Hacker News Reader

jbonatakison Former SR-71 engineer talks NASA's Blackbird revival program

Big shout out to the Udvar Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia which has both an SR-71 and the Discovery Space Shuttle, as well as a bunch of other really interesting aircraft.

jbonatakison Identity Management for Agentic AI [pdf] (2025)

What makes you wonder about that other than the word "Open" in their names?

jbonatakison How GLM built its own inference infrastructure

z.ai is a fairly well known AI lab out of China and their GLM models are probably the most popular outside of Anthropic or OpenAI’s. I don’t think it’s presumptuous for them to not introduce themselves in a post on their own blog, I think you’re just a bit out of the loop here.

jbonatakison Jev: New frontier model 40-400x cheaper and 20-200x faster

The whole video seemed generated to me

jbonatakison Ask HN: What default model do you use and why?

I honestly don’t think I could blow through a 20x plan in a day if I was trying. What are you doing that uses so many tokens?

jbonatakison Neki – Sharded Postgres

Yet. But it’s built by the guy who created Vitess and cofounded PlanetScale, so while it doesn’t have sharding implemented at the moment I think it would be foolish to discount it. Plus it’s open source.

jbonatakison Neki – Sharded Postgres

Multigres is the one that comes to mind

jbonatakison AWS Acquires DuckLabs

This doesn't even make sense. Postgres is and has been open source since the 90s and AWS has had an existing Postgres offering since approximately always.

jbonatakison How We Pushed CDC into Postgres

They acquired Crunchy Data and now have some of the most prominent Postgres developers working there.

jbonatakison How We Pushed CDC into Postgres

> I'm still waiting for a Postgres provider to just let me mirror data directly to Iceberg, so I can plug in my own stateless query engine.

The issue that each of those providers above has recently adopted Postgres as a secondary product aimed at supporting their main product, an OLAP database or engine, so they don’t want you plugging in your own query engine.

I’d bet you’re likely to see this from a Postgres-specific provider first, like Supabase.

jbonatakison Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard

I’d like to second this. Being able to change the color using the dial would be…satisfying.

jbonatakison Helicone allows users to write SQL directly to a shared ClickHouse

I’ve built a similar thing against Snowflake, with one added layer: tenant-scoped views with the ID baked in, and an associated tenant-scoped role that only has read access to its own views.

It also lets you make updates to the underlying table (shared between all tenant views) and then separately update the views. As long as you aren’t making breaking schema changes you can more easily validate the changes before releasing.

jbonatakison Guide to data tools landscape for developers

> A data warehouse on the other hand is an OLAP database and is optimized to work on columns

A bit of a pedantic nit here: a data warehouse is a usage pattern. It’s not necessarily tied to any specific technology, however it is commonly implemented with OLAP systems like Snowflake, BigQuery, etc. But there’s nothing stopping you from building out your data warehouse in Postgres or MySQL. If you’re stitching together disparate datasets to build a unified model for analytics, you’ve got yourself a data warehouse no matter what system it lives on.

jbonatakison I'm a USB-C Maximalist

This is how I feel with my Airpods. Just break already!

jbonatakison Postgres locks do not scale

That’s well beyond what a stock Postgres server would reasonably handle

jbonatakison Tell HN: Who wants to be hired" posts outpace "Who's hiring" 2 to 1

They always have been diluted. Titles mean vastly different things at almost every company.

jbonatakison ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

I’ve been using Crush with Openrouter and have good success lately

https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush

jbonatakison But yak shaving is fun (2019)

I’ll never not watch this when it’s posted

jbonatakison pg_durable: Microsoft open sources in-database durable execution

> we built pg_textsearch

Maybe you meant to word this differently and I’m nitpicking, but didn’t TJ Green build this while he was still at Tiger Data?

jbonatakison The desperation of NYTimes

Unsubscribing from The Economist was one of the most frustrating corporate interactions I've ever had.

Honestly if it was easier to unsubscribe I'd probably have an on and off again subscription, but I'll never subscribe again because I don't want to jump through those hoops to unsubscribe.

jbonatakison Drunk post: Things I've learned as a senior engineer (2021)

I’m sorry but this is just bad financial advice

jbonatakison A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

> We believe that the user experience comes first

Bold coming from the company who gives me the most confusing “Open in app” prompts that are designed to confuse you and get you to use their app rather than the web

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/03/29/those-obnoxious-sign-in-w...

jbonatakison Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

https://pginbox.dev

Repo: https://github.com/jbonatakis/pginbox

Makes reading/searching the Postgres mailing lists easier.

I’m polling a Fastmail inbox to nearly instantly receive and ingest messages. Anyone can browse without an account, but registered users can follow threads to be notified of new messages, threads in which your registered email is found are auto-followed, and there are some QOL settings.

Search is pretty naive right now (keyword on subjects) but improved search is the next big thing on my list.

jbonatakison What game engines know about data that databases forgot

CMU very recently had a seminar [1] with the founder of SpacetimeDB, which was very interesting. The recording should be up in the next few days I expect

[1] https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs-world-spacetimedb-tyler-c...

jbonatakison Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?

I’ve been working on a site that makes it easier to follow the Postgres mailing lists, which can be a bit of a firehose

https://pginbox.dev

jbonatakison Google Cloud: Investing in the Future of PostgreSQL

Yet I don’t see Google listed as a sponsor for this year’s pgconf.dev [1], which is the main developer-focused conference in the Postgres community. All the other major players you’d expect to see listed are there. And they aren’t listed as a provider of servers for internal Postgres usage [2]. Perhaps they’re supporting the community in other ways I’m not aware of, but these seems to be some conspicuous areas where other companies are involved and Google isn’t.

[1] https://2026.pgconf.dev/sponsor

[2] https://www.postgresql.org/about/servers/

jbonatakison Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed

Postgres uses Meson+Ninja in their builds. That seems like a pretty big endorsement.

jbonatakison Astral to Join OpenAI

I don't know about OpenAI using a lot of Python, but Astral builds all their tools in Rust and just exposes Python bindings. Codex is all Rust. It feels like a reasonable acquisition from that perspective. They're banking on at least in part on the Astral team being able to integrate with and supercharge Codex.

jbonatakison Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English

I have been building this in my free time and it might be relevant to you: https://github.com/jbonatakis/blackbird

I have the same basic workflow as you outlined, then I feed the docs into blackbird, which generates a structured plan with task and sub tasks. Then you can have it execute tasks in dependency order, with options to pause for review after each task or an automated review when all child task for a given parents are complete.

It’s definitely still got some rough edges but it has been working pretty well for me.

jbonatakison Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

Very much mvp but I just got this all set up: https://www.pginbox.dev/

Downloaded and parsed a bunch of the pgsql-hackers mailing list. Right now it’s just a pretty basic alternative display, but I have some ideas I want to explore around hybrid search and a few other things. The official site for the mailing list has a pretty clean thread display but the search features are basic so I’m trying to see how I can improve on that.

The repo is public too: https://github.com/jbonatakis/pginbox

I’ve mostly built it using blackbird [1] which I also built. It’s pretty neat having a tool you built build you something else.

[1] https://github.com/jbonatakis/blackbird