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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

Would love to get some detailed, in-depth, and technically rich answers from people who upvoted this nonsensical article. It's literally a 100-word advertisement for a paid product.

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I dunno. As a web dev, I find these "latest feature from vendor X" (typically Cloudflare or Vercel) posts quite helpful.

They let me know what the current big companies are doing to improve developer experience and/or devops. Their teams are often bigger than my entire company, so learning from them is a great way to see what we might be able to implement (whether by buying their service or doing a small scale version of it in-house).

Secondarily, they sometimes also show end-user experience improvements that I never thought would be possible at a certain scale/cost. Cloudflare hosting Doom and IRC on serverless is one such example, or Vercel doing multiplayer live editing (Figma style) out of the box with Next.js is another.

For this case of this particular post, the idea of having an external metadata analytics system for Mysql, stored in a separate store and dashboard, is something I've only vaguely seen in DigitalOcean. Seeing it as fully featured as in Planetscale makes me both wonder if we should consider using them instead of a some generic cloud DB, and also whether we can implement something similar on a standard LEMP container. It's one of the more interesting pieces I read on HN today, actually.

For those of us who don't live and breathe infrastructure, big(ger) tech company blog posts is a great way to learn, and I value them!

I'm not sure why you felt like you need to perform mental gymnastics over my comment. I said what I said because it's a valid point.

Let me help you understand it a little bit more in-depth.

First of all, the title used for this submission does not imply an announcement of a new feature. This one[0], however, does. Now, let's look past that. Let's say that the submission warrants front-page treatment fair and square because it has valuable content (a write-up at the very least). Lo and behold - it does not.

This submission[1] announcing Vercel's Build Output API has both a decent submission title (I can instantly tell it's a feature announcement) and fairly decent explanation for the feature, also. In fact, they even provided links to various documentations to help developers get started right away.

I'm still eagerly awaiting for someone to tell me what they learned from this specific submission.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15364896

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32192498

I don't know what mental gymnastics you're talking about? I thought I was literally answering your question... I didn't know that rich metadata analytics for mysql existed in an easy to use GUI from this or any vendor. That's valuable knowledge I just learned from the post. My Cloudflare and Vercel examples were similar.

Now, if your issue was with the article title, I fully agree. I wish the titles here were clearer.

I didn't upvote it, but I think the product does inspire discussion about why we don't have basic important features like mandatory "last accessed" metadata on external state sources. Think of the number of hours of pain due to someone being "sure" a database/api/resource wasn't used, and then removing it. I'm not really put off by the advert for that reason.

tracking access time (every read) is huge performance bottleneck. especially if reliably persisting this

same reason why filesystems are often mounted with noatime attribute !

Yes, the sensible default for this feature would be opt-out, like noatime, in case you need the performance boost and understand the implications of the choice.

This feature has zero performance impact on your database. It is powered by insights which is served from a separate data store.

I think they meant if you were to add this as a default metadata feature into mainline mysql

The most generous hypothesis would be that Planetscale is an increasing popular product among the HN crowd - specifically, those who have to maintain large MySQL deployments. It seems like a very good product that is seeing something like viral adoption across those companies.

The next ingredient would be if dropping MySQL tables is a relatively big pain (or known but unmanaged risk) that most of those people have experienced at some point.

Then this feature would be exciting news for that not-so-small cohort and that seems sufficient for HN upvotes?

I don't know if that's what happened today. I've heard about planetscale a few times but never used it. I can attest that dropping tables is always scary.

I know of many great products that a lot of HN users use or have used in the past. Not once have I felt the need to submit their announcement for a new product feature because I feel like it would spark discussion or foster genuine inspiration.

Don’t get me wrong but clicking on this link I was expecting an actual detailed guide/explanation.

There is nothing anyone can say to justify this being on the front page considering both the submission title and the actual content of the said submission.

By your standard every single Apple product announcement should not be on HN's front page.

>There is nothing anyone can say to justify this being on the front page

There's a "hide" button on HN posts if downvoting them isn't enough for you.

There's a "flag" button also.

article title is misleading! it is about planetscale only, not mysql in general. borderline click bait

also posted by a former github person. not sure if poster is author or works at planetscale but a lot of ex github engg are there

It wouldn’t be a PlanetScale post without our biggest fan throwusawayus. Let me know if you want a hat.

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