Hacker News: zachmu

New comment by zachmu in "What if database branching was easy?"

zachmu — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 23:34:44 +0000

I remember that engineering decision. You guys were pretty early customers for your throughput and durability requirements (we hadn't even added standby replication yet when you started your integration). We've come a long way in the years since then.

New comment by zachmu in "What if database branching was easy?"

zachmu — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:37:28 +0000

Neon is basically this same idea: postgres on a copy-on-write file system.

These aren't really "branches" though, they're hard forks. You can't merge them back after making changes. Dolt is still the only SQL database with branch and merge.

New comment by zachmu in "What if database branching was easy?"

zachmu — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:34:39 +0000

Can you be more specific about what complications you ran into? As for performance, Dolt is faster overall than MySQL on sysbench now.

https://docs.dolthub.com/sql-reference/benchmarks/latency

New comment by zachmu in "Chicago charges Medicaid 8x the national median for an ambulance ride"

zachmu — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:43:37 +0000

Figures are per ambulance ride.

Chicago charges Medicaid 8x the national median for an ambulance ride

zachmu — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:21:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2026-03-11-chicago-amblance/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47339208

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by zachmu in "Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns"

zachmu — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:24:36 +0000

https://docs.dolthub.com/other/faq#why-is-it-called-dolt-are...

New comment by zachmu in "Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns"

zachmu — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:13:42 +0000

What's the incentive for people to contribute to an open source project?

New comment by zachmu in "Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns"

zachmu — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:57:28 +0000

Regardless of whether this particular project goes anywhere, it's at least very interesting that Yegge has discovered a way to make multi-agent setups work better. Giving them discrete personas ("you are a senior database engineer with 30 years of experience") and narrower scopes makes them much more effective. This was surprising to me but makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

New comment by zachmu in "Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns"

zachmu — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:08:36 +0000

It is DOLT, you were right.

New comment by zachmu in "Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns"

zachmu — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:08:03 +0000

lol it's DOLT, not DoIt.

Yegge's Medium uses a serif font so you can tell, but in many faces you can't.

(We still get this comment constantly and it's very unfortunate)

New comment by zachmu in "Ask HN: How do you safely give LLMs SSH/DB access?"

zachmu — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:26:49 +0000

We build DoltDB, which is a version-controlled SQL database. Recently we've been working with customers doing exactly this, giving an AI agent access to their database. You give the agent its own branch / clone of the prod DB to work on, then merge their changes back to main after review if everything looks good. This requires running Dolt / Doltgres as your database server instead of MySQL / Postgres, of course. But it's free and open source, give it a shot.

https://github.com/dolthub/dolt

Show HN: Beta for Doltgres, the Postgres Version of Dolt

zachmu — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 21:19:17 +0000

You asked for it, we built it: the world's first version-controlled SQL database, Dolt, now has a Postgres-compatible version, Doltgres. We announced the limited alpha here on Hacker News 18 months ago, and today we're excited to announce the Beta release.

Doltgres is free and open source, and you can download it from our GitHub repository here:

https://github.com/dolthub/doltgresql/

More details on the Beta release in our announcement blog post:

https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-04-16-doltgres-goes-beta/

If you've been waiting for the Postgres version of Dolt, wait no more. Please give it a try by importing your Postgres database using pg_dump and psql, then playing around with the version control features. Let us know via GitHub issues if you encounter any problems.

This release represents 18 months of engineering and innovation. We're excited to hear what you think.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710503

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by zachmu in "Amazon employees: 'I'd rather go back to school than work in an office again'"

zachmu — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 20:33:17 +0000

You'll never hear more nonsense about the industry than when the topic of H1Bs comes up.

New comment by zachmu in "Amazon employees: 'I'd rather go back to school than work in an office again'"

zachmu — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 22:17:56 +0000

I have, and this is an absurd assertion

New comment by zachmu in "Amazon employees: 'I'd rather go back to school than work in an office again'"

zachmu — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 20:17:16 +0000

> 80%+ h1bs

This is laughable, cite a source or get out.

New comment by zachmu in "The 4-chan Go programmer"

zachmu — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 20:29:51 +0000

when I was learning Go, I read a guide that told you to fire off a goroutine to walk a tree and send the values back to the main goroutine via a channel. I think about that "just an example" guide a lot when I see bad channel code.

For me the biggest red flag is somebody using a channel as part of an exported library function signature, either as a param or a return value. Almost never the right call.

New comment by zachmu in "The 4-chan Go programmer"

zachmu — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 20:00:12 +0000

You are a bad bad man

New comment by zachmu in "CockroachDB license change"

zachmu — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 22:11:56 +0000

Think of it as a replacement for spanner with a postgres frontend. It's about global availability and replication without application-level sharding.

New comment by zachmu in "CockroachDB license change"

zachmu — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 21:02:02 +0000

Sometimes it's a reasonable choice to pay for software, especially if you're a large company that can easily afford it. It's not like "just using postgres" in a manner similar to Cockroach's capabilities is trivial, building your own solution also has a whole set of risks.

If you're absolutely opposed to ever paying for a software solution, then sure, avoid commercial projects. I'm happy to spend my (company's) money on useful software.

New comment by zachmu in "CockroachDB license change"

zachmu — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 20:52:25 +0000

The BSL doesn't make it closed source, it prevents a competitor from running their own DBaaS business using Cockroach as the backend. This has happened to various open source projects, AWS started selling their technology and ate their lunch.

BSL is a totally fair compromise for commercial open source licensing imho.

If you see BSL as the first step to an announcement like today's, that's a fair criticism. Not sure how often that happens. But BSL doesn't disqualify software from being open source.