Hacker News: mcsoft

New comment by mcsoft in "Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres"

mcsoft — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 21:42:02 +0000

Snowflake or sonyflake ids work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_ID

https://github.com/sony/sonyflake?tab=readme-ov-file

New comment by mcsoft in "YC: Requests for Startups"

mcsoft — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 15:03:02 +0000

It's the kind of software where early venture capital funding can be poisonous rather than helpful. Choosing the right abstractions to build a solid, flexible platform requires a lot of user feedback. You don't get the latter unless you have *paying* customers who have switched their critical processes to your product for a while. You need to build, sell, implement, and provide several upgrades. We bootstrapped a low-code BPM platform (pyrus.com) and were lucky to break even in several years. VCs push you to grow, while premature scaling could be harmful in the long term. It takes time before your platform is mature enough to serve inherently different use cases.

New comment by mcsoft in "The pivot table, the spreadsheet's most powerful tool (2020)"

mcsoft — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 19:06:39 +0000

I use pivot tables all the time. The concept is brilliant, but the Excel UI leaves a lot to be desired.

At first, you're amazed at the flexibility, but once you become comfortable, you suddenly hit the limitations. Can't sort by a calculated column, can't categorize without adding columns in the data, etc.

I looked at Quantrix for a while, and it was a bit too complex for practical purposes. I wonder if there are any decent PivotTable tools out there?

New comment by mcsoft in "How FoundationDB works and why it works (2021)"

mcsoft — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 17:53:58 +0000

We'd use the Record layer, but it was Java-only then. It would require us either to rewrite parts of our backend to Java or to implement some wrappers.

New comment by mcsoft in "How FoundationDB works and why it works (2021)"

mcsoft — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 17:49:18 +0000

I assume a couple of things here: 1) that SRE costs would be lower with fdb at scale due to its handling outages, i.e. auto-resharding; and 2) that a migration project from *sql to fdb will be finite (hence an investment I hastily called capex).

Would love to hear from anyone with experience in fdb whether these assumptions hold.

New comment by mcsoft in "How FoundationDB works and why it works (2021)"

mcsoft — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 09:48:25 +0000

We have seriously looked at FoundationDB to replace our SQL-based storage for distributed writes. We decided not to proceed unless we are about to overgrow the existing deploy, a standard leader-follower setup on the off-the-shelf hardware. The limiting factor for the latter would be a number of NMVMe drives we could put into a single machine. It gives us couple dozen Tb of structured data (we don't store blobs in the database) before we have to worry.

fdb is best when your workload is pretty well-defined and will stay such for a decade or so. It is not usually the case for new products which evolve fast. Two most famous installations of fdb are iTunes and Snowflake metadata. When you rewrite petabyte-size database in fdb, you transform continuous SRE/devops opex costs into developers capex investment. It comes with reduced risks for occasional data loss. For me it's mostly a financial decision, not really a technical one.

New comment by mcsoft in "How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers"

mcsoft — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 11:25:37 +0000

The article says nothing about how they instantaneously updated millions of user feeds. It was the most challenging task, as it's way easier to scale reads than writes in distributed systems. Rumor has it early Twitter had a target of 5 sec to update everyone of 50M fan feeds when Justin Bieber touched a screen. I would love to hear some technical details on how they did it.

New comment by mcsoft in "PRQL: Pipelined Relational Query Language"

mcsoft — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 05:15:42 +0000

PRQL is a breath of fresh air. Reporting languages generally miss built-in visualization and drill-down capabilities. Ideal reporting query should define not only how to seek, join, and and aggregate data, but also how to visualize output and how to present details in reaction to user clicks. There are some limited efforts like in PowerBI and Splunk but we need a standard. I wonder if PRQL guys will address this need in the future.

SVB online banking is back

mcsoft — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 14:48:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.svbconnect.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35136426

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by mcsoft in "FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank"

mcsoft — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 00:56:25 +0000

exactly

New comment by mcsoft in "FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank"

mcsoft — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 22:41:40 +0000

Double-entry bookkeeping is essentially the law of conservation of energy applied to balance sheets. It's much more deep as it was invented some 5 centuries earlier than programming.

New comment by mcsoft in "I Got Banned for Life from Airbnb (2018)"

mcsoft — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 07:40:08 +0000

The sad truth is in any disputes Airbnb is usually on the host side, not on the guest side. Looks like in their business model sellers have far more leverage over the marketplace than buyers.

FoundationDB 7.0 with Redwood Storage Engine released

mcsoft — Sat, 28 May 2022 13:09:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.foundationdb.org/blog/foundationdb-7-0-0-released/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31540056

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by mcsoft in "PRQL – A proposal for a better SQL"

mcsoft — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 21:11:06 +0000

Both CTEs and this idea address the same problem: poor readability of complex SQL queries. Compared to CTEs, the author takes the idea to split the complex query into parts to the next level.

To your point - a solid IDE will show you what's being processed at each line (or returned, if the cursor is on the last line) - in an autocomplete window or a side panel.

How to eliminate GC pauses in .NET app

mcsoft — Sun, 23 Jan 2022 10:51:56 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/swlh/optimizing-garbage-collection-in-a-high-load-net-web-service-3bb620b444a7

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30045230

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mcsoft in "How to optimize memory usage and eliminate GC pauses in .NET app"

mcsoft — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 19:04:11 +0000

Luckily it was one time effort which allocated less than 1% of our annual development resources that year. After we've walked away from large arrays allocated in LOH - there were no issues despite further traffic growth.

New comment by mcsoft in "How to optimize memory usage and eliminate GC pauses in .NET app"

mcsoft — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 19:01:43 +0000

thanks!

How to optimize memory usage and eliminate GC pauses in .NET app

mcsoft — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 16:32:15 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/swlh/optimizing-garbage-collection-in-a-high-load-net-web-service-3bb620b444a7

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995856

Points: 6

# Comments: 4

New comment by mcsoft in "What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)"

mcsoft — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 20:14:33 +0000

Some predictions were super accurate (i.e. Europe to America in 8 hours), some failed (lunch in 4 pills), but, due to immense optimism of human nature, one just couldn't envision the most influencing events of XX century - the rise of totalitarianism resulting in World War II and all its disasters. Something I can't escape thinking about when reading modern predictions.

How Google misdesigns choice screen auctions to evade EU antitrust decision [pdf]