Top all-time · #9643
David Jayatillake
Personal blog · davidsj.substack.com · on HN as DSJayatillakedatabusiness
David Jayatillake writes davidj.substack, a personal blog at davidsj.substack.com about data and business. Since 2022, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this Substack's series on semantic layers, which compares them to ORMs and covers defining metrics such as summing order amounts for revenue or counting order_ids for sales.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A substack about my journey in data: building data teams/stacks for org impact. Click to read davidj.substack, by David Jayatillake ✝️,
What Hacker News says?
> It looks very important, popular and well established, but what is it? It's easier to explain what Cube is if we first define what the Semantic Layer(SL) is. In a few words, the SL is the abstract representation of business objects, for example: sales, users, conversion rates, etc. Cube provides the language to define the SL, an API to access it, access control mechanisms and a caching layer. It's important to emp…
Comment linking /p/semantic-superiority-part-5
on “Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer”Submitted Dabbling with Dagster vs. Airflow as a story · 100 points
HN discussionIt is kind of like an ORM. I find ORM's and semantic layers to be similar in many ways, except that semantic layers are meant for defining metrics too. These metrics describe aggregating data. Like summing order amounts to get revenue, or counting order_ids to get sales. I wrote a series on semantic layers on my substack, hopefully it helps: https://davidsj.substack.com/p/semantic-superiority-part-1
Comment linking /p/semantic-superiority-part-1
on “Cube.js: Headless Semantic Layer”Submitted Moving off Looker to their open-source competitor Lightdash as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted dlt windsurfing: using Windsurf IDE and dlt to write data pipelines with AI as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The reason text-to-SQL will fail as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Yet another post on Data Contracts – Part 1 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Accio Firebolt as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Thought of Stream and a three-horse race as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Five Nines, Three Nines, No Nines: Data needs service delivery parameters as a story · 1 points
HN discussion