Top all-time · #13364
A
Andy Lawrence
Personal blog · didgets.substack.com · on HN as didgetmasterdatasystems
Andy Lawrence writes Didgets, a personal blog at didgets.substack.com about data and systems. Since 2022, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “The time has come to replace file systems”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
19mentions?
5HN people?
2022–2026first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for posts by Andy Lawrence about Didgets, a file-organisation tool that commenters describe as an alternative to ordinary file systems. Commenters cite the posts when discussing that approach and the software's performance.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Computers and managing large amounts of data.
Most-linked posts?
- The time has come to replace file systems4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-02-24
What Hacker News says?
> “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily. Didgets (recently surfaced here on HN) seems like a sane approach to this, from the file system up. Pretty incredible performance too. https://didgets.substack.com/p/where-did-i-put-that-file Sadly not (yet) open source, though the developer is considering it.
Comment linking /p/where-did-i-put-that-file
on “Write plain text files”Submitted The time has come to replace file systems as a story · 177 points
HN discussionI wrote the article right after I fixed a huge inefficiency problem in a function within my own project. I neglected to give the specifics in the article, but here they are since you asked. My Didgets tool lets you create pivot tables against relational database tables, even very large ones. For the pivot values, you can choose to just count the occurrence of each value or if it is a number type you can add them up.…
Comment linking /p/musings-from-an-old-programmer
on “Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel (2021)”Submitted Data Science and Serendipity as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAs someone who thrives on tracking down rare but annoying bugs in a debugger, I love stories like this. It is not just bugs that cause real failures which can be headaches; but also bugs that just slow things down unexpectantly. They can sometimes go undetected for decades like this one. I wrote an article this past year that talks about silent bugs that slowly eat resources and collectively can be very expensive in…
Comment linking /p/finding-and-fixing-a-billion-bug
on “Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel (2021)”What used to be 'big data' is now just 'normal data'. https://didgets.substack.com/p/big-data
Comment linking /p/big-data
on “Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven”> the person who "naively" downloads that table and plays around in excel finds interesting things that the person who was using Pandas hadn't,... I think they call that serendipity. Never underestimate its power. https://didgets.substack.com/p/data-science-and-serendipity
Comment linking /p/data-science-and-serendipity
on “Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven”It looks like you are up to 175 posts of various workspaces. I didn't look at each one, but all the ones I saw were nicely staged, organized workspaces. Did you get any submissions for 'real workspaces' with stacks of books, papers all over the place, and sticky-notes all around the monitors? If you did, did you reject them? I too, have a newsletter that I started last year about data management. I only have about a…
Comment linking /
on “My newsletter is making $2k per month with 7k subscribers – AMA”I have a project (general-purpose data management system called Didgets: https://www.didgets.com ) and I also have a blog ( https://didgets.substack.com ) that is a mix of information about my project and also about my general thoughts on various data management issues. Anytime you put your ideas or projects before the public, you run the risk of criticism and/or ridicule; but don't let that stop you. If your projec…
Comment linking /
on “What to blog about”This brings back memories. https://didgets.substack.com/p/finding-and-fixing-a-billion-...
Comment linking /p/finding-and-fixing-a-billion-bug
on “Reworking 30 lines of Linux code could cut power use by up to 30 percent”The capacity and speed curves of drives is quite different. When the first TB drives were released about 15 years ago, the fastest ones were about 100MB/s. Now you can get 20TB drives (20x capacity) and the fastest ones are about 300MB/s (3x speed). It is just far easier and cheaper to make a drive twice as big than it is to make it twice as fast. SSDs are a different animal, but have some similar characteristics. W…
Comment linking /p/where-did-i-put-that-file
on “S3 isn't getting cheaper”I found this. There's also a demo. Good points. https://didgets.substack.com/p/where-did-i-put-that-file
Comment linking /p/where-did-i-put-that-file
on “Wheel Reinventor’s Principles (2024)”This looks pretty neat (though i will not easily give up files). The author seems pretty frustrated in another post that few people are interested. I am willing to give it a look over at the design+play with it, but i struggled to even find the website, and on said website there is no way to download the software. I only found a sample data archive. https://didgets.substack.com/p/what-is-wrong-with-you-people...
Comment linking /p/what-is-wrong-with-you-people?utm_source=url
on “The time has come to replace file systems”I think it really depends on the content. I have a software product that manages all kinds of data. To raise awareness, I also have a newsletter that I send out a couple times a month. In the newsletter, I try to educate people about data issues and how computers process data. I try to make it interesting to people who might never even try out my software ( https://didgets.substack.com/ ). While the purpose of the n…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Do newsletters work? Why do websites push them so much?”Exactly. It isn't just time to set up all the data in a way that makes the right query possible. It is also having queries fast enough to be able to run a vast number of them in order to find what you are looking for (or even things you were not looking for). https://didgets.substack.com/p/data-science-and-serendipity
Comment linking /p/data-science-and-serendipity
on “Big Data Is Dead”Entrepreneurs have to wear many 'hats'. Trying to switch hats many times every day just makes you lose focus. Task switching has an overhead. I came up with a method that has helped me devote a whole day to a given task without neglecting other necessary tasks for too long: https://didgets.substack.com/p/shortcuts
Comment linking /p/shortcuts
on “Going from engineer to entrepreneur takes more than just good code [audio]”I am coming at this from the opposite end (tech founder looking for a partner to handle the business side). As a technical person, I can build all the features; fix all the bugs; and work on performance issues. But I lack the skills needed to find the right market fit and convince customers to jump on board. I think the best startups are co-founded by a bright technical person and a savvy business partner. The patte…
Comment linking /p/looking-for-another-steve-jobs
on “I lost $209,640 of my own money trying to start a business”It is surprising how hard it is to find co-founders with business experience who will actually be enthusiastic about the product they are supposed to promote. I am a technical founder who has tried (and failed) a few times to get a business partner on board to promote and sell the product. I had two guys join on with big talk about how they were perfect for turning it into a home-run project. Neither one lasted even…
Comment linking /p/looking-for-another-steve-jobs
on “Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words”I agree. Faster hardware or horizontal scaling on distributed cloud environments can mask the problem; but it certainly doesn't solve the problem of bloated, inefficient software. While it might not be necessary to spend hours fine-tuning every function; code optimization should be the mindset of every programmer no matter what they are coding. How many fewer data centers would we need if all that software running i…
Comment linking /p/finding-and-fixing-a-billion-bug
on “Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming”