daj40

This company Nominal (nominal.io) just raised $80M at a $1B+ valuation for hardware engineering data infrastructure. That alone is interesting. But what caught my eye is they released a physical product catalog styled after McMaster-Carr. Square-back binding, industrial aesthetic, the whole thing. It's a software company shipping a paper catalog in 2026.

Their product helps hardware teams (aerospace, defense, automotive) manage test and operational data. Think time series, video, structured metadata across massive test campaigns. Customers like Anduril and Hermeus are using it. But honestly I'm just here for the catalog. Someone over there clearly cares about the craft of how engineering tools get presented to the world. The website has a similar retro-industrial vibe. Feels like a throwback to when instrument companies like Tektronix and HP actually had taste.

This sounds less like discrimination and more like a bug.

Where are you coming from that you think that a CAPTCHA would be used to prevent you from seeing this?

Agreed.

If Google began to charge for their services, at least there would be a way out. If a single market telecom raised prices or change policies, there isn't any real recourse.

The updates take the entire instance down for 2-5 minutes each month. While you can't avoid them, they can be scheduled for particularly low traffic times. If you're trying to avoid downtime, its a giant PIA. Even with HA enabled, you still lose master, slave and read replicas. Not entirely sure what they define HA as, but a mandatory monthly downtime doesn't usually fit into mine.

[Update] That said, from what I understand, they have a road map to maintaining read replicas and queued writes. Not sure what the date on it is though.