for that reason alone, because when they ask for me to add Firefox support for my tools, I have to tell them it’s impossible.
I have tried to talk to Firefox developers about that a few times, at open-source conferences and such, but they think AppleScript is some power-user feature and fail (refuse?) to understand power users drive adoption and create tools that regular users rely on.
I remember whenever a Firefox story was submitted on HN, multiple people commented “I want to use Firefox but it’s missing <whatever>”. Then Mozilla started doing a lot of questionable stuff (all of which they eventually abandoned) outside their core competency and even pulling distasteful marketing stunts, and at some point people started commenting even that. I presume many got tired and gave up on Firefox entirely. I almost have. I now root for them only conceptually, because browser diversity is good.
I also noticed that no matter how politely someone pointed out on HN “Firefox doesn’t fit for me because of <whatever>”, they always got downvoted. If valid polite criticism is buried, no wonder things stay the way they are.
> They're really not going to be able to dedicate resources to something as bijou as AppleScript.
They don’t need to do it themselves, they could just not stifle the efforts of third-parties who do want to and have worked on it. Multiple people started on it over the years and were simply ignored by the devs.
Probably because they don't want to take on that maintenance burden. Even just letting someone do that and merging it in is opening up a whooooole can of worms.
Then they should just say so and close the open issues, instead of letting them linger for literal decades and have people waste time on them then ignore them. That’s just bad stewardship.
Anyway, the reasons are irrelevant and I’m frankly tired of explaining this to
Firefox defenders. Someone asked “what about Firefox are you missing” and I responded with what it’s missing for me. Plugging your ears and coming up with excuses doesn’t move the needle. Accept it or don’t, it makes no difference. In the meantime I’ll continue being honest with my users that I would like to support Firefox but I can’t, and many of them will keep switching browsers.
The features that firefox does not support are few and far between, and, IME, usually things you do not necessarily want supported.
As a user, I do not want nor need my browser to support AppleScript. AppleScript is something that should not exist. In somewhat typical apple fashion, it's some NIH platform-specific bullshit that nobody really cares about and is only half-assed supported even on it's native platform. The only way to deter Apple from creating these sisyphus-ian pieces of software is to just stop supporting them and force their hand to use something less bespoke. Although, Apple is not the only culprit of this - nor are they even the worst about it.
If I had my way, Mantle would not exist, iMessage would not exist, and some others. We would live in a perfect utopia and then we'd all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
So first they didn’t do it because of the maintenance burden, and now it’s because the feature sucks and shouldn’t exist. If you’re going to keep ignoring my points and making up new things while moving the goalposts, I don’t see the point in having a discussion.
I’ll say it again:
> Plugging your ears and coming up with excuses doesn’t move the needle. Accept it or don’t, it makes no difference.
It's both, obviously. You asked for one reason, I gave it to you, you didn't like it, so I gave another reason. These are all speculative, of course, and just my opinion.
> If you’re going to keep ignoring my points and making up new things while moving the goalposts, I don’t see the point in having a discussion.
I'm not ignoring anything - it's called disagreeing with your points. Because I do disagree with them, to an extent.
I agree that Firefox is missing features. I DO NOT agree that this is generally, keyword generally, a bad thing.
Also, Firefox is not even the most behind browser. Uh, that would be Safari, and it's not even close.
If you don't support Firefox but you DO support Safari, then:
1. You must not give a flying fuck about web standards or features, as Safari is missing the most of both OR
2. You squarely target primarily Apple users so you have no choice but to put up with Apple's subpar software, i.e. you're Stockholm'd in
For option 2, the only way to stop that is to do what I said - stop playing Apple's games and don't target their bespoke barely-functional bullshit.
Also, let me just say: there is absolutely no shame in number 2. You have to make your money. Just a couple years ago, I was maintaining an application that still targeted IE 6. Yes, really. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do to reach the users where they are.
Everything about your answer is wrong and full of assumptions.
> You asked for one reason
No, I did not. I didn’t ask for any reason. I don’t need one, the result is the same.
> I gave it to you
No, you did not, you gave speculation. Which changes nothing.
> you didn't like it
I couldn’t care less about your speculation. I specifically said I don’t care. The only thing I don’t like is how you’re just making up reasons based on what you want and like, as if your tastes and needs are all that matters, instead of what’s the truth for Firefox development.
> I'm not ignoring anything
You moved the goal post without addressing my initial reply to your response, which poked a direct hole in your speculation:
> Then they should just say so and close the open issues, instead of letting them linger for literal decades and have people waste time on them then ignore them. That’s just bad stewardship.
You continue:
> it's called disagreeing with your points.
It makes no sense to disagree with a personal opinion! My reasons are my own. It’s like if you said you disagreed with me for saying I don’t like chocolate. Your opinion is irrelevant to someone else’s taste or needs.
And then the rest is just more speculation. Again, Firefox is the only major browser not supporting AppleScript. And just so you know, Chromium browsers typically support it better than Safari.
Interesting! The last time I used a Mac was many years ago, so I'm not sure what would you do with AppleScript in the browser. What are some example use cases?
Those are browser automation tasks. Most of them can be done with Playwright/Puppeteer/Selenium.
I don't see why a browser should have to support AppleScript specifically. The Chrome DevTools Protocol and WebDriver BiDi are the standard protocols for interacting with browsers programmatically. Firefox supports WebDriver BiDi. Just use any tool that supports it, or talk to it directly. Maybe AppleScript can do that, I wouldn't know.
That requires installing a third-party tool which doesn’t look to be under development, and is an entirely different interaction. Thank you, but that’s not adequate.
Just wait until someone has the bright idea to expose Apple Events over an MCP server or something. Then everyone will be scrambling to integrate applescript into their applications so they can cash in on the computer-use model craze.
Directly writing applescript is kind of terrible syntax (I doubt there is enough high quality data, even humans find it hard to write) and lacks the discoverability portion. The good part of AppleScript is the self-discovery (via scripting dictionary) and the general graphql-RPC-esque nature of apple events.
Longtime Firefox user here too. After the new privacy policy terms, I jumped to waterfox. I’m hoping it can last long enough for Ladybird to become stable enough to use as a daily driver. It’s very sad to watch Mozilla’s demise at the hands of advertisers.
Yes, because as we all know, Google would never shove AI or ads in your face.
I disagree with Mozilla here, too - but you can't cast Chrome as a magic spell. Chrome sucks ass. Google sucks ass. It's trivial to suck less ass than Google.
Chrome does suck ass, hence why I use Firefox and said I don't want to use Chrome, lol. But I want Firefox to be a good browser in its own right, not just "not Chrome". Firefox is just about over the "acceptable" line for me, as a power user for 15+ years (and under that line for most normal users) so I continue to use it, but they're neglecting it in favor of these useless AI features.
So much about Brave raises scammy red flags every time I look at it.
However, my main reason for ditching Chrome years ago was the fact that I think a browser engine monoculture is bad for the web as a whole, especially if that engine is primarily controlled by a single corporate entity.
Manifest v3 and other Google nonsense came later, and are extra reasons to stay away from Chrome, but I still feel strongly that a good alternative needs to use a different engine.
De-googled in the "we make some patches to remove things we think are hostile from Google" sense but yes: they're still completely reliant on them for engine development.
Yeah I'm not at all interested in Brave, that's a dumpster fire of it's own. And that still gives control to Google by owning the defacto implementation of browsing the internet. There needs to be an actual alternative to Chrome.
Pretty big caveat; 5 seconds AFTER all data has been loaded into memory - over 2 minutes if you also factor reading the files from S3 and loading memory. So to get this performance you will need to run hot: 4000 CPUs and and 30TB of memory going 24/7.
hi sdairs, we did store the data on the worker nodes for the challenge, but not in memory. We wrote the data to the local NVMe SSD storage on the node. Linux may cache the filesystem data, but we didn't load the data directly into memory. We like to preserve the memory for aggregations, joins, etc. as much as possible...
It is true you would need to run the instance(s) 24/7 to get the performance all day, the startup time over a couple minutes is not ideal. We have a lot of work to do on the engine, but it has been a fun learning experience...
“Linux may cache the filesystem data” means there’s a non-zero likelihood that the data in memory unless you dropped caches right before you began the benchmark. You don’t have to explicitly load it into memory for this to be true. What’s more, unless you are in charge of how memory is used, the kernel is going to make its own decisions as to what to cache and what to evict, which can make benchmarks unreproducible.
It’s important to know what you are benchmarking before you start and to control for extrinsic factors as explicitly as possible.
Thanks for clarifying; I'm not trying to take anything away from you, I work in the OLAP space too so it's always good to see people pushing it forwards. It would be interesting to see a comparison of totally cold Vs hot caches.
Are you looking at distributed queries directly over S3? We did this in ClickHouse and can do instant virtual sharding over large data sets S3. We call it parallel replicas https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-parallel-replicas
(I submitted this link). My interest in this approach in general is about observability infra at scale - thinking about buffering detailed events, metrics and thread samples at the edge and later only extract things of interest, after early filtering at the edge. I’m a SQL & database nerd, thus this approach looks interesting.
I don’t understand why both Azure and AWS have local SSDs that are an order of magnitude slower than what I can get in a laptop. If Hetzner can do it, surely so can they!
Not to mention that Azure now exposes local drives as raw NVMe devices mapped straight through to the guest with no virtualisation overheads.
It does make me wonder whether all of the investment in hot-loading of GPU infrastructure for LLM workloads is portable to databases. 30TB of GPU memory will be roughly 200 B200 cards or roughly 1200 per hour compared to the $240/hour pricing for the CPU based cluster. The GPU cluster would assuredly crush the CPU cluster with a suitable DB given it has 80x the FP32 FLOP capacity. You'd expect the in-memory GPU solution to be cheaper (assuming optimized software) with a 5x growth in GPU memory per card, or today if the workload can be bin-packed efficiently.
That's a great question. I never worked on any cool NASA stuff which would involve large scale number crunching. In the corpo space, that's not been my experience at all. We were trying to solve big data problems of like, how to report on medical claims that are in flight (which are hardly ever static until much later after the claim is long completed and no longer interesting to anyone) and do it at scale of tens of thousands per hour. It never went that well, tbh, because it is so hard to validate what a "claim" even is since it is changing in real time. I don't think excess GPUs would help with that.
lot's of columns are float valued, GPU tensor cores can be programmed to do many operations between different float/int valued vectors. Strings can also be processed in this manner as they are simply vectors of integers. NVidia publishes official TPC benchmarks for each GPU release.
The idea of a GPU database has been reasonably well explored, they are extremely fast - but have been cost ineffective due to GPU costs. When the dataset is larger than GPU memory, you also incur slowdowns due to cycling between CPU and GPU memory.
For background, here is the initial ideation of the "One Trillion Row Challenge" challenge this submission originally aimed to participate in: https://docs.coiled.io/blog/1trc.html
Wow (Owen Wilson voice). That's still impressive that it can be done. Just having 4k cpus going reliably for any period of time is pretty nifty. The problem I have run into is that even big companies say they want this kind of compute until they get the bill for it.
Are you asking how Dynamo compares at the storage level? Like in comparison to S3? As a key-value database it doesn’t even have a native aggregation capability. It’s a very poor choose for OLAP.
BigQuery is comparable to DuckDB. I’m curious how the various Redshift flavors (provisioned, serverless, spectrum) and Spark compare.
I don’t have a lot of experience with DuckDB but it seems like Spark is the most comparable.
BigQuery is built for the distributed case while DuckDB is single CPU and requires the workarounds described in the article to act like a distributed engine.
And yeah these days you can boost a single machine to enormous specifications. I guess the main difference will be the cost. A distributed engine can "lease" a little bit of time here and there, while a single RAM engine needs to keep all that capacity ready for when it is actually needed.
the https://sortbenchmark.org has always stipulated "Must sort to and from operating system files on secondary storage." and thus felt as a more reasonable estimate of overall system performance
ClickHouse doesn't use ZooKeeper anymore, and if you're just using a single server you don't need to worry about coordination :)
ClickStack/HyperDX is a polished OOTB stack that has an all in one image you can deploy to get started, so you don't need to worry about the ClickHouse side until you need to really scale (which is where ClickHouse really shines).
Yeah "Optimizing ClickHouse for Intel's ultra-high core count processors" is the original, unchanged article title, it's just been submitted slightly differently on HN (surprised mods haven't changed it here actually)
