One thing I admire about Snowflake is a real commitment to self-cannibalization. They were super out front with Iceberg even though it could disrupt them, because that's what customers were asking for and they're willing to bet they'll figure out how to make money in that new world
Have you interacted with Snowflake teams much? We are using external iceberg tables with snowflake. Every interaction pretty much boils down to you really should not be using iceberg you should be using snowflake for storage. It's also pretty obvious some things are strategically not implemented to push you very strongly in that direction.
Not surprised - this stuff isn’t fully mature yet. But I interact with their team a lot and know they have a commitment to it (I’m the other guy in that video)
even partition elimination is pretty primitive. For Query optimizer Iceberg is really not a primary target. The overall interaction with even technical people gives strong this is a sales org that happens to own an OLAP db product vibe.
I have to very much disagree on that.
All pruning techniques in Snowflake work equally well both on their proprietary format as well for Iceberg tables. Iceberg is nowadays a first-class citizen in Snowflake, with pruning working at the file level, row group level, and page level. Same is true for other query optimization techniques. There is even a paper on that: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11540
Where pruning differences might arise for Iceberg tables is the structure of Parquet files and the availability of metadata. Both depend on the writer of the Parquet files. Metadata might be completely missing (e.g., no per column min/max), or partially missing (e.g., no page indexes), which will indeed impact the perf. This is why it's super important to choose a writer that produces rich metadata. The metadata can be backfilled / recomputed after the fact by the querying engine, but it comes at a cost.
Another aspect is storage optimization: The ability to skip / prune files is intrinsically tied to the storage optimization quality of the table. If the table is neither clustered nor partitioned, or if the table has sub-optimally sized files, then all of these things will severely impact any engine's ability to skip files or subsets thereof.
I would be very curious if you can find a query on an Iceberg table that shows a better partition elimination rate in a different system.
Supporting Iceberg is eventually having people leaving you because they have better elsewhere, but this is birectionnal, it means you can welcome people from Databricks because you have feature parity.
I’m surprised not to see a discussion of the biggest drawback: despite being fewer characters, “uv” is harder to type than “pip”. It requires two different hands to participate and a longer reach with my left index finger. pip is convenient – just a little rattle off with my right hand.
This post didn't age well – 3 weeks later Substack announced a $100m fundraise at $1.1b valuation. [1]
Ana's contention that Substack is "rickety" seems motivated by her conviction that they should adopt a more assertive, aggressive censorship regime, and that "we need a world where a social safety net protects risky writing".
There are certainly many interesting questions about the future of media and Substack's business – but the parade of people saying it can't succeed without more moderation keep being proven wrong.
This post linked to a different article (former Bloomberg reporter) that said it expected this round to be at $750 million ($50 million above the previous valuation).
And so yes, that's significantly less than it ended up being, $1.1 billion, but I'm not sure it impacts the argument being made. Except that the multiple would be even greater!
I don't think moderation has anything to do with it and it's not the core of the argument in the article. They've taken a huge valuation and investors will want a return on that. The problem is that there's just not that much loyalty in this space. I don't care where the content is hosted as long as it's not annoying, content makers don't care so long as they can make money. When substack starts needing to extract value they have to do it in a way that's annoying and chances are high we see the next platform appear. We've seen it before.
It would be lovely to see a platform get big taking a sustainable approach. But that investment money buys marketing and hype.
> This post didn't age well – 3 weeks later Substack announced a $100m fundraise at $1.1b valuation.
From the article: Newcomer says Substack is “pitching investors on a round between $50M and $100M that would value it above its roughly $700M last round price.”
Also: And if Substack does manage to raise that $100M they’re looking for now? Things will get worse.
The implication of her article is that they’d have a hard time raising that money and/or that they somehow aren’t doing well - I don’t see any evidence of this cited anywhere in her post.
No, the implication is that raising such a high level of VC would put huge pressure on Substack to grow and enshittify, thereby ruining the platform for writers who currently think it's good.
In other words, their current business model does not support their valuation, which necessitates a pivot.
She specifically talks about what happens next after raising that $100m. The higher valuation creating more urgency to be profitable, which could lead to a descent into Twitter-style outrage engagement stupidity, influencers, etc.
If she's wrong about anything, it's that you can assume enough people will leave a declining platform to keep it from staying alive.
At no point in this post does she even write the word "censor"/"censorship". The post relentlessly criticizes Nazis but wanting silence to her dissent isn't pro-speech, it's just pro-nazi.
I'm really sick of this argument. You never see free speech extremists defending anti-fascism or even questioning the decisions of governments as long as they're right wing.
That's no longer a justification once you have algorithmic amplification which Substack introduced with its Twitter immitation.
At that point they ceased to just tolerate these ideas but to amplify them. At that point they carry more responsibility, and people rightly blame them for it.
Free speech is fine. A private company handing nazis a megaphone and not accepting criticism for it is not.
I’m not sure what you mean by “responsibility”. But if thing are published or notified based on content neutral criteria, then it’s fine in my opinion.
This is an ironic response to a comment on HN that is being downvoted and soon will be censored by the crowd based flagging and voting system for being "disagreeable".
I don't know how this myth came to be. One would think that the experiences of the Weimar Republic would be enough to learn the lesson.
No, a democracy doesn't have to allow forces that literally want to destroy it an equal voice. Fascists and Nazis don't want to be a part of democratic society, they want to abuse it to get power and then dismantle it. As such, it's the duty of real democracies to protect themselves from such malicious actors. Because if they win, everyone loses. And we're seeing this in one of the supposedly more democratic countries, right now - a coup attempt by wannabe fascists was left without consequences, and now fascists are dismantling checks and balances and democratic institutions.
An extremely good quote from Nazi Minister of Propaganda on the matter:
> “We are an anti-parliamentarian party that for good reasons rejects the Weimar constitution and its republican institutions. We oppose a fake democracy that treats the intelligent and the foolish, the industrious and the lazy, in the same way. We see in the present system of majorities and organized irresponsibility the main cause of our steadily increasing miseries.
> So why do we want to be in the Reichstag?
> We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us. Any way of bringing about the revolution is fine by us.
> If we succeed in getting sixty or seventy of our party’s agitators and organizers elected to the various parliaments, the state itself will pay for our fighting organization. That is amusing and entertaining enough to be worth trying.
> Will we be corrupted by joining parliament? Not likely. Do you think us such miserable revolutionaries that you fear that the thick red carpets and the well-upholstered sleeping halls will make us forget our historical mission?
> Is our entry into the Reichstag the beginning of a compromise? Do you really think that we who have stood before you a hundred or a thousand times preaching faith in a new Germany, who have smilingly faced death dozens of times from the red mob, who have joined you in battling every form of resistance whether of official or nonofficial nature, who have bent before no command or terror, do you really think that we would lay down our weapons in exchange for a railroad pass?
