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I mostly read newspapers and technical journals, but two books that I read that made an impression: "The Changing World Order" and "The Gulag Archipelago".

I recently revisited an HN discussion on using “Postgres for everything” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42347606 ) and also read/participated in this Twitter thread: https://x.com/BenjDicken/status/2002742633966514544 . Both prompted a few reflections. What stood out to me was how divided opinions still are—some people strongly believe in this approach, while others don’t. I wanted to share my perspective on this.

In my experience, many proponents of “Postgres for everything” haven’t been exposed enough to (newer) purpose-built technologies and the tremendous value they can create. I was firmly in that camp for nearly a decade while working at Citus and on the Microsoft Postgres team. After building PeerDB (a Postgres CDC product that syncs data to various systems) and working at ClickHouse, my perspective completely changed. Seeing firsthand the “magic” that purpose-built systems deliver for their specific use cases—especially in terms of cost, performance, and scale—was truly eye-opening.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m a huge Postgres proponent and have spent 10 years helping customers implement it. However, I strongly believe in using Postgres for what it was designed for in the first place. Postgres is a row-based OLTP database, with over 30 years of engineering effort dedicated to making it robust for that specific workload.

Proponents of “Postgres for everything” often argue that a single stack is simpler and reduces complexity. What’s frequently overlooked, however, is the CAPEX and OPEX required to make Postgres work well for use cases it wasn’t designed for. At Citus, many customers had reasonably sized teams of Postgres experts whose primary job was to constantly tune, operate, and “babysit” the system to keep it working at scale.

Separately, we’re seeing the need for purpose-built technologies emerge much earlier in a company’s lifecycle, likely driven by AI. At ClickHouse, many customers using Postgres CDC are seed-stage companies that have grown rapidly. We pulled together some data that highlights these trends here: https://clickhouse.com/blog/postgres-cdc-year-in-review-2025#use-cases

Ultimately, I believe it’s better to make it seamless and even magical for users to integrate purpose-built technologies with Postgres, rather than making an overgeneralized claim of “Postgres for everything.”

Thread for 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509408

Thread for 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782613

Thread for 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33873800

Here are mine:

Technical skills:

- Among my last year's goals was to take on VR dev, which sadly I did not get to. Punting it to 2026. I'm thinking to get the Samsung Galaxy XR and experiment with some VR apps and learn the fundamentals of spatial computing. As an Android mobile developer, that feels like a natural extension.

- Complete the "UCSanDiegoX: Computer Graphics II: Rendering" computer graphics course. I did the first course in the series and found it enlightening (no pun intended)

- Create an e2e project that earns money as a side gig. It's time to put my product and technical knowledge to practice and actually build something people want.

- Leverage AI across all my endeavors. AI tools are here to stay and the more I know how to use them effectively, the better. The speed boost in learning a new framework/concept is phenomenal.

Non-technical skills:

- Expand my social circle - the unstable tech climate made me realize the importance of maintaining a healthy social network. My goal is to connect with more people both inside my company and outside, by both proactively reaching out and going to meetups in my area. In fact, I invite fellow NYC-based HN-ers to contact me at cybercreampuff at yahoo dot com, in case you want to meet up!

Different cultures celebrate Christmas at different days and time zones are a thing. But it's Christmas here, so:

Merry Christmas to everyone. I hope you get some rest and can spend time with people who are dear to you and get to focus on what's important rather than getting lost in stressing about everything having to be perfect.

Also much love to everyone who cannot spend their Christmas with dear people.

To make sure this post meets the relevancy criteria, here is a Wikipedia article about some Christmas (more precisely advent) tradition which I personally really like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_market

Hi. I remember when Dart was introduced, it was supposed to be a "JavaScript alternative" (?) for browsers.

It however "evolved" into being almost only used in Flutter, for developing mobile, web, and desktop front-end development.

It seems bizarre to me that a language is so special-purpose for front-end. Even Ruby has some fringe use cases beyond Rails.

Does Dart have any particular features that justify such a decision to bind Flutter to it? Or it has all been accidental?

Thanks

With more shoppers starting product discovery in AI assistants (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity), I’m curious how teams are handling the pre-visibility problem.

Specifically:

How do you check whether product data is actually interpretable by AI systems (not just indexed)?

Are you relying on schema validation, feed checks, manual prompting, or something else?

Have you seen cases where visibility tracking showed “nothing,” but the root cause was unreadable or ambiguous product data?

Interested in practical approaches, failures, and lessons learned

I’m looking for examples of high-quality engineering blog posts—especially from tech company blogs, that go beyond surface-level explanations.

Specifically interested in posts that: 1. Explain technical concepts clearly and concisely 2. Show real implementation details, trade-offs, and failures 3. Are well-structured and readable 4. Tie engineering decisions back to business or product outcomes

Any standout blogs, posts, or platforms you regularly learn from?

I am a mid-level backend engineer with 4 yoe. I come from the world's most populous country. I was laid off 1.5 years ago. I travelled for half of the time, the rest half just passed by doing nothing although I learnt some AI fundamentals.

I hate leetcode and that keeps me away from most of the job opportunities. I have some money left just enough to get by for the next 6 months. I dont want to work here since they dont value humans here. Realistically, moving abroad is tough but I want to! I applied to a lot of startups but not getting any positive response.

Like most of us (?) I like to code for fun but hate it as work. I am not an AI doomer but believe human force would be cut by a sizeable amount in the foreseeable future in SWE. But then what's left apart from doing coding? I dont have any business ideas and doing it here in this country is just cumbersome.

Content creation comes to my mind but it's also tough out there. I really don't know what I should be doing.

1.5 years have gone by. But I want to make the rest of upcoming 6 months of great use in finding my calling. I can chatgpt my problem but I yearn for human responses. Thank you.

Dear all,

do we have an statistics on visitor location/country here?

Would be curious: Is it US-centered? How much people from LatAm or SEA? EU?

Maybe there was a question like this in the past, but I couldnt find it.

(Maybe this is a question for @dang?)

And what IT issue will you (probably) fix today?

HN puts the Christmas banner and alternating colors. I am curious what percentage of HN community celebrates Christmas vs. not at all, another religion, or born Christian but doesn't celebrate etc.

Note: When I was in college (years ago) I asked an admin this and he said point blank 'face it it's a Christian world'

If you have fond memories of misspending entirely too much of your youth on web-based message boards, or you would like to misspend more of your nights and weekends on them now, Google has you covered. Simply add

  inurl:viewtopic.php

  inurl:"index.php?topic="

  inurl:showthread.php

  croissant AND (inurl:viewtopic.php OR inurl:showthread.php OR inurl:"index.php?topic=")

It seems there are many solutions for social media these days, but only one LinkedIn. Why are we still putting up with it? I’m surprised there’s not been a contender yet, or maybe I am not aware and perhaps that could be the rub; the challenge of acquiring enough traffic for the network effect to take hold.

I downloaded it and compiled it and ran some toy programs. I have no idea how to use it for an actual project even though I have a stack of dusty rpi's and esp32s in the drawer.

Any one want to share their inspiration?

Hey all, didn't want to pay for Strong or Hevy so I started building my own lifts journal app.

It's free and always will be.

https://stronk.app

Source Code (open to contributions). If you find bugs, add it to the issues. If you don't use it now but plan to after I build out the features, please star the project so I know to keep working on it.

https://github.com/alshdavid/stronk

There a lot to do still, gotta add things like;

- Strava/Facebook Sync

- Import/Export

- Charts

- Set type (warmup/drop)

- Timers

- Online backups (right now it's saved to your phone)

- Programmable custom routines using JavaScript (like 5-3-1, progressive overload)

- A suite of default routines

It's a web app because I'm not paying Apple and Google to publish it on the app store.

I’ve spent a decade doing frontend work. It pays pretty well but I am essentially just making modals and dropdowns for CRUD apps. I crave more purpose in life but understand the most rational choice is to keep going and saving for retirement.

Does it make sense to change direction at this point? I envy PhDs working on self-driving cars and rockets and AI. But also question overall morality of the tech industry.

Dear HN,

I’m a solo operator with no paying customers yet. I wanted more predictable baseline costs while iterating on a side project, so I migrated from App Engine to Cloud Run.

I fed my setup, budget, and constraints as context into Gemini CLI, asked it to search official documentation and best practices, and followed that guidance.

I removed –min-instances=1, expecting autoscaling to reduce idle spend. The commit message claimed “60% cost savings.” The actual outcome was roughly an 1,800% increase and a surprise decline message when I went to buy coffee on my credit card.

From Nov 2 to Dec 14, Cloud Run accrued ~$4,676. There was no traffic spike, no abuse, no application bug. The services were mostly idle.

What compounded: CPU and memory were over-provisioned (4 CPU, 16Gi) from earlier experimentation. Each deploy created a new revision, and I deployed frequently while iterating. Those revisions must have stayed warm longer than expected. Autoscaling plus revision sprawl meant more active resources than intuition suggested, even without traffic.

The billing alert failure: I had alerts enabled at $50. I received one early notification, then silence as spend climbed another $4,600. There were no clear signals that my cost profile had materially changed.

I contacted Google Cloud Billing Support looking for clear guidance or partial relief. After review, they declined any adjustment and closed the case. As a solo dev without an account team, there was no escalation path beyond accepting the charges.

Where it stands now: After right-sizing resources and cleaning up revision sprawl, daily costs dropped from ~$200 to under $5 on my billing dashboard. I’m cautiously optimistic but not certain it’s fully resolved.

For those running Cloud Run longer term: How do you actually cap downside as a solo dev? Do you set hard budget caps and accept downtime? Are there deployment patterns that avoid revision sprawl? Is App Engine still preferable purely for cost predictability? What guardrails work that don’t depend on constant manual billing checks?

I wasn’t chasing scale. I was trying to be careful with money while building alone. I’d appreciate hearing what others would do differently.

Today is the worst day of my life. We live in a country near Cambodia, and as you know, it is kind of a dream land for scammers. Today, it happened to my family.

My mother received a call from a scammer. They told her she needed to process some tax issue and prove that her bank account had enough money. In just a few minutes, they tricked her and manipulated her into entering banking OTP codes. All of her savings are now gone.

What makes this more dramatic is that last year I architected and helped a government department in my country build a big system. This system can track money flows across the whole country, to know where money comes from. I was very proud of this. It is the biggest achievement of my life. Even if nobody knows I built it, that was fine.

But now I cannot protect my own mother. I cannot protect my family. My system can track the money, but it is almost impossible to get it back.

When I went to the police, just in one small area, there were more than 20 cases in a single day. A hardworking student sent all their family's money, thinking it was for university fees or going abroad. An old factory worker lost all her retirement savings. So many people lost everything. That is when I realized that the system I built, the system I was proud of, is not enough.

All my own savings are gone too. (My mother was scammed into borrowing a lot of money and sending it to the scammers, and now it is my responsibility.) I had plans for the next few years: to do open source work, to write books about math and programming, to create a dream Go web framework, to give back to the community. Now all of that is gone.

But this is not only about me. I can still start over. I am strong enough to rebuild my life. But who will protect people like my mother? Or a poor student? Or a factory worker? Or so many others?

I can build systems. I can build distributed systems that scale to a whole country. But for what? What should I do?

I have been reading Hacker News for 12 to 13 years, sometimes posting from other accounts. I am writing here now to ask for advice and help from this community.

If anyone has experience with similar cases, or ideas on what can realistically be done, or even advice on how to move forward after something like this, I would really appreciate it. I will keep this account semi-private, because with the details above, I think some engineers from my country may recognize me.

If you're inordinately in front of a computer screen for a living, day in day out, week after week, when you've finally had enough and need a break, what works for you to counter it?

No matter the weather (UK, its grey and dank), or locale, a timer and an enforced outdoor solo walk generally perks me up.

I’m looking for ideas to build and open-source.

Curious what problems you expect to matter in the next couple of years.

Thx!

Greetings,

I recently came accross this thread from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34501352

I am interested, in particular, by the comment by vidarh, that starts with:

"You've been given the answer already: Simplicity. You keep ignoring it."

I find myself highly interested in what this person would have to say about rust. Is it better than, for example, oberon, or it's descendents?

I have heard that Rust is a big language. By that definition, a simpler one must be better, right? And yet rust is a big thing, and .. oberon is ..dusty?

I will keep on searching, and maybe attempt to contact him/her/(other?) directly.

I’m seeing a lot of claims that modern iPads can fully replace laptops for students. For those who’ve tried this in real life: – What workflows actually worked? – Where did it break down (coding, multitasking, writing, file management)? – Would you recommend it today, or is it still a compromise? Curious to hear real-world experiences rather than marketing claims.

Super casual post (typed on my phone, while lying on my bed), tried a lot of things but this is sticking. So I had to tell you because it may help some of you that are math curious like me.

Sleep issues is tough, it took me 5 years and a friend who is a doctor. The Dutch medical system failed me but my doctor friend saved me from a lifetime of insomnia. In my case it is: 0.3 mg melatonin + 7.5 mg mirtazapine (anti-histamine, it makes me drowsy) + meditation + sleep hygiene. Your experience may be different.

Math academy: I need to be told what to do. Designing my own curriculum is too much. Also, I need to pair it with a solid LLM because I have a lot of why questions and of course channels like 3B1B.

iPad: I tried pen and paper multiple times. The thing is: sometimes I just want to be in a slob and lie on my bed in weird ways and still do math. I found I need a pen, I can’t do it on pure memory. An iPad where I can do split screen: Math academy + MyScript (formerly Nebo) is nice. An Apple Pencil Pro is really nice because I don’t need to worry about connection issues.

I was doubting between: ipad vs pen and paper (the nth retry) vs Remarkable. I am happy I got a second hand ipad air. I can stick to this routine.

Low-key life changing.

I know this setup isn’t for everyone.

I can’t tell if I’m feeling the collapse of OpenAI hype. Or if there are legitimately more ChatGPT bugs

Notably it suddenly is pretty bad at chat?

Ask a question

(Get a reasonable answer)

Ask a follow on question

(Give first an answer to the first question, then my second question)

It’s not just this, I also click on images in my library and ask for modifications, and ChatGPT then says “please attach the image”

All very frustrating. Anyone feel this as late? I just end up using Claude more

Merry Christmas HN from the antipodes, especially dang and tomhow whose hard work makes this site the special part of the internet that it is.

Hi HN,

I’ve been building in AI for a few years now, mostly as a solo founder. One thing I’ve consistently found useful is reading and listening to honest accounts from people actually building — not launch posts, but the thinking, trade-offs, and mistakes along the way.

As we move into a new year, I want to spend more time learning from others working at the frontier of AI: researchers, founders, and engineers building real systems.

If you’re working on something interesting:

What problem are you trying to solve?

Why now?

What’s been harder than you expected?

Not looking to promote anything or collect leads — just genuine stories and technical or product insights. I think there’s a lot of quiet, high-quality work happening that doesn’t always get discussed.

Would love to hear what people here are building.

My family got Amazon Echos for Christmas. After setup the devices are very slow and glitchy, like taking minutes to switch songs and then consrantly having volume increade and decrease with no inputs? Is Amazon's service overloaded? Or some setup process running in the background making things bad at the start? Or they are always this way? Or bad hardware? (I could imagine the volume problem as a poor electrical connection of the speaker).