Hacker News: cmollis

New comment by cmollis in "Dad Didn't Need a TaskRabbit"

cmollis — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:38:12 +0000

when I was young, we lived with my grandparents after my parents divorce. My grandfather worked in a factory in trenton, NJ; in fact, both of my grandfathers did..now there are no factories. Nevertheless, he had a garage full of tools, vises (and vices.. i used to find his cigarettes and try one here and there). Maybe just by sheer proximity, i would find his tools and try to build things.. badly, but i did learn how to cut things, bend things, screw things together. As I got older, i got into sports so I stopped 'tinkering', but I never forgot it. I took apart my moped engine just to see if I could put it back together.. I almost got it right. I built a gangplank for my parents boat that i thought was pretty sturdy. I proudly brought it down to their boat for a ceremonious 'launch'. I took a single step on it and unceremoniously fell through it into the bay (true story). I didn't think I was smart enough to go into engineering, so I decided in a very roundabout way to go into computer science in college. This scratched my itch to build something.. anything, and I turned it into a marginally successful career. My step dad was also very handy around the house. I distinctly remember my mother asking me to hang with my step dad to learn how he fixed all of our cars. My answer : 'I'll just pay someone to do it,' Naivete at its finest. Although, admittedly, I'm an average developer, but I'm still endlessly fascinating with making things.. even more fascinated with learning how other smarter people do it (thanks HN!). When I became home owner, I was never daunted by installing light switches, building shelves, minor plumbing or car repairs, anything. I think it goes back to my grandfather's garage of my youth. The article talks about the intense structure of childhood.. the endless competition of college admissions, the lack of time to just 'tinker' or make things.. however dumb or useless . I see all of that in my own kids who haven't had the same 'time' for lack of a better word. Of course, the brutal economics of adulting will literally force some of that on you, but without some kind of introduction to it, you're at a distinct disadvantage. I'm glad I had at least some kind of exposure to it as it doesn't really go away.

New comment by cmollis in "I Created Rosie's mRNA Vaccine Protocol"

cmollis — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:06:34 +0000

amazing.

New comment by cmollis in "Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?"

cmollis — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:58:09 +0000

yes, so bored. yada yada.. i've been 'obsolete' for 36 years and counting.

New comment by cmollis in "The Average Cost of a Family Health Insurance Plan Is Now $27,000"

cmollis — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:44:10 +0000

i have the most bare-bones plan with an HSA.. for me and my three kids, it was 19K per year.. and that was basically nothing more than catastrophic insurance.. I don't think my provider actually paid for anything in the last 4 years except for my son's hospital stay (which I paid the max per person out-of-pocket for). Everything else has been paid out of my HSA.. which is at least discounted by my tax rate. Interesting tidbit, I was actually almost broke about 8 years ago after my divorce, so I didn't pay for healthcare for myself for one year, just my kids. When I notified by doctors about this, they actually were very helpful getting me prices for each procedure.. and they were very helpful directing me to hospitals in the area that actually cater to those without health insurance. Grand total for healthcare for me in that year : $300. I pay 500 per month each month for myself now (because of my age).. yet i use almost none of it... and if I did, I would have to pay out of my HSA. Now, I know that I'm paying for catastrophic conditions.. yada yada.. but being mostly 'healthy' I literally use none of that.. there is no way that health insurance providers will ever cover for anything other than what my age is.. and why? because they'll say that it is the most accurate indicator of general 'health'.. ignoring anything related to how much of the health care system that I use, or much prevention that I personally enage in (diet, exercise, etc, etc).. in the same way car value is a function of miles.. not necessarily how much maintenance has been put into it. It's a simple metric, and easy to fleece healthy people to cover those not healthy. There's only one thing that matters at all: profit margin.

New comment by cmollis in "Thiel and the Antichrist"

cmollis — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 15:33:25 +0000

It seems to me that if I were actually the Antichrist, the first thing I would do is identify the antichrist as someone else. Then, I would give a lot of pseudo scientific reasons why I think that the antichrist is someone other than me, so the idiots who listen to my bs will give me their money so I can continue my work as the antichrist.

New comment by cmollis in "US Measles Cases Pass 1500, Worst Outbreak Since It Was Eliminated 25 Years Ago"

cmollis — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 19:53:29 +0000

have your kid suffer through measles because you believe some clown on tv.. when you could completely prevent it if you had your kid get the same vaccine you yourself got.

New comment by cmollis in "Polars Cloud and Distributed Polars now available"

cmollis — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 13:12:59 +0000

can i run a distributed computation in pola.rs cloud on my own AWS infra? or do I need to run it on-prem?

New comment by cmollis in "DeepSeek's smallpond: Bringing Distributed Computing to DuckDB"

cmollis — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 15:49:41 +0000

spark is getting a bit long in the tooth.. interesting to see duckdb integrated with Ray for data-access partitioning across (currently) 3FS. probably a matter of time before they (or someone) supports S3. It should be noted that duckdb (standalone) actually does a pretty good job scanning s3 parquet on its own.

New comment by cmollis in "US Department of State plans to spend $400M on Tesla armoured vehicles"

cmollis — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 12:15:34 +0000

...and that's why he spent 250MM on the election. (SpaceX contracts coming soon).

New comment by cmollis in "How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley into Trump's Arms"

cmollis — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 18:58:32 +0000

clearly talking his book. whatever.

New comment by cmollis in "Farewell Pandas, and thanks for all the fish"

cmollis — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 17:11:41 +0000

true spark has existed for years and is a great toolset.. i use it ever day. it's also a huge hassle spinning clusters up and down and configuration is complex.

I can execute some pretty hairy scans against a huge s3 parquet dataset in Duckdb that I would typically have to run in either spark or athena.. it's a little slower, but not ridiculously slower. And, it does all of that from my desktop.. no clusters, no mem or task configs.. just run the query. Being able to integrate all of the expensive historical scanning and knitting that back into an ML pipeline with desktop python is pretty nice.

New comment by cmollis in "Amazon's exabyte-scale migration from Apache Spark to Ray on EC2"

cmollis — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 21:38:50 +0000

exactly.. parquet is good for append only.. stream mods to parquet in new partitions.. compact, repeat.

New comment by cmollis in "Ask HN: What brought back the joy of programming for you?"

cmollis — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 21:05:36 +0000

Rust and scala

New comment by cmollis in "Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago"

cmollis — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 11:21:46 +0000

yes.. that is correct (also worked there 2000-01). Bertelsmann offered 1B to settle the suit with the Labels (including the ones Bertelsmann owned, somewhat ironically) so the subscription service that we were building could go live, but this was rejected out of hand. After that, it was an existential moment for the entire Industry.. until Steve Jobs pitched what Apple had been working on (iTunes). My personal recollection was that probably at no other time would the Music Industry agree to the terms that Jobs wanted for the iTunes service, but there literally were no other viable options at the time so they agreed. you know the rest.

New comment by cmollis in "Supabase Storage now supports the S3 protocol"

cmollis — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 13:57:37 +0000

Yes. Duckdb works very well with parquet scans on s3 right now.

New comment by cmollis in "M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake"

cmollis — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 16:42:30 +0000

we've had tornadoes in NJ..

New comment by cmollis in "Differential storage: A key building block for a DuckDB-based data warehouse"

cmollis — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 17:32:09 +0000

sounds a bit like what Iceberg does with writes on parquet.

New comment by cmollis in "Perf Is Not Enough"

cmollis — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 12:13:05 +0000

I've been testing duckdb's ability to scan multi-tb parquet datasets in S3. I have to say that i've been pretty impressed with it. I've done some pretty hairy SQL (window functions, multi-table joins, etc).. stuff that takes less time in Athena, but not by that much. Coupled with its ability to pull and join that data with information in RDB's like mysql make it a really compelling tool. Strangely, the least performant operations were the mysql look ups (had to set SET GLOBAL mysql_experimental_filter_pushdown=true;). Anyway.. definitely worth another look.. i'm using v 9.2

New comment by cmollis in "Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)"

cmollis — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 22:37:04 +0000

I always thought it was easier to read code than to write it.

New comment by cmollis in "A bird's eye view of Polars"

cmollis — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 12:47:19 +0000

Also, duckdb allows you convert scan results directly to both pandas and pl dataframes.. so you can mix and match based on need.