3 ms·

No idea what's with the sqlite articles making the front page every other day. This one is pretty old as well. The measurements in this article were made dur

by xxs 5y ago

No idea what's with the sqlite articles making the front page every other day. This one is pretty old as well. The measurements in this article were made during the week of 2017-06-05 using a version of SQLite in between 3.19.2 and 3.20.0.

blunte 5y ago
Either it's a concerted effort by some number of people to promote it, or it's that most people didn't see the original news and now find it interesting.
kissgyorgy 5y ago
I think it's just simply a lot of folks on HN (including me) just like SQLite very much and instantly voting up an article about SQLite (even when we already saw it :D).
- yashap 5y ago
  Yeah, IMO there’s certain tech that HN, in aggregate, likes a lot, and readily upvotes positive articles about - SQLite is in that category, along with Postgres, CockroachDB, Go, Rust, etc. There’s also certain tech HN, in aggregate, strongly dislikes, and readily upvotes negative articles - Mongo, anything “modern JS ecosystem”, systemd, etc.
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    Often for good reason too. SQLite is amazing. Modern JS and frameworks...not so much.
    - yashap 5y ago
      I think tech like a lot of modern JS frameworks, and Mongo, are really good at dev productivity, especially in the earlier days of products. If you're at a very new startup where the company could die any day, and you must ship absolutely as fast as possible to keep the company alive, that can be a truly essential feature. But then if said startup gains traction and the team/codebase/systems grow a lot, it can easily become hard to maintain, and you probably wish your backend was implemented in, say, Go/Postgres over Node/Mongo. Or that your mobile apps were written in Swift and Kotlin over React Native. And I think a lot of the HN crowd works at "startups becoming big businesses", so this is probably a common headache. But it doesn't necessarily mean the tech is BAD, just that it's good for certain things (like early days productivity), but a pain for others (maintainability as the system scales). SQLite is a bit unique in that it's just a super high quality piece of software, that is arguably the best short AND long term solution for the problem it solves (mostly being an embedded DB). But for software where it's more of a tradeoff around early productivity vs. long term maintainability, I think HN is pretty strongly on the long term maintainability side, and that's more of an opinion/choice than a clearly "correct" answer.
TrackerFF 5y ago
I think that whenever some topic sticks on the front page, and has a couple of hundred upvotes, you'll see a trailing/decaying trend of similar posts the days after. Some people see the main post, do some more research on the topic, find something cool / interesting, and post them here. Then this induces similar reactions, until the interest low enough to make them disappear. But then again, some recurring topics seem to stick around forever. It seems like there's a new Rust article here almost daily.
coldtea 5y ago
It's a social voting site, and it also belongs to a VC group. So when things make it to the front page, they're either voted by many people, or pushed forward by the site owners. In the case of SQLite, it's probably the first. Articles also come in batches (of a topic). Somebody sends something about X (e.g. SQLite) and then others see it, some start reading more about X on their own and digging up further articles, and inevitably a few will post those other articles they've found as well. Rinse, repeat. Age of article also has little to do with being on the front page of HN. There are articles that have been submitted, and made it to the front page, dozens of times from 2010 to today, and their original publication date can be half a century old (eg. some old Lisp articles, Djikstra articles, "Worse is better", etc.).
Seattle3503 5y ago
Because SQLite is the real deal. We see a lot of hype about technologies that have come and gone, but SQLite has stood the test of time AND is a pleasure to use. In some way it is the Platonic Ideal of what a SQL database should be (from a a developer's perspective). There isn't any mucking about with dev-ops configuration, because the DB is file based. Just type "sqlite3 out.db" and you have a database to write queries against. At the same time it still manages to be quite performant.

by xxs 5y ago

blunte 5y ago

Either it's a concerted effort by some number of people to promote it, or it's that most people didn't see the original news and now find it interesting.

kissgyorgy 5y ago

I think it's just simply a lot of folks on HN (including me) just like SQLite very much and instantly voting up an article about SQLite (even when we already saw it :D).

yashap 5y ago
Yeah, IMO there’s certain tech that HN, in aggregate, likes a lot, and readily upvotes positive articles about - SQLite is in that category, along with Postgres, CockroachDB, Go, Rust, etc. There’s also certain tech HN, in aggregate, strongly dislikes, and readily upvotes negative articles - Mongo, anything “modern JS ecosystem”, systemd, etc.
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  Often for good reason too. SQLite is amazing. Modern JS and frameworks...not so much.
  - yashap 5y ago
    I think tech like a lot of modern JS frameworks, and Mongo, are really good at dev productivity, especially in the earlier days of products. If you're at a very new startup where the company could die any day, and you must ship absolutely as fast as possible to keep the company alive, that can be a truly essential feature. But then if said startup gains traction and the team/codebase/systems grow a lot, it can easily become hard to maintain, and you probably wish your backend was implemented in, say, Go/Postgres over Node/Mongo. Or that your mobile apps were written in Swift and Kotlin over React Native. And I think a lot of the HN crowd works at "startups becoming big businesses", so this is probably a common headache. But it doesn't necessarily mean the tech is BAD, just that it's good for certain things (like early days productivity), but a pain for others (maintainability as the system scales). SQLite is a bit unique in that it's just a super high quality piece of software, that is arguably the best short AND long term solution for the problem it solves (mostly being an embedded DB). But for software where it's more of a tradeoff around early productivity vs. long term maintainability, I think HN is pretty strongly on the long term maintainability side, and that's more of an opinion/choice than a clearly "correct" answer.

TrackerFF 5y ago

I think that whenever some topic sticks on the front page, and has a couple of hundred upvotes, you'll see a trailing/decaying trend of similar posts the days after. Some people see the main post, do some more research on the topic, find something cool / interesting, and post them here. Then this induces similar reactions, until the interest low enough to make them disappear. But then again, some recurring topics seem to stick around forever. It seems like there's a new Rust article here almost daily.

coldtea 5y ago

It's a social voting site, and it also belongs to a VC group. So when things make it to the front page, they're either voted by many people, or pushed forward by the site owners. In the case of SQLite, it's probably the first. Articles also come in batches (of a topic). Somebody sends something about X (e.g. SQLite) and then others see it, some start reading more about X on their own and digging up further articles, and inevitably a few will post those other articles they've found as well. Rinse, repeat. Age of article also has little to do with being on the front page of HN. There are articles that have been submitted, and made it to the front page, dozens of times from 2010 to today, and their original publication date can be half a century old (eg. some old Lisp articles, Djikstra articles, "Worse is better", etc.).

Seattle3503 5y ago

Because SQLite is the real deal. We see a lot of hype about technologies that have come and gone, but SQLite has stood the test of time AND is a pleasure to use. In some way it is the Platonic Ideal of what a SQL database should be (from a a developer's perspective). There isn't any mucking about with dev-ops configuration, because the DB is file based. Just type "sqlite3 out.db" and you have a database to write queries against. At the same time it still manages to be quite performant.