They are not just some random 3 have decades of real db experience behind them. They also just got funded which gives them the ability to expand and stay longer in the game.
"Why Us" => "I ran Postgres at Instacart, where we scaled the company 5x in April of 2020. The biggest problem we had was making Postgres serve 100,000s of grocery delivery orders per minute"
Instacard have released a public dataset[1] on their orders, so it should be even easier to verify this claim. From what I could find in some analysis[2] of this dataset around 100k orders per day and not per minute seems accurate.
I assume they are referring to how many database requests they have due to customers orders or a similar metric and just worded it poorly.
That's fair as the Kaggle dataset[1] is from 2017. Even assuming orders scaled with revenue (which grew to $1.5B in 2020[2]), you'd only reach a few hundred orders/minute at the pandemic peak (which lines up with the calculation above via a different method).
So I still assume the original comment isn't referring to actual orders placed.
I worked at a company that had billions of views per year on a single big Postgres instance. Extremely read heavy with many queries needed for a page load. You can cache a lot of things.
It was one of the top real estate portals in the world. A lot of geolocation searches. New search every time someone moves the map. A ton of data sent to the client. Analytics in every page view.
No clue how a shopping cart or checkout flow would drastically increase database load. It should just be basic CRUD. Building a shopping cart is something every student makes. Pages in a web store can be cached relatively easily since items won't change often.
A primary DB with a few replicas and caching can go a really long way.
The composition of the average transaction will be different in a shopping cart (lots of writes and updates) compared to your use case which sounds like it skewed read heavy. With Postgres it’s generally easier to scale reads because it doesn’t really matter which replica the query hits, as long as it contains the data it needs. Whereas write-heavy workloads route through a single-writer bottleneck.
There’s challenges scaling read-heavy workloads, for sure — but they’re generally more straight forward than scaling write-heavy workloads. You can get away with more dumb horizontal scaling than with writes.
You don't see how adding functionality that requires writing to the database rather than just reading from a cache could "drastically increase database load"?
That doesn't necessarily mean _new_ orders per minute. Their app or website could poll for updates every 15 seconds
Could just be looking at the "orders" endpoint in their app which might also include incremental updates as shoppers get items from the store. It's a fairly ambiguous statement
Is that still a lot? Feels like a single 64-core, 256GB RDS instance with some caching should handle that fine. RDS has instances up to 192-core and 768GB.
I think the real-time logistics is likely the thing taxes a Postgres database.
Everything else seems normal DB CRUD that a single beefy instance with a few replicas should handle easily. Type ahead search is no doubt using a different service and not directly querying Postgres.
Agreed. S&P 500 needs to be seriously gatekeeped. We need safer boring companies in there thatbhave been peoven over a long period of time. Nothing against these companies but they are not proven and ready for S&P 500.
Let's say Alphabet shifts further to ~become a 100% AI company in the same way that Anthropic and OpenAI are. Should they be removed from the index? If not, why not?
Forget AI. Any company in the S&P could set fire to their entire business in a pivot to Labubus.
A certain amount of required scrutiny and experience derisks that possibility. Also remember pre-IPO the valuation isn't set by the broader market, so you don't know if any of these valuations are even real. Do we want to set a precedent where banks can put any price tag they want on a pig everyone is forced to buy?
Once these companies go through the same process Google or any other S&P member did, they're welcome to join the party.
The logic isn’t the same. We’ve had plenty of history to judge Alphabet’s financials. It’s less about AI and more about allowing the market to appropriately price the stock after seeing their filings for a period of time.
This is true, and it's why index trackers exist, in order to diversify risk across the market so an investor is not excessively exposed to that happening for particular stocks. The market then re-prices that stock. As an index fund investor you are outsourcing your discretion to other market participants.
However the market hasn't priced these new stocks at all, the existence of index trackers is being exploited to force prices on enough buyers to make the prices stick. This is the wrong way around. It's market manipulation. It's using the behaviour of index funds to influence prices, decoupling those prices to at least some extent from the discretion of market participants.
Let the market price the stock, then the index trackers can buy in, this is exactly why these rules exist, and why it's a travesty that the NASDAQ is waiving them.
I think it would be reasonable to consider moving a company making large changes like that into some kind of probationary state, and automatically adjust the weights it has in the index as a result.
The reasons we have Google in the index and not Anthropic are many:
1. Google has a history of profits. Their move into AI isn't coming at the expense of Search Ad revenue, and can be seen as defending it for the future. Their last annual report shows continued growth in this sector. So the P:E ratio isn't NaN.
2. Their stock prices has survived the test of market trading and multiple reporting windows, short sellers, WSB regressive behavior, etc. In part because they have a huge publicly tradeable float.
3. There isn't a huge bundle of shares in lockup until six months after the IPO that would put selling pressure on the symbol.
It's also a safer bet as a company, though that technically shouldn't be the criteria for indexing:
1. Google has a diverse product line: youtube subs, search ads, adwords, cloud services, etc. And a demonstrated ability to launch more (probably too many more).
2. They have a huge existing customer base to upsell to; cost of customer acquisition would be low for quite a while.
3. Anthropic and OpenAI are dependend on nvidia to supply them every beefier chips, while Google has their own TPUs to run on and lease out to others.
An IPO can be a very volatile moment for any stock. This isn’t about AI so much as it is about an unproven company h th at is actually losing money right now.
To be fair, it is done exactly to protect against accounts like yours. HN quality needs to be gate-keeped and new accounts absolutely need to be throttled. You may have meant well and be genuine but the bar is high now especially due to AI bots.
Because of these shitty corporate companies that don't give a shit about their employees, the well is now poisoned for companies that do care especially smaller ones. Employees don't want to give their best anymore because they are burnt elsewhere and they become unemployable at smaller companies. It is a sad state of affairs.
I've worked at the full spectrum from great to terrible (and eventually one that went legally fraudulent) companies.
You're right that there can be a problem at small companies when you hire someone out of a toxic company. Some people love the fresh start and are so happy to finally be in a healthy environment that they thrive.
Some people are so broken from toxic previous employers that they can't adapt. We hired a lot of people out of a competitive Big Tech office and it was probably a 50/50 flip of the coin if they were going to be great to work with or toxic political monsters. I had to have so many difficult conversations with people who could only see their coworkers and other teams as competitors who had to be defeated that I nearly had a prepared speech on the topic. The politics and attempted backstabbing was insane. It was also weird that they thought it was going to work at a small company where we knew the people they were trying to backstab for years.
Stop trying to hire folks from AWS and this won't happen. Micrsoft is famous for "rest and vest" and a far less toxic culture as a result. You could also try hiring from Intel, where the internal "great place to work" propaganda is known as "great place to leetcode" because usually the work pace is so lax that its seem as a stepping stone for further advancement on your own time...
Microsoft took a pause in some areas for a moment but has been a brutal dog eat dog environment for a long time and never really stopped. I tried to get the job there once and got back channel on why I was denied: the interviewer didn't believe I'd emotionally handle the psychological environment. They went with somebody far more aggressive.
These companies are not monoliths though. Statistics really matter.
>the well is now poisoned for companies that do care
Because there's no such thing. Or rather, there are until it's unprofitable enough that caring seriously threatens the bottom line, or the nice owners sell off to someone less nice.
Sure but thats a very cynical way of seeing things. A company cannot exist without making a profit but there are plenty of companies that try and take care of their people. At least the ones that don't have investor or board pressure (smaller private companies).
I wish all platforms did this specially reddit, twitter etc. I don't use AI to write comments on any platform and always wondering if I am replying to an AI comment.
I think that is significantly harder to solve for without false positives ruining UX.
I don't think its bad to use AI assistance but what people clearly hate is just copy and paste.
Also its possible to generate extremely natural and casual sounding replies and comments now and you've probably interacted with several AI bots on HN already.
I thought about "poisoning" in this context as well. Even if there is not that much AI, if there is enough that you start second guessing every other comment, I start thinking what am I doing there.
In my experience, any meetup > 10 people becomes useless because you cannot really make meaningful connections and large meetups usually have a fixed agenda where everyone is out there selling their own stuff.
I now will not attend a meetup unless it is extremely small group (<10 people). Those are hard to sustain though.
Speed meetups could work where you'd go to a series of meetups in a row. Venues could allocate space for this, say 5 separate rooms and every few months you'd go to a bunch of meetups all on the same day. Small gatherings with a larger space where people could keep talking once the set period is over if need be.
Even a local park on a sunny day would work and you could "kick on" into the night if things were going well - no obligations or pressure.
The coworking space I was at back in 2013 held regular weekly meetups in the common space. Sometimes cool tech was shown off, but a ton of promo talks was common. I won't say no to free pizza though.
Exactly. I hired someone who was a good developer but he was charging hourly and extremely slow for what we needed. I am a software engineer (and a founder) myself so I get what it takes to write good code but I am no longer waiting for a dev to turn something around in 20 hours when I can use LLM to write it in 1 or less.
Going forward, I am no longer hiring hourly rate devs. Either fixed rate project or full time as needed. No hourly.
This is bad. Even their own website is down at railway.com. Looks like total dependency on google cloud. Surprising for a company of their scale with all this VC money.
I know a solo founder who got SOC2 certified. He is literally the only person running the product/company and is SOC2 certified. I found that hilarious to be honest. But he is trying to play the "win enterprise deals" game but not sure how that helps when you are literally 1 person.
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