tomwphillips

I was in the same boat with an M1 Pro I loved, but the display on mine died, and a replacement is about £800, which is bonkers. So now it's tethered to the monitor on my desk.

>As long as you have queryable data

This is doing a lot of work! Decent model and semantic layer is critical, I think. And of course it has to make sense to the business/domain experts.

Your comment reminds me of this one about Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

As a data generalist in an business, it makes zero sense for me to spend my time building a it tool like Hex when I can buy one and spend my time actually moving the needle on business outcomes.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

I agree. It takes time to develop intuition about how to use it effectively. My skills improved when I adopted a more systematic approach, e.g. using the same prompt across multiple models and examining the results, or slight variations on a prompt with the same model.

I'm surprised at the negative feedback in the comments.

We signed up for Hex a few weeks ago. The PoC was smooth. My colleagues love it.

Agreed.

For ages the data industry has obsessed over tooling when really the biggest impact comes from the organisational/people aspects - achieving consensus on metrics, dimensions, key entities. In short, governance. You can't buy that you like can a SaaS product.

We are now on Cloud Run.

After the last outage we considered moving off to Cloud Run - used it several times before and it is rock solid - but we gave them another chance. Unlikely we are staying after a day of no deployments and then this.

Rotated all our secrets but since deploys are paused our app is down.

I'm unimpressed.

Still down. I think we will move to Cloud Run after this.

You could, but the whole idea of lakehouse is that you can use whatever engine suits your needs. Now you've got to make sure that every engine enforces your access control policies properly. It just seems like a lot of work.

I think this is an elegant design that's superior to the competition, but I think lakehouses are not as generally useful as vendors would like us to believe. The access controls are limited to what's possible on the underlying bucket.

For example I think a lakehouse is a bad choice for standard enterprise BI type analytics - you've got no column or row access controls, and no column masking. I don't see how this could ever be bolted on to the bucket and catalog.

https://www.tomwphillips.co.uk/2026/08/the-benefits-of-data-...

Yeah, me. I've used it every day for years. With a hybrid/remote team it is a fantastic alternative to a physical whiteboard. Whole team uses it.

I don't care for or use any of the AI features.

I hope the price doesn't go up dramatically.

The video demo is so strange. A waitress spoke too fast - just act like a normal person and politely ask them to repeat themselves, instead of reading a transcription on your watch. My goodness.

Definitely not a bubble.

Can you elaborate what you mean by "won't let me fix"? What happens when you try to?

I was in a similar boat with my M1 Pro. I have an M4 Pro for work but rarely notice the difference.

Unfortunately the display in my M1 has failed and a replacement is £500-700. Very frustrating.

*All* my work as a solo consultant/contractor was from former colleagues who needed "trusted pair of hands" to deal with a project, or former colleagues introducing me to new people.

People hire you because they want something done with zero hassle. It is a risk to go with someone you don't know or haven't had someone vouch for.

I have this problem, but I just lock the front door.

A colleague sent me this search directly.

Dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269

Yes.

https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...