In the United States (in 2020[1]), 100% of the population lived within 5 miles (8 km) of a local public library, with 99.1% of people living within 1 mile (1.6 km). That seems good enough to me.
Interesting to see SQL Server not listed here, am curious whether it didn't have enough signal, or suffered from being a two-word product, with "SQL" being far too generic on its own.
I’ve also don’t remember SAP HANA, Oracle, or DB2 mentioned even once here but believe me, along with MSSQL these occupy most of the top ten database deployments world wide.
Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is that all of the proprietary vendors are quietly strangling their flagship products.
Free and open source database engines were always “nipping at their heels” but weren’t a serious threat for decades. Only other proprietary engines were.
Now that PostgreSQL has more features than SQL Server and better performance, it’s a serious competitor.
But Microsoft is holding MSSQL’s face under water with core-based licensing. It means that per dollar you get dozens of times less compute available for your data than with open-source systems. That ratio is growing exponentially, because they haven’t redone their pricing in… ever.
Oracle and DB2 are being similarly choked off at the same rate, so looking left and right at their direct competition their respective product managers haven’t noticed the problem, which is akin to Fuji and Kodak raising film prices in lockstep just as digital photography is taking off.
We’re entering the era of “kilocores”: single servers becoming available that have over a thousand cores. You can’t imagine what per-core licensing costs for something like that!
PS: I saw a similar dynamic play out in the network space with load balancers and “web accelerators” like NetScaler sold “by bandwidth” with a starter SKU as small as 2 Mbps. I kept trying to politely explain to the reps that the smallest cloud VMs can cheerfully put out 10 Gbps, and hence their product is a 500x decelerator. They eventually listened to someone and made it bandwidth-unlimited. Too late. Everyone uses NGINX now.
Proprietary compilers and developer tooling were similarly strangled, and have been completely replaced by free/open tools in all but a few niche areas such as embedded, hard realtime, and circuit design.
It is also less mentioned on the site in general, owing to it being a proprietary Microsoft product in an audience of people who primarily go for Free / Open Source non-Microsoft products.
There are some people here who are interested in corporate Europe or <insert Microsoft foothold place/industry here>, but most are aligned with Silicon Valley hackers.
Someone else mentioned it already, but what is there to talk about with SQL Server (and Oracle)? Like I'm sure there's plenty someone could write about but generally it's pay Microsoft so it's their problem.
Whereas something like Postgres has a plethora of forks and tools built around it, because it's open source devs can actually do interesting things to solve their problems.
Good insights -- people now have to have their party look good for their social feeds: insta, tiktok, whatever. I'm forever thankful that I never had to even think about that, and even if people were taking pictures, nobody gave a damn about the background.
I go through this with my wife for every party we throw. She wants the house cleaned, table set, food spread ready, seasonal cocktails mixed, furniture moved around, decorations just so, etc.
I’m like here’s a giant thing of ice cold booze have fun.
I know this struggle, and the best I've been able to do is to push every time for limited scope. Let's just get pizzas instead of cooking 3 different mains and having a cheese plate, 4 bowls of chips, etc. Social media has really done a number on people (see also those omnipresent balloon arches)
I wonder how the levels of engagement compare between an extremely online GenX person, an average GenZ person, and an extremely online Gen Z person would look like.
I couldn't help to look and see if the company behind commercials that are burned into my brain from 40 years ago are still a thing, and lo, Hooked on Phonics is still going strong!
This page[1] walks through the basics of phonemic awareness that children need to learn via exposure & repetition in order to learn to apply that aural learning to reading.
It makes me wonder if a program like this, aimed at English-speaking children, might help those adults learning to speak & read English if they could put up with being addressed as if they were a child.
It's funny -- before social media, I was more likely able to go find someone to chat with on IRC, a Usenet group, or some purpose-built forum. I knew where my friends were (ICQ, then AIM, then Skype, then GChat), and it worked.
Now, it's all fragmented into 1000 Discord servers, and who has the time to dig through it all?
I agree, I feel similarly. There are now 25+ car groups on fbook that I have to subscribe to, because the main web-board / usenet group for that car doesn't get anywhere near as much traffic as it used to. Major vendors are providing support on fbook - which sucks.
See, I'm the opposite. I've got a Discord server, which are very much "where my friends are": If I make an acquaintance (or any of my friends do), they get added to the server. Some stick around, and get woven into the social fiber. Some never come back, and eventually get removed from the server during our annual purge. There's maybe 10-20 active people (i.e., people we see at least a couple times a month), a handful of regulars that are that multiple times a week, and then maybe twice all that again of people we hear from once in a blue moon. If I want to chat, I'll hop in voice. If I want to share something I found, I'll stick it in a text channel.
There's still plenty of communities on the internet. It's just that the communities worth belonging to are not wide open to the public. Community building does not scale.
It's there -- go to the jobs tab, answer the first time questions if they come up, and when you get the job list, click All Filters, and scroll the filter list down (admittedly, pretty far down); there's an "In your network" toggle.
Primarily because LinkedIn has to bother with complying with their privacy policies and other T&Cs, and your site has none of that.
Why should I take all of my data and give it to you, a rando on the internet? Is it being stored? Will it be shared? Sold? Maybe, as there's nothing that says you won't.
Correct. But you can build this thing on your own, for yourself. LinkedIn didn't, and you don't trust this third party. So if you had the problem its trying to solve, you could just spend the 2-3 hours and build it for yourself, even if you don't have all the necessary skills to do so.
Those are totally fair points but what I agreed with here was that people will create _personal_ software to solve a particular itch for themselves, which is what I did here for my friends. I just decided to throw it on HN as I have some API credits remaining :)
[1] https://www.gc.cuny.edu/center-urban-research/research-proje...