While this is true to an extent, oftentimes the important context is not in the code but in the head of the writer. The code is just the fence in the Chesterton’s Fence analogy. And that is still non-fungible and will (presumably) forever be.
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
In big companies, the why is 80% of the work. I could swear actual dev work is less than 20% of a “developer’s” job at a standard large (non-SV/FAANG/tech-first) company. The rest is holding a lot of really weird organization-specific context in your head to make the right decision.
With my own tiny company, I used to answer questions about my code to support. Supporting the support. I remember doing that when working at big companies too.
Now, my support asks claude about the codebase to answer those sorts of questions. He's better than my memory.
“Use Postgres for everything” is a great philosophy at low/medium scale to keep things simple, but there comes a scaling point where I want my SQL database doing as little possible.
It’s basically always the bottleneck/problem source in a lot of systems.
Of course. The flip side is that many, many more people are in the "low/medium scale" zone than would self report. Everyone thinks they're a scale outlier because people tend to think in relative terms based on their experience. Just because something is larger scale than one is used to, doesn't mean it's high scale.
Yes. For example you'll typically have a "budget" of 1-10k writes/sec. And a single heavy join can essentially take you offline. Even relatively modest enterprises typically need to shift some query patterns to OLAP/nosql/redis/etc. before very long.
can share our work setup we've been tinkering with at a mid size org. iceberg datalake + snowflake for our warehouse, iceberg tables live in s3, that is now shareable to postgres via the pg_lake extension which automagically context switches using duckdb under the hood to do olap queries acrossed the vast iceberg data. we keep the postgres db as an application db so apps can retrieve the broader data they want to surface in the app from the iceberg tables, but still have spicy native postgres tables to do their high volume writes.
very cool shit, it's certainly blurred the whole olap vs oltp thing a smidge but not quite. more or less makes olap and oltp available through the same db connection. writing back to iceberg is possible, we have a couple apps doing it. though one should probably batch/queue writes back as iceberg definitely doesnt have the fast-writes story. its just nice that the data warehouse analytics nerds have access to the apps data and they can do their thing in the environment they work with back on the snowflake side.
this is definitely an "i only get to play with these techs cause the company pays for it" thing. no one wants to front the cost of iceberg datalake sized mountains of data on some s3 storage somewhere, and it doesn't solve for any sort of native-postgres'ing. it just solves for companies that are doing ridic stuff under enormous sla contracts to pay for all manners of cloud services that joe developer the home guy isn't going to be tinkering with anytime soon. but definitely an interesting time to work near data, so much "sql" has been commercialized over the years and it's really great to see postgres being the peoples champ and helping us break away from the dumb attempts to lock us in under sql servers and informix dbs etc. but we still havent reached a one database for everything yet, but postgres is by and large the one carrying the torch though in my head cannon. if any of them will get there someday, it's postgres.
SQS is dead simple, and if your in AWS (forever) it is "in the stack" with some easy to use features that may make sense to you (delay queue is a great one).
Kafka is... a lot. If you need what it provides, then it's great. You just have to be able to support it, and thats non trivial.
I can point to more than a hand full of Kafka project that exist because it was clear that someone wanted it on their resume. I dont think any one is doing that with SQS, it is just (a fairly good utility). However if you want to leave (or branch out from) AWS and you're reliant on it, good luck.
There’s a big difference between nanoplastics/chemical leeching (which is what happens with heated food containers) and microplastics of the sort that break off from clothing other plastic materials (which is what the article is talking about). Both are significant issues though.
Or full time. In some countries, those are pretty decent salaries. I earn €50k in one of the poorer European countries and that puts me in the top ~8%.
I thought so too, but another entry in their sheet is "Sysadmin (part time)" for $18k/yr. So either they forgot to put part time in parens, or they're paid full time wages. I wonder which...
I'm a mod here and wanted to let you know 2 things: (1) I've marked your account with a beta feature that displays a colored line to the left of new comments (since you last viewed the page). It might help you keep track of this rather large thread.*
(2) I'm sorry the post was downranked off the frontpage for a while this afternoon. A software penalty kicks in when the discussion seems overheated ("flamewar detector") but I turned this off as soon as I became aware of it. We make a point of moderating HN less when a story is YC-related (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) but as this goes against standard internet axioms, people often assume the opposite.
(* And yes, any reader who wants this is welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com to ask - I haven't turned it on for everyone because I'm worried it would slow the site down. Also, it's a bit buggy and not only have I not had time to fix it, I've forgotten what the bugs are.)
Edit for context: the sibling comment from karpathy is gone after being flagged to oblivion. Not sure if he deleted it or if it was just removed based on the number of flags? He had copy-pasted a few snarky responses from Claude and essentially said “Claude has this to say to you:” followed by a super long run on paragraph of slop.
————
Wow, I respect karpathy so much and have learned a ton from him. But WTF is the sibling comment he wrote as a response to you? Just pasting a Claude-written slop retort… it’s sad.
Maybe we need to update that old maxim about “if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it” to “if you don’t have something human to say, don’t say it.”
So many really smart people I know have seen the ‘ghost in the machine’ and as a result have slowly lost their human faculties. Ezra Klein, of all people, had a great article about this recently titled “I Saw Something New in San Francisco” (gift link if you want to read it): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/opinion/ai-claude-chatgpt...
It's not sad. He's a person like you and me. devnullbrain's comment is snarky. He invoked model collapse which has nothing to do with the topic of a wiki/kb, he wrote that karpathy is not normal, and then seemed to imply that the idea was useless. I'd be pretty in my feels and the fact that he wrote it and deleted it seems like a +1 normal guy thing.
Yeah. I know you didn’t see it, but it was truly a substance-free response. Glad to see he deleted it and I know I’ve been guilty of the same kind of knee-jerk response before.
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
reply