<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: zjaffee</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zjaffee</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:40:36 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=zjaffee" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is in many ways a smart way to understand the problem, but it doesn't mean that microsoft contracts mean you're stuck with bad software. There are several verticals where Microsoft and Azure actually were smart and chose a better software product to sell on their platform than what they had in house.<p>One example is when they stopped trying to develop a inferior product to EMR and Dataproc, and essentially just outsourced the whole effort to a deal made between them and Databricks. Because of this I assume many enterprise azure customers have better running data solutions in that space than they wouldve had they gone with just AWS or GCP.<p>On the other hand, having worked for Microsoft on an Azure team, there are plenty of areas that critically need a rewrite (for dozens of different reasons), and such a solution is never found (or they just release some different product and tell those with different needs to migrate to that), where they keep on building what can only really be described as hot-fixes to meet urgent customer demands that make it harder to eventually do said critical rewrite.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:40:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625527</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625527</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625527</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If there's a single section of the entire world where daylight savings makes the most, it's above and below the 45th parallel. This means the earliest sunrise is 9am in the winter what a horrible idea just to give people a little bit more sunlight when they'd still be out at work anyways.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:36:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47229794</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47229794</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47229794</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "The Israeli spyware firm that accidentally just exposed itself"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mean, it's objectively true that they can do this, especially when even mildly filtered down by incoming external data.<p>It's why you no longer need to speak with a person when reentering your home country in a lot of different places (israel being one of them, but also the EU, trusted travelers in the US through global entry, ect).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2026 10:21:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149731</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149731</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149731</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's no need to counter it, the whole point is to hit the social aspect of being on these platforms. If even half the kids can't figure out how to make it work, then a massive part of the problem is solved because a much larger percentage are only using it due to network effects.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:42:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986295</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986295</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986295</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can't speak about this being a current law, but there were laws in multiple US states at various times that prevented you from storing facial data on the server. In turn features like snapchat's face filters were doing all the relevant computation locally on the device (which back then was certainly a complicated achievement).<p>US tech companies are constantly under FTC audit relating to how they use user data. This is certainly not something that needs to be seriously worried about, certainly less so than say the way in which cameras placed all over cities are used to track all sorts of people or storing GPS locations attached to a specific devices UUID.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:40:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986280</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986280</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986280</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Company as Code"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't this essentially just trying to reinvent ERP (i.e. what SAP has built a 207 billion dollar company at time of writing on and 90% of fortune 500 companies along with endless other large organizations use).<p>One can argue that ERP as code is higher value than whatever it is right now, but to act like this is a totally new idea is insane.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:27:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900720</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900720</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900720</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The iOS version of most social media apps is better. IOS simply has better API integration to it's hardware, where with android, many OEMs (hell this was even the case to a certain extent with older pixel phones), do a number of things that make the hardware not as easily accessible as quickly from the OS API for said feature.<p>This is especially relevant for the camera, but also various other sensors and hardware modules that exist inside these phones.<p>That said, in recent years there are just a number of other areas that android is much better at such as deeper AI integration, which goes back to even prior to the current LLM craze.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2026 09:51:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752440</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752440</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752440</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm originally from the US, but where I live now, whatsapp functionally replaced email for a lot of different types of communication (that would be an email in the US). Recruiters text me on whatsapp about jobs, I can ask for a prescription renewal through it, and I get support from everything ranging from a government agency to customer support for things from businesses, ect.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2026 08:00:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751789</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751789</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751789</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One thing that is repeatedly underdiscussed about open source is that every time you have a major open source project become successful, be that anything from Linux to Apache Spark, you have private companies who come in, build something that can very reasonably still be called Linux or Apache Spark, but underneath has tons and tons of extra stuff that they never feed back into the open source community.<p>Hell, I think with the later (since all major cloud providers deploy their own version of spark on their respective data processing cluster services), people don't even know that they aren't in fact using open source software. Hell, eventually you get to a point where companies that choose not to use these third party services eventually just open source their own improvements or abstractions as again separate open source projects that never make it into the upstream project (which are often times heavily influenced by profit making entities).<p>This has been the model for a very long time, going back to at least the likes of redhat. And certainly will be going forward with countless future projects. Maybe there needs to be new models of open source governance, but I have no clue how successful such a thing would even be.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 19 Jan 2026 08:02:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46676114</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46676114</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46676114</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It depends on what you were trying to with the data. Hadoop would never win, but Spark can allow you to hold all that data in memory across multiple machines and perform various operations on it.<p>If all you wanted to do was filter the dataset for certain fields, you can likely do something faster programmatically on a single machine.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 19 Jan 2026 07:46:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46676023</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46676023</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46676023</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm saying that a smaller amount of data means more compute is required for a join. Sorry if that wasn't clear.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 19 Jan 2026 06:40:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46675687</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46675687</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46675687</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not about how much data you have, but also the sorts of things you are running on your data. Joins and group by's scale much faster than any aggregation. Additionally, you have a unified platform where large teams can share code in a structured way for all data processing jobs. It's similar in how companies use k8s as a way to manage the human side of software development in that sense.<p>I can however say that when I had a job at a major cloud provider optimizing spark  core for our customers, one of the key areas where we saw rapid improvement was simply through fewer machines with vertically scaled hardware almost always outperformed any sort of distributed system (abet not always from a price performance perspective).<p>The real value often comes from the ability to do retries, and leverage left over underutilized hardware (i.e. spot instances, or in your own data center at times when scale is lower), handle hardware failures, ect, all with the ability for the full above suite of tools to work.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 12:17:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667218</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667218</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667218</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What an amazing set of articles, one thing that I think he's missed is the clear multi year trends.<p>Over the past 5 years there's been significant changes and several clear winners. Databricks and Snowflake have really demonstrated ability to stay resilient despite strong competition from cloud providers themselves, often through the privatization of what previously was open source. This is especially relevant given also the articles mentioning of how cloudera and hortonworks failed to make it.<p>I also think the quiet execution of databases like clickhouse have shown to be extremely impressive and have filled a niche that wasn't previously filled by an obvious solution.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:34:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46501895</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46501895</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46501895</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Montana becomes first state to enshrine 'right to compute' into law"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Montana likely passed such a law because they have a governor and a senator who both came from the tech sector in big ways (sold the same company to oracle).<p>That said, there are a lot of other legal hurdles that would prevent Montana from ever being significant to the tech sector, despite the fact that I'm certain many skilled people would love to live there. From being the only state to not have at will employment to having a completely out of wack tax system (ratio between income and sales tax for a state entirely dependent on tourism), to countless restrictions (and often necessary because of water restrictions) on building large amounts of new housing, it just sin't happening.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2025 07:44:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45873469</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45873469</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45873469</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>AWS (along with the vast majority of B2B services in the software development industry) is good because it allows you to focus on building your product or business without needing to worry about managing servers nearly as much.<p>The problems here are no different than using SaaS anywhere else in a business, you can also run all your sales tracking through excel, it's just that once you have more than a few people doing sales that becomes a major bottleneck the same way not having an easier to manage infrastructure system.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 13:55:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746888</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746888</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746888</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I couldn't agree more, there was clearly a big shift when Jassy became CEO of amazon as a whole and Charlie Bell left (which is also interesting because it's not like azure is magically better now).<p>The improvements to core services at AWS hasn't really happened at the same pace post covid as it did prior, but that could also have something to do with overall maturity of the ecosystem.<p>Although it's also largely the case that other cloud providers have also realized that it's hard for them to compete against the core competency of other companies, whereas they'd still be selling the infrastructure the above services are run on.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2025 11:17:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45642629</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45642629</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45642629</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in ""Avinatan has come home": Jensen Huang hails release of Nvidia engineer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>“Avinatan has come home”: Jensen Huang hails release of Nvidia engineer after two years in Hamas captivity
Nvidia’s CEO shared the emotional news with employees after Avinatan Or, who was among those kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was freed on Monday</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:29:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570260</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570260</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570260</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA["Avinatan has come home": Jensen Huang hails release of Nvidia engineer]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjos2bc6ee">https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjos2bc6ee</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570259">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570259</a></p>
<p>Points: 4</p>
<p># Comments: 1</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:29:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjos2bc6ee</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570259</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570259</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And the reasons for this are increasingly clear. In a globalized world, you need large-scale organizations to compete. Smaller nations are increasingly forced to become highly specialized in a few specific industries, often where companies are sold to major firms from allied countries (large parts of europe or israel, singapore), or you end up with individual companies constituting a significant portion of the national GDP (korea).<p>The way in which the US is able to weld such power on the world stage, especially with the rise of China is we don't constantly break up every rising business.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2025 06:11:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45369755</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45369755</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45369755</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zjaffee in "Corporations are trying to hide job openings from US citizens"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Except this isn't about H1B this is about the PERM process for EB2/EB3 greencards.<p>The truth is we should be much more open to temporary work permits, and much less open to this sort of thing for granting permanent residency. Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Sep 2025 08:04:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45230232</link><dc:creator>zjaffee</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45230232</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45230232</guid></item></channel></rss>