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I’m a database guy, not an OS guy, so I agree, obviously… But what is the micro-kernel angle?

Yeah but that’s an interesting technical point, more suited to 2015 HN - in 2025 we can’t let technical matters get in the way of our Sinophobia…

It’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down. If you use the BLS’s definition of productivity, then computers seem to be a net drag on productivity:

https://usafacts.org/articles/what-is-labor-productivity-and...

Even more surprising for me is that productivity growth declined during the ZIRP era. How did we take all that free money and product less?

This is a pretty weird hill to die on, boss. Are you suggesting that all of the software written over the years by emacs users (eg gcc) is “ivory tower”?

As a community of practitioners we should embrace the idea that not all tools have to be “ideal” for all users. Some people like hacking their editor, and some don’t. If software tools sink to the lowest common denominator, like the vast majority of commercial software, we’ll all be worse for it.

Corporations that over-hired over the past 10 years needed an excuse to cut the layers of fat and bureaucracy out, and AI came along at just the right time. It doesn’t matter if AI is increasing productivity; what matters is that people think it might be.

More accurate to say that VC and the “startup ideology” has always been at the core of HN - it just so happened that aligned with OSS ideology during the ZIRP era.

The “external index build” idea seems pretty interesting. How does it work with updates to the underlying data (e.g., new embeddings being added)? For that matter, I guess, how do incremental updates to pgvector’s HNSW indexes work?

Marc Brooker’s blog on the topic is good: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2021/05/24/metastable.html

Two questions:

1. What’s the best place to research FTC win rates?

2. Given that Khan is taking an “aggressive” approach to what sorts of cases the FTC should pursue, wouldn’t it make sense for the win rate to be lower under her leadership?

RA’ing people at the top of their band means that they’ve topped out skill-wise. These aren’t senior people; it’s people who will never get promoted past 7 or 8 (which are quite junior) but have been accruing comp adjustments for a long time. Most teams will lay off a 7 that is getting paid more than a 9 by virtue of being at the company for 20 years.