sonthonax

The thing that people forget about databases is that they are just really complicated ways of writing to a file.

The crux of all these “you only need sqlite” posts isn’t that you need SQLite, it’s that your architecture only ever needed flat appendable log file to begin with.

Once you realise that SQLite is just an aggregated view over this log it calls into question if you needed a third party query engine at all, suddenly the whole NoSQL vs SQL debate becomes a meaningless implementation detail.

Server based databases aren’t special beyond the fact they’re just distributed synchronisation primitives over files on a file system. But the utility of this is quite limited in practice, writing to a table will always require some sort of synchronisation, using SQLite vs Postgres is just a case of where you put the lock - in your own code or in a 3rd party server.

They’re extremely temperamental vehicles because they’re not fit for purpose.

The original Range Rover is an upmarket agricultural vehicle, and used the same platform from 1970 until the 2000s. When you actually use them as intended, for off road farm work you realise they’re better off road than they are on road.

You just set the alembic version yourself in the alembic.version table. It’s not rocket science.

To the contrary, a simple expression language is one of those things that can easily be done in that size.

Yeah, parent comment is deeply unserious.

Imagine you're writing trading software, you have an algo go haywire and it machine guns the whole order book, and then you refuse to put a "max order size" outside of the algo to stop it from happening again because you can't figure out why it happened in the first place.

Try telling a regulator or your boss that was your reasoning.

Just not true. Lots of oil companies have a vested interest in renewables now. A lot of the infrastructure for offshore oil is being redeployed for offshore wind.

600 people on a median 200k salary in New York, when including taxes and obligatory benefits is about $150 million dollars a year just in payroll. This is an enormous spend. Unlike a game studio or a software company like Adobe, these people are all operational cost centres, they're not the bread and butter of the firm.

In a true software firm, more capital invested in headcount loosely means more features which is what drives sales. Here you can attribute a per employee profitability. When you hire more employees at a tech firm, the expectation is that you become more profitable.

At a non-tech company like a newspaper, technologists are a cost centre, you invest in technology in order to be more efficient, and hire as few people as possible.

Of course some technologists at the NYT will be profit centres. like those who work on advertising operations and games. But the NYT at its core is a news firm, it makes money on its influence and prestige which is driven by its journalism. Writers and content creators are the profit centres, everything else is a cost of doing business.

I know they have a larger range of services, but are they 20x the breadth of services? Think of what other companies do with 600 tech people and compare what the profitability per employee should be at an tech organisation of such a scale.

They have at least 600 employees, get some perspective on just how much that is. It's least $150 million dollars a year in technology payroll alone. They have more technology workers than some major newspapers have in staff alone.

Why do you think that people on 200k should have a union? How does it benefit anyone besides people looking for sinecure jobs?

Unions were needed to combat the powers of corporations where you are in some ways trapped by the relationship; like miners in appalachia who had to fight cartels of mining companies who suppressed their wages; or teachers who have one state employer.

If you're a competent tech worker, you're at the other end of the spectrum. So much so you're generally advised to switch jobs every few years in order to maximise your salary. There's nothing binding you to a particular employer, particularly in New York!

To be honest, if you're a good technologist, you should be looking at making 400k a year in at a trading firm. If you're working for the NYT you're doing it because you're weirdly attracted to the prestige of working there, or you're looking for a cushy job.

If the job is no longer as cushy as you want, have the dignity to leave and find other employment rather than trying to hold your employer hostage.

If it's low for the market why choose to work at the NYT?

Being a tech worker isn't like being a steelworker where you're kinda screwed if the plant shuts down. You're fully capable of moving job if you're dissatisfied.

> Why they have 600 people is a question for management, no?

It's a question for everyone at the organisation. If you're joining a firm with a massively bloated headcount you need to think if you're going to be there in a year's time when someone in management finally gathers the political capital to slim your department down to sane levels.

It's certainly not a position to start bargaining even more concessions from the hand that's feeding you.

The New York Times is a glorified blogging platform. Not to long ago it was a Wordpress site.

I'm fully aware of how jaring it is for the median HN reader to hear this, but maintenance of a news website isn't the kind of skilled labour that commands a 250k a year paycheck anymore.

Linux outages and upgrade fuckups happen all the time. The difference is that Linux isn't on a unified upgrade cycle so issues come as a trickle rather than a dulge, so the problems are usually localised to a corporation and don't make the news.

Also Linux fanboys will usually blame the system admin for not configuring things properly if things break: "it's not the operating system, it's <something stolen from OpenBSD>".

End of the day Linux is only popular because of the inertia UNIX had on mini-computers/servers. For standard end users GNU Linux is lightyears behind Windows and macOS in terms of usability and stability.