Hacker News: tomwphillips

New comment by tomwphillips in "My Favourite Laptop"

tomwphillips — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 20:40:57 +0000

I was in the same boat with an M1 Pro I loved, but the display on mine died, and a replacement is about £800, which is bonkers. So now it's tethered to the monitor on my desk.

New comment by tomwphillips in "Hex Raises $100M"

tomwphillips — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 19:26:49 +0000

>As long as you have queryable data

This is doing a lot of work! Decent model and semantic layer is critical, I think. And of course it has to make sense to the business/domain experts.

New comment by tomwphillips in "Hex Raises $100M"

tomwphillips — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 06:03:46 +0000

Your comment reminds me of this one about Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

As a data generalist in an business, it makes zero sense for me to spend my time building a it tool like Hex when I can buy one and spend my time actually moving the needle on business outcomes.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

New comment by tomwphillips in "Getting good at AI takes time and practice"

tomwphillips — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 20:33:04 +0000

I agree. It takes time to develop intuition about how to use it effectively. My skills improved when I adopted a more systematic approach, e.g. using the same prompt across multiple models and examining the results, or slight variations on a prompt with the same model.

Getting good at AI takes time and practice

tomwphillips — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 20:31:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.seangoedecke.com/getting-good-at-ai-takes-time-and-practice/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280471

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by tomwphillips in "Hex Raises $100M"

tomwphillips — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 09:04:04 +0000

I'm surprised at the negative feedback in the comments.

We signed up for Hex a few weeks ago. The PoC was smooth. My colleagues love it.

Hex Raises $100M

tomwphillips — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 20:36:38 +0000

Article URL: https://hex.tech/blog/hex-new-era/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50265413

Points: 85

# Comments: 65

New comment by tomwphillips in "Can we replace a $150k Looker with a bucket of HTML files?"

tomwphillips — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 07:16:47 +0000

Agreed.

For ages the data industry has obsessed over tooling when really the biggest impact comes from the organisational/people aspects - achieving consensus on metrics, dimensions, key entities. In short, governance. You can't buy that you like can a SaaS product.

Behavior-Centric AI Design

tomwphillips — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 18:14:06 +0000

Article URL: https://swamp-club.com/behavior

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50213175

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by tomwphillips in "Security Disclosure"

tomwphillips — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:31:27 +0000

We are now on Cloud Run.

New comment by tomwphillips in "Security Disclosure"

tomwphillips — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 04:57:06 +0000

After the last outage we considered moving off to Cloud Run - used it several times before and it is rock solid - but we gave them another chance. Unlikely we are staying after a day of no deployments and then this.

Rotated all our secrets but since deploys are paused our app is down.

I'm unimpressed.

New comment by tomwphillips in "Railway Major Outage"

tomwphillips — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:28:22 +0000

Still down. I think we will move to Cloud Run after this.

New comment by tomwphillips in "DuckDB Ducklake"

tomwphillips — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:32:55 +0000

You could, but the whole idea of lakehouse is that you can use whatever engine suits your needs. Now you've got to make sure that every engine enforces your access control policies properly. It just seems like a lot of work.

New comment by tomwphillips in "DuckDB Ducklake"

tomwphillips — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 06:57:25 +0000

I think this is an elegant design that's superior to the competition, but I think lakehouses are not as generally useful as vendors would like us to believe. The access controls are limited to what's possible on the underlying bucket.

For example I think a lakehouse is a bad choice for standard enterprise BI type analytics - you've got no column or row access controls, and no column masking. I don't see how this could ever be bolted on to the bucket and catalog.

https://www.tomwphillips.co.uk/2026/08/the-benefits-of-data-...

New comment by tomwphillips in "Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B"

tomwphillips — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:27:01 +0000

Yeah, me. I've used it every day for years. With a hybrid/remote team it is a fantastic alternative to a physical whiteboard. Whole team uses it.

I don't care for or use any of the AI features.

I hope the price doesn't go up dramatically.

New comment by tomwphillips in "Apple Watch Series 12"

tomwphillips — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 19:32:02 +0000

The video demo is so strange. A waitress spoke too fast - just act like a normal person and politely ask them to repeat themselves, instead of reading a transcription on your watch. My goodness.