skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: BemiDB – Postgres read replica optimized for analytics
Hi HN! We're Evgeny and Arjun, and we’re building a better way to do analytics with Postgres.

We love Postgres for its simplicity, power, and rich ecosystem. But engineers have to still get bogged down with heavyweight and expensive OLAP systems when connecting an analytics data stack.

Postgres is amazing at OLTP queries, but not for OLAP queries (large data scans and aggregations). Even in this case, we’ve still heard from countless scaling startups that they still try to use only a read replica to run analytics workloads since they don’t want to deal with the data engineering complexity of the alternative. This actually works surprising well initially, but starts to break for them as they scale or when integrating multiple data sources. Adding lots of indexes to support analytics also slows down their transactional write performance.

When growing out of “just use Postgres”, companies have to understand and wrangle complex ETL pipelines, CDC processes, and data warehouses — adding layers of complexity that defeat the simplicity that undermines their initial choice for Postgres as their data storage in the first place.

We thought there had to be a better way, so we’re building BemiDB. It’s designed to handle complex analytical queries at scale without the usual overhead. It’s a single binary that automatically syncs with Postgres data and is Postgres-compatible, so it’s like querying standard Postgres and works with all existing tools.

Under the hood, we use Apache Iceberg (with Parquet data files) stored in S3. This allows for bottomless inexpensive storage, compressed data in columnar files, and an open format that guarantees compatibility with other data tools.

We embed DuckDB as the query engine for in-memory analytics that work for complex queries. With efficient columnar storage and vectorized execution, we’re aiming for faster results without heavy infra. BemiDB communicates over the Postgres wire protocol to make all querying Postgres-compatible.

We want to simplify data stacks for companies that use Postgres by reducing complexity (single binary and S3), using non-proprietary data formats (Iceberg open tables), and removing vendor lock-in (open source). We'd love to hear your feedback! What do you think?
Ask HN: How to learn computer science from bottom up?
How can I learn computer science from the ground up, starting with fundamentals like logic gates, processors, and ALUs, and then moving on to OS and compiler design? Are there any free courses or materials available for this approach?
I meant the discord server for airtop
Communities own the roads, trucking companies are commercial.
Using Cedana to cut time to first token by almost 50%
> that Apple will collude with lots of security researchers, and because you're not invited to the party, nobody can prove that you're wrong.

Or conversely, because you and I aren't invited, we have been deliberately deprived of a legitimate opportunity and excuse to inspect the code. Even Apple's researchers aren't going to be put in a position where they can say with absolute certainty the server isn't backdoored.

This is puppet-show levels of security theater.
My favorite aspect is the music, I regularly listen to the OST while working: https://youtu.be/tqMuvFEKCOk

I've played a decent amount (never finished it), but I never understood why people say it's a horror game?
It looks like something that would be a lot of fun for a day or two and then end up in my attic where I would forget about it.

This is the kind of thing I should probably buy used on eBay and then resell it a week later.
I got a quote for trusses 1 year ago. A few weeks ago I walked into their office to order them, extremely worried the prices shot up. $500 less!

Prices do go down. I'll update you in a year after Trump is in place about the price of chips.
If you really want to buy pornography on the internet as a minor, you will have difficulties doing the transactions.

Aside from that you haven't thought about the implications of an ID system in the current political climate. Some advocates even state their real goals openly.

I don't think you are very liberal here for that matter. It is just a single issue, but it strongly correlates with positions around this particular topic.
I'm happy to see this, but you are but one person, and probably an outlier. GP was clearly talking about society in general.
It used to be "My Computer"
Great read!

Do you have any resources on getting started with Dreamcast game reverse engineering? I've been wanting to do some things with Skies of Arcadia, and I've been hoping there exist techniques more systematic than "see what values change between memory snapshots".
Here's what you are missing, the relative populations of native born and foreign born have changed over that time period. If you do the same thing for the population data (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/seriesBeta/LNU00073413) you see that the graphs are almost exactly the same. % of foreign born population goes from 17.5% to 22%, versus the 18.3% to 23.7% you called out for job change.
> it is 14 years old

Yes, but the Battle of Midway was 82 years ago, and it stands to reason that many good books on the battle already existed 14 years ago.

> and not the best source in this situation

That's subjective, which was one point I was trying to make in my comment.

> Can you read the entire post?

I did. I was compelled to comment due to your "Really Google?" snark, combined with the additional overwhelming snark in your comment upthread, when you're responding to a Googler who is just trying to help you.

And now you're here asking me if I read your entire post, which is explicitly against the HN guidelines. ("Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.") I have more thoughts on the topic of ranking, but it really doesn't seem worthwhile to comment further given the tone of these responses!
Why the ever-living fuck do you think I should take Apple's documentation seriously when they lied through their teeth about the Push Notification architecture?

This isn't source code, it's marketing.
Why did vibes take over from "gut feeling" I wonder
The term "capacity factor" should generally always be used for that concept, because "efficiency" has its own, different, meaning for power plants.
The Crypto Industry Spent over $130M on the Election. It Paid Off
Tension-Filled Black Holes
I haven't used submodules much (just one project for a few years), but the only flow that seemed to work is "never commit changes in the submodule."

You can change the code locally on-disk for testing, then submit your changes to upstream. Once you've got an upstream ref (preferably after merge), then you can update the submodule to match.

This does slow everything down though, unless you're cleverer about CI and deployment than we were (very possible).
Neither PO nor lead dev thinks AI is cool, but it’s a priority from top level management so it has to be put in one way or another.
I can't express the extent to which autodifferentiation was like a revelation to me. I don't work in ML, but in grad school around 2010 I was implementing density functional theory computations in a code that was written in Fortran 77. My particular optimization needs required computing to second derivatives. I had Mathematica to actually calculate the derivatives, but even just the step of mechanically translating the computed derivatives into Fortran 77 code would be a week of tedious work. Worse was rewriting these derivative expressions for numerical stability. The worst was realizing you made a mistake in an expression high in the tree and having to rewrite everything below. The whole process took months for a single model, and that's with chain rule depth that probably could be counted on one hand. I can't imagine deep learning making the kind of progress it has without autodifferentiation - the only saving grace is that neural networks tend to be composed from large number of copies of identical functions, and you only need to go to first derivatives.
> At least that’s a single problem that can be reigned in.

I don't understand what you're referring to. How do you recommend reigning in a newsroom? Especially one beholden to owners and advertisers with interests directly opposed to those of readers? How do you as a consumer opt out of the financial barriers to quality reporting? The only answer is the peer to peer nature of social media and the internet.

Perhaps what you're missing is that traditional media has zero incentive to highlight the positives of direct communication between disparate populations, creating farcically-negative hysteria about the dangers of worldviews not beholden to giant interests (yes, including domestic and foreign state powers, but also individual entities with massive capital to throw around).
Right - not exactly what we were referring to, but a really good product at a cheap price, nonetheless.
How do you mean that? China would not produce iPads for the rest of the world if the rest of the world was not buying iPads, right?

The graal of climate policy would actually be to be able to know precisely the impact of every single action we do. So that we could optimize properly. But because we can't do that, we have to rely on proxies, and that makes it error prone and practically very challenging.
Why would someone disagree with punishing crime? Are we living in reverse world where crime is the norm? How do we expect a functioning society if everything is expected to fail?
Could you elaborate further on the problem you see?

I don't see a problem with "things as they currently stand".
You can model a generative process, but it's necessarily an auto-regressive generative process, not the same as the originating generative process which is based on the external world.

Human language, and other actions, exist on a range from almost auto-regressive (generating a stock/practiced phrase such as "have a nice day") to highly interactive ones. An auto-regressive model is obviously going to have more success modelling an auto-regressive generative process.

Weather prediction is really a good case of the limitation of auto-regressive models, as well as models that don't accurately reflect the inputs to the process you are attempting to predict. "There's a low pressure front coming in, so the weather will be X, same as last time", works some of the time. A crude physical weather model based on limited data points, such as weather balloon inputs, or satellite observation of hurricanes, also works some of the time. But of course these models are sometimes hopelessly wrong too.

My real point wasn't about the lack of sensory data, even though this does force a purely auto-regressive (i.e. wrong) model, but rather about the difference between a passive model (such as weather prediction), and an interactive one.
Location: Hemet, California, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: React.js, TypeScript/JavaScript, Node.js, Next.js, Material UI, AWS, Redux, Firebase, GCP, Git, WebSocket, Canvas, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, HTML, CSS, Remix

Résumé/CV: https://patrice.vercel.app

Email: patricereddick902@yahoo.com

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/preddick902757/

Intro: I am a Senior Full Stack Developer with 10+ years of experience, mainly in Start ups. Specialized in React, TypeScript, and Node.js
To you and GP - I think the original title was misleading, and I tried not to and hope I succeeded in not editorialising. Editorialising is injecting personal opinion instead of focusing on the facts, which is the opposite of what I did. I removed the misleading ambiguity and instead stated as clearly and shortly as I could the essence of the story.

The original title leaves open the idea that this decision doesn't have a precedent which it is overturning, which is unnecessary and misleading. And the original title strongly implies that the recent revelation from Meta only relates to the U.S., which similarly is not true and is misleading.

For a U.S. audience that might seem to make sense, but HN has international readers.
I don’t follow - what do you mean by this?
Ask HN: Can current AI learn calculus by reading a single calculus textbook?
For example, after reading one high school calculus textbook, would the AI be able to solve high school calculus problems?

Are there any AI benchmarks that test this kind of learning from a math textbook?
Yeah we should call this whole thing off and spend the money on solving poverty! /s
Patients Are Suing over Alleged Side Effects of Weight-Loss Drugs
I agree with your logic. However, fear of nuclear waste, rational or not, has been a major driver of public opposition for decades, and is worth the focus.
In addition to minimum wages indexed for inflation, more unions and stronger labor protection laws that allow the unions to negotiate.

Also on the entrepreneurship side, more public support for small to midsize companies that share capital and power with their workers.

Plutocracy and oligarchy (what we have today) and the modern serfdom they rely on suppress the creative and industrial talents of workers.
The problem here is that Pidgin's development didn't manage to keep up with the changing times. Stable branch is 10-15 years behind XMPP features. The developers are working on a Pidgin 3.0 (rewrite?) but that still has quite some way to go.

Unfortunately Pidgin was one of the most popular ways to use XMPP back in the day, and this had a knock-on effect on XMPP's reputation as an out-of-date technology. People still install Pidgin today and tell me, yep, XMPP hasn't changed since 2006. Which couldn't be further from the truth.
Try engage with Entrepreneur First. Great community
... *puts tin foil hat on* ...

let me tell you a story...
"The Working Songwriter" is a fantastic podcast, each week they interview a singer-songwriter about their career. A lot of the talk is about compounding their audience, expanding their market outside their hometown, forming and dissolving bands, marketing strategies, etc. Stories of friends who were on the same path but didn't make it to "cruising speed", etc. If you pull a guest up on Spotify, most have their top songs with < 1M listens, but some will have a single big hit that you've heard before with say 20M listens, and a deep catalog of 10k listens behind that. https://theworkingsongwriter.com/
I kind of suspect it might be worth clarifying what a language is and how it's differentiated from culture. I've heard that honorifics works differently in Korean language e.g. for a supervisor in work situation where one is not expected to use one for his own supervisor in Japanese, while one absolutely is in Korean, and I feel that's more towards culture while also possible to include in grammatical ruleset.

> cooked I can't do, sashimi I'm fine

btw completely understand this. My technical brain says just pure NaCl and pure heat for a whole fish as caught with absolutely no herbs allowed is technically crazy. I hated the brown chiai regions in buri slices growing up. It's crazy that yaki-zakana, literally "roast fish" is one of characteristic dish of the country.
Sigh... I'm not giving a physics lecture. Just speaking casually. The neutron energy imparts kinetic energy to particles which can be harvested in a well engineered system
Meh.

https://about.psyc.eu/Jabber
Tastes may be siloed but they're also a lot more concentrated. Recorded pop music is bigger than ever. In an environment where recommendation services drive a lot of discovery, music is more winner take all than ever.
I can't figure out where the fog goes.
> Liking a video ... might end you up in an interesting conversation, getting laid, finding a life partner, all sorts of things.

How? Give an example that actually happened. If you can, address the relative likelihood vs. in-person contact.
Still waiting for the sequel, seems to be getting a bit overdue . . .
The dinner was to celebrate getting acquired, which was a wide team effort. The cost savings I did was one of the pieces I contributed.

Don't assume that a steak dinner was the only recognition we got.

As far as comp: I was well taken care of, and I won't discuss more in a public forum.
If I had a time machine, I’d make something where text posts are free, but need to pay for photo/video storage. Add some procedural graphics for efficient flare. The circles functionality would be helpful also.

Launch? Need a marketing budget and someone who knows how to spend it wisely. Maybe a contest as well.
Sony's PS5 has had this cool feature from launch, Nov 2020. But doesn't offer game event metadata integreation to the timeline like Steam.

A github project exists for another SDK for videogame recording editing, fwiw.

https://github.com/lulzsun/RePlays
You can since you can still inspect the traffic. However, it is like finding needle in a haystack since there is quite much of traffic.
Non-profit newsrooms that speak truth to power
Sorry, why do you believe these entities have no intent nor goals? That's a very odd assumption to make.

As always, I highly recommend Manufacturing Consent, which well illustrates how to examine financial interests to determine the above. Propaganda does not require conspiracy nor explicit instructions on what messages to convey; it only requires a class of people produced from the same environment, aiming to reproduce that same environment.
It's weird to me anyone thinks this is going to improve?

The exact opposite is very likely to happen in the next four years, a federal ban on community networks, lobby paid for by the same big telecom that was previously doing it piecemeal at the local level, they'll just buy 100 rooms at that special hotel in DC and the bill will get signed in sharpie like a 5-year-old.

Sure, it will end up at the supreme court in a lawsuit but of course that's a lock too now.
I guess I just don't see how this is any different from using external libraries. Yes, bumping a library from v3.2.4 to v3.2.5 can sometimes break your build. So, the solution is we stop using versioning?

No, you just pin your app to v3.2.4 until a working update is made (either to the library or to your own app). I'm not sure why that suddenly becomes an impossible task once the creators of the app and the library work for the same parent company.

> Knowing when no one uses older versions is also hard

That's the thing though - you don't have to care. If you delete an interface, just bump the version number accordingly. People who still need the interface will stay on the old version. (And - bonus - they are now placed under implicit pressure to refactor their code away from using that old interface, now that they know it's deprecated and will no longer be maintained. By contrast, if you have a practice of keeping code around code just because people are still using it, that code tends to just stick around forever.)
Polyurethane spray foam is pretty damn fiery in most conditions, even if the right number of carcinogenic flame retardants can limit open flame spread on a surface. It's also got the most toxic, thick sort of smoke of the available options, other than the polyiso in Grenfall.

There are two inherently fire-safe, inexpensive insulation options, borated cellulose and mineral wool. You can even use them as fire-stops. Neither are good to use in an application where they receive rain.

Polystyrene and fiberglass get runner up status because they melt & retreat from a fire at sub-ignition temperature, which doesn't spread the flame but does open up the wall.
Or something written by William S. Burroughs.
This 100%. It’s hard to serve ads to someone using your service through a text based irc client running 24/7 on a vps
What Trump 2.0 means for tech at home and abroad
Zuckerberg has drastically improved his PR in the last couple years, I'm starting to really like the guy!
I’d say greatly reduced in magnitude, but not irrelevant. I’d also prefer to use middleware like PgBouncer or PgCat rather than relying on a library’s connection pooler, mostly because the latter IME has a habit of causing fun surprises from people not properly handling transactions.

> “don’t do that”

If I could get people to use RDBMS properly, I’d be both thrilled and potentially out of a job.
That's easy to explain--cultural and media institutions have disparaged Republican voters for so long that Trump voters inherently distrust pollsters. They might or might not turn out in a given election, but they have nothing to gain by telling anybody.
nice! I had building something similar a while back based on semafor [1]

[1] https://hackernews-semafor-duhw.vercel.app/
VCs preparing term sheets as we speak
The classic example is Homer's "Wine-dark sea", but it gets a lot more complicated than that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
PCC is fundamentally more secure than merely encrypting at rest and auditing access. That still has a variety of attack vectors such as a software bug that leaks data.

Apple is unable to access the data even if subpoenaed, for example, and this is provable via binary audits and client verification that they are communicating with an auditable node.
That's disturbing and news to me. I didn't vote for Biden. The only time I voted for the winner in a Presidential election was my vote for Trump in 2016. But my vote for Trump was due to my theory that electing the dumbest, most corrupt, incompetent asshole possible is what America deserves.
> Um, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Yahoo, YouTube, Skype, and AOL are/were PRISM Service Providers

Correct. I didn't say all cloud providers aren't part of prism, just that many (most?) aren't scrutinized like Apple is.

> From my perspective, those guys all tend to honor the demands of any state that offers a statistically significant percentage of current/potential consumers

I know. It's awful, we don't have to defend it just because "the other guy" does it. Microsoft and Google left markets over this sort of disagreement, but curiously Apple doesn't.

> until someone shows me compelling evidence that Apple is /not/ acting in good faith towards both their consumers and the governments under which they operate, I see no reason to believe that they’re “lying about this one too”.

...do I have to link you the notification thing again, or is that evidence that the government is acting in bad faith and Apple is entirely scott-free for deliberately lying about their security/privacy marketing while being coerced to pretend nothing bad happened?

See, part of the problem isn't just comparing Apple to their competitors, but to their own advertisements. Apple knew their security was compromised but continued to promote their own security and even fabricate entirely misleading documentation for their own supposed system. This is why I will never be satisfied unless Apple nuts up and shows everyone all of the code. They have proven beyond a shadow of doubt that they will exploit anything we take for granted or are told to accept as-written.
Or you could just not water it, not fertilize it, not pesticide it and simply run the mower over it whenever the assorted vegetation (which will be mostly grass) exceeds a certain height.

It won't look "nice neighborhood" nice but it'll still be fine.
I agree with your position: working for Meta means selling out your moral values.

The argument I see for doing so is usually, "If I don't, someone else will, so I might as well be the one making money off it." I think people tell themselves that as a way to avoid thinking about the ethics of what they're doing. What they're actually saying is, "I value money more than upholding these moral principles"

But I disagree that everyone working there wants to operate ethically and I strongly disagree with the sentiment that the company's moral failings are "due to no fault of their own" because it enables people to be silently complicit. Operating ethically requires individuals to take action to uphold their values.