Hacker News: jma24

New comment by jma24 in "Was my $48K GPU server worth it?"

jma24 — Fri, 22 May 2026 02:23:57 +0000

Better sell it fast before the M5 ones come out.

New comment by jma24 in "Why I don’t vibe code"

jma24 — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:29:04 +0000

It's a really interesting PoV, and one I'm in polar opposition to.

Context engineering is allowing me to do things I've always wanted to do but don't have the time/energy. I'm writing in C++, assembly, Rust, Go. I'm fucking with boot loaders and all kinds of things.

It's brought me a far greater understanding of how cryptography, GPUs, CUDA, Apple Metal - all topics I have a vague interest in but have no time to work on.

The current raft of LLM models are genius children. It's like that 15 year old at college. But I have 30 years of experience and a genius child is pure power in my hands.

And it's a genius child that never gets tired. For a few hundred bucks a month I can have 3 geniuses working on my ideas through the night. Last night they wrote 20 different research theses on a topic and benchmarked them all. Then combined them into a best of breed algorithm better than anything that has been done before. It's an amazing world we live in.

I don't write this to throw mud at OP - they are entitled to their opinion. Merely to point out the contrast.

New comment by jma24 in "HANA C++ Development Environment and Processes"

jma24 — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 12:26:08 +0000

Fascinating read Dennis - do keep it up.

An Oracle Database In-Memory FAQ

jma24 — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 18:16:24 +0000

Article URL: http://www.bluefinsolutions.com/Blogs/John-Appleby/October-2014/Oracle-Database-In-Memory-FAQ/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8406802

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jma24 in "MemSQL Does Oracle’s Own Demo Ten Times as Fast, Sixty Times Cheaper"

jma24 — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 03:55:58 +0000

The much bigger problem with Oracle In-Memory is that a lot of operations like joins and sorts often happen in the SGA, in row form. So you end up needing a truckload of SGA for temporary calculations. And when the SGA runs out, which it invariably does, you end up using TEMPDB. And everything comes to a crawl.

New comment by jma24 in "MemSQL Does Oracle’s Own Demo Ten Times as Fast, Sixty Times Cheaper"

jma24 — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 03:54:13 +0000

Oracle designed their Database In-Memory Option specifically for these sorts of scenarios. But it's a fairly crudely designed column store cache and MemSQL are right to bash them.

But the strength of Oracle remains OLTP and I don't see customers fleeing to MemSQL for this.

New comment by jma24 in "MemSQL Does Oracle’s Own Demo Ten Times as Fast, Sixty Times Cheaper"

jma24 — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 03:51:44 +0000

Doing some basic math... Wikipedia is around 80m rows a day, so 4 months of Wikipedia is around 9.5bn rows. But they show 17bn on the graph.

Typical columnar compression gives about 11GB per 1bn rows, so 17bn rows should be 187GB. The AWS machines they are using should be c3.4xlarge which are 30GB, and 6 of them is 180GB. But you can't run an in-memory column store at 100% RAM, you need to run it at 50-70% so you have capacity for calculations.

Is it just me or do the results not make any sense? Seems likely they actually had 9.5bn or 4 months data, which conveniently is what the graph shows?