Top all-time · #6431
Shayon Mukherjee
Personal blog · shayon.devdatasystemsprogramming
Shayon Mukherjee's personal blog at shayon.dev covers data, systems and programming. Since 2020, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 77 times, most often “Using CTID Based Pagination for Data Cleanups in PostgreSQL”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Shayon Mukherjee's posts on the tech industry's moral vacuum and on pg-osc, a tool for zero-downtime Postgres schema changes. Comments only point to the posts without judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Everything, everywhere - always in progress
Most-linked posts?
- Using CTID Based Pagination for Data Cleanups in PostgreSQL3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-10-29
- Non blocking and zero downtime ALTER statements in PostgreSQL with pg-osc3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-02-21
- Bypass PostgreSQL catalog overhead with direct partition hash calculations2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-11
- Show HN: pg-online-schema-change – Zero downtime schema changes in PostgreSQL2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-02-16
- A PostgreSQL planner semi-join gotcha with CTE, LIMIT, and RETURNING2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-04-29
- Tech Industry's Moral Vacuum2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-07-22
- The 'At My Last Place ' Problem2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-05
- pg_easy_replicate 2.0 zero downtime upgrades with support for recreating indices2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-29
- Another look into PostgreSQL CTE materialization and non-idempotent subqueries2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-04
What Hacker News says?
Kudos. We did/built something internally to solve similar-ish problems https://www.shayon.dev/post/2026/283/versioned-filesystem-fo...
Comment linking /post/2026/283/versioned-filesystem-for-disposable-sandboxes/
on “LayerFS: A filesystem for AI coding agents”Submitted Why I Enjoy PostgreSQL – Infrastructure Engineer's Perspective as a story · 194 points
HN discussionHere is another take on deletes through by just updating the row groups in Parquet file through multi part upload and UploadPartCopy - https://www.shayon.dev/post/2025/285/mutable-atomic-deletes-...
Comment linking /post/2025/285/mutable-atomic-deletes-with-parquet-backed-columnar-tables-on-s3/
on “An MVCC-like columnar table on S3 with constant-time deletes”Submitted Database mocks are not worth it as a story · 178 points
HN discussionThis is very cool! I no longer work on Rails on daily basis, but would have loved to have this. I built something similar called `pg-osc` / `pg-online-schema-change` for PostgreSQL workloads. It does zero downtime migrations using triggers and shadow table. Github: https://github.com/shayonj/pg-osc . Blog: https://www.shayon.dev/post/2022/47/pg-osc-zero-downtime-sch... Also love that this is written in Ruby :). Goin…
Comment linking /post/2022/47/pg-osc-zero-downtime-schema-changes-in-postgresql/
on “Show HN: Zero-downtime PostgreSQL migrations for Ruby on Rails”Submitted Non blocking and zero downtime ALTER statements in PostgreSQL with pg-osc as a story · 138 points
HN discussionRelated recent submission: "The Tech Industry's Moral Vacuum" < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41029948 > < https://www.shayon.dev/post/2024/203/the-tech-industrys-mora... >
Comment linking /post/2024/203/the-tech-industrys-moral-vacuum/
on “Ask HN: Is YC entangled with Trump’s rich supporters?”Submitted Do you really need foreign keys? as a story · 117 points
HN discussionHTTP not-found fixup: looks like your URL changed? (should be: https://www.shayon.dev/post/2022/47/pg-osc-zero-downtime-sch... , I think)
Comment linking /post/2022/47/pg-osc-zero-downtime-schema-changes-in-postgres/
on “pg-osc: Zero downtime schema changes in Postgres”Submitted Selective async commits in PostgreSQL – balancing durability and performance as a story · 109 points
HN discussionBeing able to debug and diagnose difficult problems and distributed systems still remains a key skill, at least until Opus or some other model gets better at it. I think being intentional about learning while using AI to be productive is where the stitch is, at least for folks earlier in their career. I touch that in my post here as well: https://www.shayon.dev/post/2026/19/software-engineering-whe...
Comment linking /post/2026/19/software-engineering-when-the-machine-writes-code/
on “Way AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills”Submitted Don't rely on IF NOT EXISTS for concurrent index creation in PostgreSQL as a story · 90 points
HN discussionCool project. +1 on userfaultfd for the multi-node path. Wrote about how uffd-based on-demand restore works wrt to my Cloud Hypervisor change [1] if you are curious. I think the the main things to watch are fault storms at resume (all vCPUs hitting missing pages at once) and handler throughput if you're serving pages over the network instead of local mmap. I think its less likely to happen when you fork a brand new…
Comment linking /post/2026/65/linux-page-faults-mmap-and-userfaultfd/
on “Show HN: Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forking”Submitted Pitfalls of premature closure with LLM assisted coding as a story · 83 points
HN discussionSubmitted A PostgreSQL planner semi-join gotcha with CTE, LIMIT, and RETURNING as a story · 57 points
HN discussionSubmitted An MVCC-like columnar table on S3 with constant-time deletes as a story · 45 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scaling with PostgreSQL without boiling the ocean as a story · 40 points
HN discussionSubmitted Bypass PostgreSQL catalog overhead with direct partition hash calculations as a story · 35 points
HN discussionSubmitted Beyond logical replication: pg_easy_replicate Supports Tracking DDL Changes as a story · 22 points
HN discussionSubmitted An MVCC-like columnar table on S3 with constant-time deletes as a story · 20 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tech Industry's Moral Vacuum as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Show HN: pg-online-schema-change – Zero downtime schema changes in PostgreSQL as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted To PaaS or Not as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted pg-osc: Zero downtime schema changes in Postgres as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pitfalls of premature closure with LLM assisted coding as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Another look into PostgreSQL CTE materialization and non-idempotent subqueries as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Value of Sitting on an Idea as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Is AGI Paradoxical? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Challenging AI generated code from first principles as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted 100x Faster Query in Aurora Postgres with a lower random_page_cost as a story · 4 points
HN discussion