Hacker News: georgewfraser

New comment by georgewfraser in "Anthropic, please make a new Slack"

georgewfraser — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 01:37:22 +0000

I assure you I wrote it myself

New comment by georgewfraser in "Anthropic, please make a new Slack"

georgewfraser — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:21:19 +0000

Claude-in-Slack is a big enough feature to overcome the slack-connect network effect. Openness is absolutely key! I wrote this post because I hoped that if Anthropic is already planning to do this I might be able to influence them to make open-data part of the plan. But openness by itself isn't a big enough feature to get users.

New comment by georgewfraser in "Anthropic, please make a new Slack"

georgewfraser — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:14:28 +0000

Also true! The most important thing is that the NewSlacks commit to interoperability. I think Anthropic has a special opportunity to lead the way here, because they have a track record of standing by their principles to an extraordinary degree.

New comment by georgewfraser in "Anthropic, please make a new Slack"

georgewfraser — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:01:43 +0000

You can only access public channel data, you can't even access that at scale, and Claude needs to be more natively integrated in ways that Slack will never allow.

Anthropic, please make a new Slack

georgewfraser — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:52:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.fivetran.com/blog/anthropic-please-make-a-new-slack

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280200

Points: 272

# Comments: 253

Salesforce is tightening control of its data ecosystem

georgewfraser — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:05:42 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cio.com/article/4108001/salesforce-is-tightening-control-of-its-data-ecosystem-and-cios-may-have-to-pay-the-price.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307355

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by georgewfraser in "Timescale Is Now TigerData"

georgewfraser — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 04:04:21 +0000

I talked to the timescale CTO at pg conf a few years ago and asked him what timescale does differently than a standard columnar database that makes it better suited for time oriented data. He said a bunch of things and I said “but columnar databases do those things.” Then he got mad at me.

I guess it’s just another columnar dbms after all?

New comment by georgewfraser in "DuckLake is an integrated data lake and catalog format"

georgewfraser — Wed, 28 May 2025 01:33:38 +0000

They make a really good criticism of Iceberg: if we have a database anyway, why are we bothering to store metadata in files?

I don’t think DuckLake itself will succeed in getting adopted beyond DuckDB, but I would not be surprised if over time the catalog just absorbs the metadata, and the original Iceberg format fades into history as a transitional form.

New comment by georgewfraser in "Fivetran to acquire Census"

georgewfraser — Thu, 01 May 2025 18:53:39 +0000

This is exactly right. We even went so far as to build a proof of concept internally, and the technical challenges are just very different. The simplest way to explain it is that Fivetran connects a skinny pipe (APIs) to a fat pipe (databases) while Census connects a fat pipe to a skinny pipe.

New comment by georgewfraser in "Vertical Sharding Sucks"

georgewfraser — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:41:28 +0000

I am generally a huge vertical sharding skeptic but there are special cases where it is beneficial. If you have a simple query pattern on one table that represents a big fraction of your entire workload you can put it into its own instance and it becomes much easier to monitor. It’s easy to see why vertical sharding is sometimes the right answer by inverting the decision: should we put two unrelated large applications on the same instance? Obviously not, there is no benefit and ops becomes more difficult.

New comment by georgewfraser in "The Evolution of SRE at Google"

georgewfraser — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 18:41:56 +0000

Like so many things from Google engineering this will be toxic to your startup. SREs read stuff like this, they get main character syndrome and start redoing the technical designs of all the other teams, and not in a good way.

This phenomenon can occur in all “overlay” functions, for example the legal department will try to run the entire company if you don’t have a good leader who keeps the team in their lane.

New comment by georgewfraser in "Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (2022)"

georgewfraser — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 21:12:42 +0000

In general, I absolutely agree with you. It’s basically an instance of “the customer is always right”: if a smart customer can’t get our product working, there is a problem with the product. But this post made a much bolder (and wrong) claim: “the product has a number of major design flaws that mean that it literally cannot work”.

New comment by georgewfraser in "Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (2022)"

georgewfraser — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 19:32:16 +0000

I have some insight into this because this claim is about my company Fivetran:

“…relies on the data source being able to seek backwards on its changelog. But Postgres throws changelogs away once they're consumed, so the Postgres data source can't support this operation”

Dan’s understanding is incorrect, Postgres logical replication allows each consumer to maintain a bookmark in the WAL, and it will retain the WAL until you acknowledge receipt of a portion and advance the bookmark. Evidently, he tried our product briefly, had an issue or thought he had an issue, investigated the issue briefly and came to the conclusion that he understood the technology better than people who have spent years working on it.

Don’t get me wrong, it is absolutely possible for the experts to be wrong and one smart guy to be right. But at least part of what’s going on in this post is an arrogant guy who thinks he knows better than everyone, coming to snap conclusions that other people’s work is broken.

New comment by georgewfraser in "Show HN: Peerdb Streams – Simple, native Postgres change data capture"

georgewfraser — Tue, 07 May 2024 02:08:36 +0000

You can partition your BigQuery table however you like and Fivetran will leave it in place. I don’t think there’s any benefit to partitioning the staging table.

New comment by georgewfraser in "PostgreSQL reconsiders its process-based model"

georgewfraser — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 03:26:38 +0000

I wonder if it would be easier to create a C virtual machine that emulates all the OS interaction, then recompile Postgres and the extensions to run on this. Perhaps TruffleC would work?

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2647508.2647528

New comment by georgewfraser in "Tesla finally breaks and offers round steering wheel on Model S/X"

georgewfraser — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 03:48:32 +0000

I have an S with a yoke and prefer it to a round steering wheel. 95% of the time it’s better: you can see the entire dashboard and your body can feel the angle of the wheel instinctively. 5% of the time it’s worse, during low speed maneuvers.

New comment by georgewfraser in "Database drivers: Naughty or nice?"

georgewfraser — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 19:36:39 +0000

The world would be a better place if database drivers were completely abandoned as a way for clients to connect to databases. A standard API, implemented by multiple vendors, is a vastly preferable solution. Arrow Flight is an example of this.

https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2019/10/13/introducing-arrow-f...

New comment by georgewfraser in "Show HN: Cozo – new Graph DB with Datalog, embedded like SQLite"

georgewfraser — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 16:05:34 +0000

Licensing under AGPL will make it hard for any startup to use Cozo. Lawyers always ask about AGPL in venture financing diligence and it is considered a red flag. You can argue that they are wrong, the linking exception and so on, but you’re basically shouting into the wind.

NRR Doesn't Matter

georgewfraser — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 21:57:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.fivetran.com/blog/nrr-doesnt-matter

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33127370

Points: 13

# Comments: 1

New comment by georgewfraser in "Why is Snowflake so expensive"

georgewfraser — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 17:30:25 +0000

The core claim of this article, that Snowflake doesn't implement optimizations that would reduce usage, is not true. Search optimized tables, partitioned tables, and per-second billing are all counterexamples.