dgudkov

I want a movie about that :)

We've built a high-performance in-memory data transformation engine in F# and it works like a charm in thousands of installations around the world every day and supports business-critical processes in many organizations.

The beauty of Hetzner is its dedicated servers. You can get 8 core, 64GB ECC, 1TB SSD server for mere 64 EUR/mo. AWS has nothing like that, AFAIK.

>it's not doable in general, because of a growing contingent of users who won't use your tool unless it's free or open-source

Oh, don't worry about that. Trading money for things is an ages-old thing and will remain for centuries no matter what. Just make something useful and put the right price on it. People will buy it if it solves their problem. If someone won't use it because it's not free - they don't really have the need that your product solves. Just ignore them.

I agree with all the points. If only sound insulation was better in these old plexes. Hearing someone sneezing (and not only) on the upper floor is not much fun.

>This is a huge claim that doesn't match reality.

You have a point that the interoperability that existed pre-Web 2.0 is still here and wasn't taken away (except for things like RSS).

My point is that we didn't move significantly ahead with interoperability and stuck with centralized proprietary services and niche protocols.

>grpc, json-api.org, and graphql.

You're totally missing the point. With an email client I can connect to any IMAP service (and there are tens of thousands of them). With an SFTP client I can connect to any SFTP server (and there are thousands of them) and download files. Again, without coding, just by configuring the connection.

What public service can I connect to with a GraphQL client (do they even exist?) without coding, just by configuring the connection settings like with an email client?

The fundamental power of the internet is its interoperability. It was born out of the ability of different networks to talk to each other using common protocols.

The interoperability is what we've lost in the Web 2.0 era. Even such quintessential thing as a web API has no well defined standard or protocol, just a very vague concept of REST or RPC.

I want Web 3.0 to get interoperability back. We badly need commonly accepted standards and decentralized protocols: for web APIs, for identity management, for message queuing, for web callbacks (webhooks), for online transactions, for semantic web and ontology, etc.

Take, for instance, web APIs. It's barely usable nowadays. Imagine if you had to write a special browser every time you need to connect to a new website. But this is what already happens with APIs. Accessing programmatically any web-service requires custom coding an API. Insane!

I agree, brief descriptions like sound vague and empty. So let me support my claims: EasyMorph is easier for non-technical people because unlike with PowerQuery all of its functionality is available without coding. Also, EasyMorph is more powerful than PowerQuery, because it has a bigger library of available data transformations, for instance, interval merge (a join where a key value must fall in a range specified by two fields), fuzzy matching, binning, de-aggregation (breaking down a total), or replacing substrings using a lookup table.

In terms of programming, EasyMorph is basically a high-level functional programming language (but entirely visual) with immutability, pipelining, automatic parallelization and concurrency. It allows arranging loops similar to FOR..NEXT, FOR..EACH, DO..WHILE/UNTIL loops in programming languages. It has subroutines, conditional IF/THEN/ELSE branching, exceptions, mutexes, and a built-in key-value storage.

Besides that, it combines data preparation with no-code automation because it has many so called external actions for exporting to/updating databases, sending low-level HTTP requests to web APIs, performing file operations (download, rename, delete, clone, zip, unzip, etc.), running external applications, and even executing SSH commands on remote machines. The full list of capabilities is rather extensive to list in one post and can be found here: https://easymorph.com/all-integrations.html.

Finally, EasyMorph is just faster due to its in-memory columnar engine with several tiers of data compression and aggressive optimizations that leverage CPU cache. We regularly see customers that switch from PowerQuery because EasyMorph is 1-2 orders of magnitude faster.

At the same time, EasyMorph is 5 times less expensive than Alteryx and has a very generous (as our users say) time-unlimited, data volume-unlimited free edition.

We're entirely bootstrapped, profitable, and almost double our revenue every year for the last several years.

May I suggest your non-tech users to try EasyMorph[1] (I'm the founder)? It's easier than PowerQuery (it's completely no-code) and at the same time more powerful. 80% of PowerQuery capabilities require coding. Our tool is 100% visual (and has a free edition).

[1] https://easymorph.com

Apparently, a programming language itself can't be low-code. I suppose PowerFX is designated as "low-code" because it's intended for use in low-code apps, basically, becoming the "code" part of "low-code".

Good point. Excel is no more low-code than SQL.

It really depends on what cloud services are used. The strategy of all the major cloud providers is to attract customers with cheap low lock-in commodity resources like S3 or EC2 and convince them to start using high lock-in and high-margin services like serverless computation. If they succeed (and they frequently do), the bills go through the roof.

Read also: https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap...

Nice idea. We need more tools to build various explainers. Ideally, embeddable.

There are wireless headphones with a good TCO. I have a Logitech headset that cost me $80 or so. Changed the battery two times over the last 7 years. Each battery was like $12. Battery replacement was trivial.

The second point sounds like something that can be fixed with regulation and/or fines.

It's 2.5% ROI, on par with inflation and well below the market. It's hard to reasonably justify it. Unless you bet on a stock with an extremely high P/E to get a much higher P/E.

>Over the next 20 years, the majority of those 290M will get replaced by an electric vehicle.

Let's optimistically assume that Tesla will sell 100M of new cars in the US in the next 20 years at the average price of 50K per car and profitability 10%.

100M x $50K * 10% = 500 billion which is already less than Tesla's current 1 trillion valuation.

At least we know how Ford can screw things. With Rivian we don't know even that. Yet, Rivian's valuation is higher than Ford's capitalization despite many unknowns and far far smaller production rate.

It solves nothing. They still need something to mark poor quality videos so that the viewers don't waste time figuring it out themselves. Oh, wait, the mighty algorithm gods of Google will again decide for you what you like.

>I think to achieve equal opportunity it makes sense to make education equal.

It's doable. Make it online and free. The HTTP protocol doesn't care about your social background.

I absolutely can't understand why would any country require its citizens to pay for education in state-funded schools and universities. Educated people are the best and the biggest national asset. Anything that creates a barrier (monetary or not) to education harms the country directly.

SQL calculations on columnar data are quite different from row-based databases, so its effectively a different database engine. You can take multiple advantages of columnar data store, because it usually employs a form of vocabulary compression. For instance, obtaining distinct values of a field in a columnar DB is much faster because it's typically just the vocabulary of the field, so it doesn't even require a full table scan. Many other columnar computations such as filtering or aggregation can be done on compressed data without decompression.

This is why I believe the real inflation is higher than the official. When the price remains the same but the quality degrades it's inflation.

DuckDB is faster than SQLite on an analytical type of query. That's expected because DuckDB is column-based and designed exactly for this type of queries.

The analysis would be more telling if it measured insert performance as well.

Dmitriy Zaporozhets (co-founder) was Gitlab's CTO until 2018 and now his LinkedIn profile says "Engineering fellow at Gitlab". What happened to him?

This poll was done in 2019. Things were a bit different back then. The majority is probably still happy with CBC, but the proportion could change.

Apparently, foreign state actors have been actively building competence and skills how to attract and manipulate large audiences on social networks. If you think you're smarter that those followers of Christian groups and you can't be manipulated, well, I have bad news for you.

I would argue that not having a payload makes it even more dangerous. At least, when there is a payload you know what you're dealing with. When there usually is no payload, it may suddenly appear and be very surprising in its reach and effect.

This is what baffles me in the cloud story: you think you get a servant, but you get a master.

>BI shouldn’t handle data ingestion and storage

I've been working in the BI industry for almost 20 years and I don't know why the author believes that the "Original BI" includes ETL/storage. He mentions BusinessObjects and Microstrategy as an example of traditional BI tools popular 20 years ago, but neither of them had ETL/storage capabilities. Both were basically visual SQL generators. (Although, BusinessObjects later acquired an ETL company). Qlik has a bit of everything - ETL, columnar storage, and dataviz. But that's more of an exception than a rule.

Nevertheless, the author has a point - BI seems to not have a clear path forward. There are experiments with natural language queries (won't work), automatic text summary generation (useless), AI-assisted automatic insights (might be a nice feature, but barely a "product"), and a few more. The self-service story of BI never really took off (I believe self-service ETL is a more interesting story [1]). Neither did story-telling. Dashboards are oversold and are mainly used to impress CxOs to close big deals. Geospatial dataviz is useful, but has limited application.

I would envision two possible directions to advance for the BI industry:

1) Analytical notebooks, something like Jupiter Notebooks but no-code and for BI might be a good idea to explore, but I haven't seen anything like that.

2) No-code/lo-code analytical app building. Reporting and dashboarding tools are just highly specialized app builders. Why not make a step further and generalize it a bit?

[1] https://easymorph.com (Disclaimer: it's my company)

>It wasn't even close.

Apparently, it's not what the pedestrian thought.