I’ve met Simon for the first time in Tokyo in 2009 for a birthday related to JPUG (Japan PostgreSQL User Group) when hot standby was getting integrated into the upstream project. I saw him last time in Prague three months ago, and we have joked about a few things while discussing about life and how things were going on as I did not go to the Postgres Europe conference for 6~7 years.
The community has lost a member, and many people have lost a friend. That’s so sudden. My thoughts go to his family and people who knew him. I’m so sad. RIP, Simon.
I met Simon once ages ago when I was due to speak at a PostgreSQL conference. It was my first time speaking at a conference and he was a nice bloke and gave me a bit of advice afterwards. He said not to worry about having to be entertaining, it's enough just to get the points across, that's what people were there for. I found that very reassuring!
Article in daily mail:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13245363/Father-kil...
I don't normally like the Daily Mail but they do often include a lot of photos. For those of us who didn't know Simon, but knew of him through Postgres, it's nice to see a face and get a more human connection through these photos. Looks like a guy who lived life to the fullest.
Really sad to hear this news.
Personal anecdote from when friends went through a family tragedy - the daily mail were incredibly invasive and insensitive. They trawled Facebook to pull photos (like they’ve done here) but also figured out close friends and camped out on their doorsteps to try to get them divulge more information.
Man this is really sad. :(
Having interacted with Simon on both a community and commercial basis through 2ndQ he was always polite, professional and happy to spend time explaining things to mere mortals.
RIP Simon. You will be missed.
This happened at Duxford, a very famous airfield in the UK build during WWI. I think they have regular air shows there. Happens to be near Cambridge, UK, which is the high-tech (in many fields) area.
Duxford houses the Imperial War Museum Duxford, the American Air Museum, the Fighter Collection and the Historic Aircraft Collection [0]. Went their once years ago and was very impressed with the size of the collections.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duxford_Aerodrome#IWM,_America...
The museum there is really worth visiting.
You can see an SR-71 there!
Yeah. It's great
That's sad to hear. I only met Simon briefly at a conference a decade ago, but I've worked at companies based around Postgres for almost twenty years now. Given his work both on Postgres directly and in founding 2nd Quadrant, I don't think it's a stretch to say I owe him my career.
Having been following PostgreSQL's development and casually reading pgsql-hackers for years, Simon Riggs is a name I immediately associate to PostgreSQL. It's clear he will be missed. Rest in peace.
I met Simon in the 2000s when he was invited to give a Postgres training at the company I was working for at the time. My teammates and I invited him for a glimpse of Bavarian beer garden culture. Not only was Simon a world-class, no-nonsense database software engineer and entrepreneur, he was also a really nice fellow to hang out with. I’ll miss him.
I remember the discusson between Simon and Robert about RLS in Postgres, a feature I was eagerly awaiting at the time: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CA%2BU5nM%2BADSzcSs_2d...
Simon always replied in a professional and objective tone, while making his point. I liked him.
He was a "major contributor" according to https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
There's also a statement here: https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/remembering-simon-rigg...
His contributions include:
> Point in Time Recovery, Table Partitioning, Hot Standby, Sync Replication, focuses on enterprise issues, security, performance and scalability, business intelligence and replication/high availability.
Those are hell of big contributions.
It'd be worth billions if Postgres was a greed-driven enterprise (like Redis, Elastic, Mongo). And this value is now available and enjoyed by everyone on Earth.
Simon was one of the first people I met in the Postgres community, perhaps in 2007 at the first PGCon that I attended. We've attended many of the same conferences in places around the world, and I've occasionally had the chance to explore those places with him. He was always kind to me and helped me immensely. I was proud to have the chance to co-author a major feature with him. The last time I saw him was this past December.
Very sad.
Ouch, RIP. I didn't know anything about this guy, but now I feel like I should attempt some kind of code contribution to Postgres in his memory.
May he rest in peace, humanity surely lost a great mind today.
Simon Riggs's 2ndQuadrant was one of the first patreons for PostgREST. I'll forever be grateful, their support came in a hard time. Rest in peace Simon.
I worked for him at a 7 person consulting company in the 90's before his work on PostgreSQL. Back then he was a very focused and driven individual. We didn't stay in touch, but I bumped into him a few times at conferences and it was always good to catch up. RIP Simon and much love to friends and family at this difficult time.
The daily rate of notable deaths in the CS/hacker space will exceed the front page space of hacker news. Aging sucks.
This reminds me of:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37199495
Kris Nóva has died (865 points | 7 months ago | 130 comments)
Interesting deaths.
R.I.P.
Wow, incredible achievement to build Postgres replication.
Something so many people use. Inspiring.
(Note to self: never mention genitals in an obit!)
I hope I build something that’s used at this scale.
RIP Simon.
;__;7 I find news like this very sad. People who do massive amounts of good just suddenly die.
I had the honor and pleasure to work and collaborate with Simon. I am truly sad!
I had the honor and pleasure of working with Simon. I am truly sad!
RIP :(
Thankful for all the work.
RIP. :(
RIP Simon.
So side, Simon was a very brilliant dude. He was flying the cirrus sr22 which has parachute system, I wonder what happened.
Here is the incident report: https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/372326
The parachute dutifully deployed after the plane crashed.
Some discussion and a really upsetting video on Reddit that I’m assuming is this incident
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1boxor4/cirrus_sr...
So Sad, that video link is private, this one works.
Wow, I had seen the headlines about a fatal plane crash at Duxford but I hadn't made the connection that this was the same incident.
What an awful tragedy. RIP Mr Biggs.
Botched go around killed many pilots. May be trimmed too much up for landing with flaps and didn’t push nose down hard enough. In general, touch and goes in a high performance planes is not a good idea (no time for checklists, runway length, and actually wrong muscle memory for real takeoffs / landings). RIP.
There’s a balance of risks in T&G vs full-stop taxi-backs. On the day of the individual flight, taxi backs are surely safer. But if they let you get in less than half of the circuits (as would be common at busy GA airports) or if they cause your proficiency training to become twice as expensive, the overall system safety difference isn’t clear.
I come down on the side of being willing to do touch and goes in any aircraft (and have shared circuits with heavy jets doing touch and goes, so it’s done at all levels).
From the video, this does look like a botched climb from either an intended T&G or bounced landing after a series of T&Gs, so I’ve got to agree with your point about the “that day” safety here.
I kinda wish computer systems were more involved in planes.
Computer systems have controlled the movement of elevators for 50+ years. They stop the elevator moving when the door isn't shut very effectively. They have certainly saved more lives compared to even a well trained elevator operator.
With today's tech, it would be possible to make a computer that prevents stall of any aerofoil. Anytime an aerofoil is nearing stall conditions, do whatever is necessary to prevent it stalling by actuating control sticks in the direction to prevent the stall.
Self-driving cars can't even manage 2 degrees of freedom with billions of driver-miles of data. What do you think can be done in 3d space, with more instruments and many orders of magnitude of less data?
> With today's tech, it would be possible to make a computer that prevents stall of any aerofoil. Anytime an aerofoil is nearing stall conditions, do whatever is necessary to prevent it stalling by actuating control sticks in the direction to prevent the stall.
What a brilliant idea! It certainly could never directly lead to the deaths of 346 people in two separate plane crashes or anything.
On a slightly less snarky note, what do you imagine an autopilot is?
> I kinda wish computer systems were more involved in planes.
> Computer systems have controlled the movement of elevators for 50+ years. They stop the elevator moving when the door isn't shut very effectively. They have certainly saved more lives compared to even a well trained elevator operator.
I thought you were talking about the elevators on a plane and was trying to figure out why whether a plane door was closed mattered for controlling the elevators.
As the old quotation goes, Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous, But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.
Even if the accident pilot had intended a stop-and-go and assuming reports of a bounce are accurate, it was too late. Trying to force a landing risks porpoising. Going around after a bad bounce is the safer choice — but a high workload event: full power, first notch of flaps, nose forward, and the all-important right rudder.
Are pilots four point strapped? The video looks like a heavy impact with a whip effect from the wing hitting the ground, but the forces involved look generally in the class of automobile impact. Is GA lax on restraints?
Are there "airbags" in GA, or accidental deployment too high a failure risk?
> but the forces involved look generally in the class of automobile impact.
I don't think that's something you can eyeball?
For one thing, planes infamously don't appear to be moving super fast even when moving at speeds that would raise eyebrows in a car. On normal final approach a Cirrus SR22 has an airspeed of around 80 knots (92 mph, 148 kph) and that looks like this: https://youtube.com/shorts/XZcW11zgWQE - the accident plane almost certainly had a higher velocity when it hit the ground
And for another, impact with the ground especially in a dive is very different from impact with another vehicle as is typical for road accidents. Instant deceleration is a whole other beast. Imagine driving straight into a thick concrete wall at over 90mph - there's nothing that seatbelts and airbags are going to do to save you from fatal injury (an example of such a test crash: https://www.carscoops.com/2022/11/what-happens-when-you-cras...)
PostgreSQL is a very unique community compared to other database community(MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, ClickHouse et.c). It is INDEED decentralized, which means NO single company control it. This is related to the style of PostgreSQL's primary maintainers and leaders, who have ensured that the project's decisions and direction are determined collectively by the community members, rather than being controlled by a single company. Hopefully, their departure will not change this aspect.
The foundation is set up as a 501(c)(3) and to the benefit of the public. While it is not the only open-source project foundation working like that, many others are 501(c)(6)'s and primarily for the benefit of their (most often corporate) sponsors.
Redis ownership is decentralized as well. Redis the company owns the trademark and they were responsible for about one fifth of commits in recent years. The majority of contributions is external to them. The code base is BSD licensed and anyone is free to create a fork and continue development. Which looks like it is exactly what will happen now that Redis has decided that they don't need the input of the other 80% of commits from external contributors. Those contributors will inevitably shift their attention to one or several of the other forks. The Linux Foundation's Valkey fork looks like one of the main likely candidates for committers to rally behind. The biggest change will be the name change. The notion of the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. abandoning their Redis user base is unthinkable. They'll continue to offer that and they'll continue to lead the development of Redis. Redis the company will loose what little influence they had. I've never heard of anyone using hosted Redis directly from them.
In general, projects like Postgresql and other successful open source projects have in common that generally contributors are not coming from a single company. Community diversity is what gives open source projects resilience against corporate shenanigans. Mysql in some form or another will persevere as well. It has survived a lot of this stuff already and it's still there as an open source option.
I use it as a guide to select which things I use. I look for three things in open source tools and libraries that I use: 1) proper licensing (No agpl or shared source nonsense) 2) community diversity (no single companies that can change their mind), 3) active & recent development demonstrating the project is healthy.
Of course the tragedy of individuals like Simon Riggs passing away is that they are so important for the health of these projects. With postgresql, I'm confident that there are others that can step up. But still, he's been very important and it's important to recognize their amazing contributions. The OSS world is full of these type of hero developers and it's what makes using OSS so wonderful. With Redis, that person would be Antirez. And he stepped back from Redis the company some time ago. It will be interesting to see what he does post fork.
I’d guess Microsoft ends up replacing Redis with Garnet[0] in their stack at some point.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-ga...
What’s wrong with AGPL
It has a few clauses and language in there that generally scare corporate lawyers. There are two main groups of people advocating the use of this license.
1) companies that sell non oss commercial licenses for their AGPLed software that they own the copyright to and want you to buy those. A lot of those companies are now starting to prefer shared source type licenses.
2) open source advocates that don't like any commercial usage of their software and will actively want to prevent any form of intermingling of closed source and open source components like is common in many commercial projects. This is nominally to protect their freedom. But of course it has consequences in the context of commercial projects that don't want to opensource their proprietary stuff. Whether that is actually true or not for any particular use requires a bit of careful legal scrutiny.
Some places that do license audits (e.g. most banks, insurers, and other large companies that need to be alert to potential legal pitfals) would probably flag anything under this license. Three reasons for this: these licenses are only fine under very specific circumstances and certain combinations of licenses are not compatible. And finally of course these audits and lawyers are expensive. So, the easiest way to stay safe would be a blanket ban on anything with this license. Which is my general attitude towards this license.
Anyway, don't take your advice from random commenters (including me) on hacker news and consult a lawyer when in doubt. Yes that costs money. Alternatively, save some money and just steer clear of this mess.
AGPL is fine for open source projects. It isn’t really useful for a commercial closed-source or even an open-core codebase in some cases.
On the other hand, usually that’s the intention when a project selects AGPL. There’s usually a commercial license you can buy instead (see iText for example).
It isn't fine because it will come up in due diligence as a risk, every single time. It's easy to say "it's fine", and in theory I agree with you. But it's a cost that doesn't make sense if you know what the auditors are going to say and expect. Auditors flag even more benign things than the AGPL, but to pretend it's not a thing is just whimsy.
I very much want drew's post to be correct, but I can't let confirmation bias cause me to consider this due diligence.
Are there any lawyers or legal cases that you know of that have proven this? or at least lawyers who have reviewed it and given a legal opinion?
> MySQL
What‘s the point of it, by the way? Why would one start a new project based on MySQL instead of postgres today?
Because you know it better? Same reason as for most technical decisions tbh.
Besides that, there are still some points where the MySQL and/or the tooling around it simply performs better than Postgres. Anything to do with replication and big table migrations comes to mind.
Not an expert, but briefly looking into this, MySQL is
1. easier to configure and manage
2. faster for read-heavy workloads
3. has pluggable storage engine (though, if you care about this, then 1. likely doesn't matter anymore)
It's much less emphasized compared to MySQL, I didn't even know about it until your comment, and search results are sparse.
MySQL has had multiple viable storage engines for most of its existence. MyISAM, InnoDB and more recently MyRocks.
MySQL has an actively maintained LSM-tree based storage engine like MyRocks, while Postgres doesn't have production-ready options in that regard.
Log Structured Merge Trees are superior in write volume and scaling B+ trees higher. LSMs are part of the sauce of Cassandra and (I believe) DynamoDB for horizontal scaling.
RocksDB is a single node very efficient (better than Cassandra's in the 2.x/3.x releases, not sure about now) single node LSM implementation.
Had Oracle stopped investing into MySQL, may be people would have moved on. But they didn't. Just like when people were worried about JAVA, instead we have 15 years of continuous improvement. And that is the same with MySQL. There are lots of features MySQL has as defaults, while postgres simply accept it is not something they want to deal with but leave it to extensions.
I would choose MySQL because I'm more familiar with it and it's good enough for what I need. PostgreSQL might be able to give me better benchmarks but it won't have any meaningful benefit for me the developer or for the user.
Also, the license. PostgreSQL is controlled by the open source community via a nonprofit organization.
Multi-master replication out of the box. Very useful, very occasionally.
Because it may be good enough. In my case, because I already maintain an instance of MariaDB in production, and I may prefer to share this that maintain another thing
I personally also prefer postgres but I have used mysql in the past as well on and off over the last 20+ years or so. Managed postgres was at some point slightly more expensive in Amazon for some reason. So that's a good reason. If all you need is some simple database, either is fine.
Because I make money with WordPress.
I wouldn’t, only because the big O is behind MySQL.
Otherwise, why not? It’s basically a Chevy vs Ford decision.
Interesting comment, why do you think PostgreSQL succeeded where others with the some structure don't? Is it most probably the kind of people involved more than the structure?
I don't have an answer but I'd love to know this too. Why has Postgres got this unique staying power?
Coming at this from a small sample size, every time I've seen it used has been because some of the developers on a team love it and think it's cooler than the other options. And, over time, the operational experience has gotten better (AWS' Postgres support for RDS/Aurora is all recent, for example); and, in fairness, I'd take psql over SQL Server any day of the week.
Regarding why it has popularity beyond mySQL/mariaDB is still a confounding mystery as far as I'm concerned. The additional behaviors Postgres tends to encourage (I'm looking at you, publisher/subscriber and trigger functions) seems to lead to devs advocating it as 'easy' while those in my position are left to keep the damn thing running.
I developed my preference for PostgreSQL years ago, before MySQL supported foreign key constraints or defaulted to durable commits. MySQL also had this annoying tendency to silently store invalid timestamps as zero. All of these things have been fixed since (I hope?), but I still can’t shake my impression that PostgreSQL takes correctness more seriously.
I would say it's similar to Linux:
It's a free, solid foundational technology, guided by steady hands.
In a software economy full of profiteers, charlatans, and marketing babble, the project is providing real value to users.
> It's a free, solid foundational technology, guided by steady hands.
Beautifully said.
This is how ALL open source used to be! Like literally ALL, this is the norm not this bullshit VC funded fremium restricted/tiered fuck the customer trap nonsense.
People built things because they loved it and wanted to help others , not to get rich. Now everyone just wants to get rich, and fast.
While I agree with your sentiment, maintaining software like postgreSQL is a full time job. But your last sentence seems to apply to everything on the internet lately. People used to do podcasts, create guitar tabs or publish cooking recipes because it was their hobby and they wanted others to participate. Now everything seems about making money.
People would do these things for free because they had a stable job which guaranteed their material needs. Now every type of job can be automated and done better/cheaper by a machine, people will be forced to "monetize" everything that exists unless we get a literal revolution in how we tax and distribute the produced wealth.
It’s less automation and more about cheap labor. Content farms sprung up and flooded the landscape with worthless content to get a micro-slice of the pie.
Very discouraging to many content creators when their work is just going to be buried in SEO chaff.
Also, the automation wave is just beginning. Soon the human run content farms will be overwhelmed by AI created crap.
This is likely to happen in software as well. Every product will need to compete with some AI generated piece of garbage that’s barely passable functionally, but being sold at a fraction of the cost.
Fun times!
You are getting at it backwards. People are doing podcasts about investing, cooking, music production, <anything> because even those careers are being automated away and the money that they could be getting working is going away.
Even Software Engineers: take all the swaths of engineers who were productive but didn't want / didn't make to a FAANG company and now are having to compete in a world where most companies can replace a lot of the people they don't need a team of 8 engineers because their team of 4 now can have Co-Pilot and most of their "middle management" roles could be effectively replaced by some cheap, off-the-shelf SaaS.
I'm literally in this scenario. I'm too old to be interested in competing with someone who is 20 years younger than me but can call themselves a "programmer", and whatever knowledge/experience I have can be had at a fraction of my "cost" by using a commodified service that automates a process. So, what is left for me? Either I need to go downmarket and work for "programmer" jobs (further increasing the supply and lowering salaries) or I need to find someone who is willing to invest in my "idea for a startup" (thus getting into the Silicon-Valley way of life), or I need to find a way to take my unique experience and repackage as something of value - and then get to be called "greedy" by people like you.
By the way, may I interest you in becoming a customer of my not-yet VC funded company (https://communick.com) and/or join the people sponsoring me for $4/month for my Fediverse work (https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs)?
100% agree on this. Ansible sell out and Hashicorp are fine examples of this.
The main alternative to open source monetization is XKCD 2347 (one guy in Nebraska). PostgreSQL appears to have hit that sweet middle ground that is so rare in open source.
Monetization-era
Yeah man, screw the VCs! That’s why we’re communicating through an open source platform… oh.
Well at least this site isn’t created by a VC… oh.
Things are nuanced. VCs can fund valuable useful things sometimes.
I don’t believe HN was created or is being maintained out of the goodness of anyone’s heart.
HN has monetary value to someone somewhere. Plus it’s cheap to run.
It’s also a good advertising and recruiting platform for YC.
There by the grace of VCs goes HN.
Nobody's saying screw VCs.
We say screw to fooling your users that you're an OSS adopter and supporter, just until your project is big and you can say screw OSS.
Who cares if they do that? Do you see Torvalds and co running around crying because the entire world runs on Linux Kernels?
I would love nothing more than for a project I built or contributed to wound up as an AWS service.
Writing the code is just part of the value, running it is also very difficult. Especially as the use increases and expose new code paths and bugs and what not.
OSS users don't complain about AWS wrapping around it. It's very much welcome.
The greedy people behind businesses managing OSS are concerned, because they are not satisfied with making money. They want to be THE ONLY ONES making LUDICROUS profits on top of community contributions.
you can't fork and maintain everything yourself, and that de-facto lock in is exactly what companies bank on when they pull this kind of bait and switch. The idea is precisely to gain popularity with open source, "the first dose is free" style, and then capitalize on the dependency and popularity. Literally just the developer analog to the misleading "everything is free and always will be" advertisements of consumer facing software.
Do you have any idea of what constitutes an OSS project besides characters written on an versioned repository?
What's wrong with trying to get rich? Please explain.
Just tell everyone you're dealing with that your primary purpose is getting rich with the software.
Don't tell them you have always been and always will be open source, just until you're big and give the middle finger to OSS in order to get richer.
You apparently are not familiar with the concept of software maintenance, upgrade, security patches. Or completely ignored it when wrote this comment.
No. No no no. Don't weasel-word out of this with bullshit technicalities.
The phrase isn't "FooBar v3.11 is free and always will be".
There is no version number in the phrase, so the common understanding is that the product and every version of that product will always be free.
Wow
Design by committee has downsides. Let’s not put Postgres’ development practices on a pedestal.
Design by committee is not really common in the PostgreSQL community. Instead people just work on whatever they or their employer wants to. Makes having a roadmap or cohesive plan impossible but the issues of design by committee rarely show up.
PostgreSQL's development never looked like design by committee.
Postgres is one of the top open source projects of all time. That doesn’t mean everything is perfect with no room for improvement but almost anyone could learn from what’s worked there.
I think he deserves the black banner to be put
emailed dang asking for this
Very sad.
I will not fly in a small plane, just as I wouldn't ride a motorcycle (both have similar death/time rates.) Your preferences may differ.
This doesn't mean riding in a car is risk free. Many well known computer figures have died that way too. A friend of mine who went on to become fairly well known in the early internet died that way, a head-on accident on I-95.
I wonder if small planes aren't actually far more dangerous than motorcycles. A significant minority of motorcycles are operated by thrill-seeking people who routinely drive recklessly and avoid wearing safety equipment. They tend to be young, inexperienced, and unconcerned with risk. Pilots, on the other hand, tend to be serious, careful people. They use checklists. They have to undergo extensive, supervised training. Pilots have a culture of understanding and mitigating risk. For all those differences, the mortality rates are almost the same.
The average death rate for motorcycles and general aviation is around 1 death per 100,000 hours. Just an average, as you observe.
BTW, flying a small plane costs maybe $40/hour in fuel, but if your life is worth $12.5M (the statistical value of a human life these days) then the cost of the risk is $125/hour, three times as much. This tells me it's likely a good idea to include an emergency whole-plane parachute system on general aviation aircraft, even at the cost of fuel efficiency.
I'm sorry to hear that. My best friend, since we were 2 years old, died at 29 in a motorcycle accident the same year he took over the family business. He got clipped by a car that swerved into his lane to avoid another car and that was all it took to take him away from us.
[dead]
> and the British, as a rule, don't do to-go portions from a restaurant.
This isn't true at all.
If it's anything like Denmark, it's just that nobody local ever does it, and so we never learn that it is an option.
Then we suddenly see a foreigner do it and wonder what other options we've missed and start to wish life came with a manual.
One of the somewhat delightful things I’ve learned as an adult is - you can just ask people for anything, and they’ll do it, much more often than you might think.
People will even start to like you more for it!
I had never heard of this- thanks for linking!
I remember the time I was at the Ocha on Embarcadero in downtown SF and I saw some older VC type guy order his shrimp pad thai with no tails.
My mind was blown and my life changed forever. Now I order french onion soup without the onions (high end steakhouses are happy to strain it), shrimp tempura rolls with no tails, whatever. I order my salmon nigiri with no skin. I’ll order sides of sauces from other menu items I didn’t get.
It’s rare they don’t accommodate me. (Before you ask, I always tip super well and don’t ever mind an upcharge for a special side sauce or whatever.)
You are paying them! I still struggle with customizations and usually like to try things as envisioned by the chef, but some food textures I just can't do.
Unless it's a place with a certain vision/theme/morals or artsy food, they just want to make you happy.
Shamelessness is a superpower :)
For Danes, half the experience of a meal is the presentation. They would not want to eat an already half-eaten meal out of a styrofoam box.
As a Dane from central Copenhagen, I'm not sure where you'd get that idea from.
While most would agree that fresh food tastes better (unless it's pizza, that jury is out on that one), that doesn't mean we're too posh for the looks of leftovers. A good portion of our food is also quite boring, and the most common takeaway comes pretty crudely presented and packaged. If we only ate food in fancy presentation, we'd all have starved to death by now.
The reason I don't eat half-eaten meals is because I never half-eat meals in the first place. I order the amount of food I want to/can eat, and should that plan fail, I share with my tablemate(s) - although I tend to be the recipient on that one. We don't do it because we fear taking a crime-scene with us home in the form of a haphazardly filled styrofoam box like poor people, but just because it seems polite and proper to both size your mail right and try finish it. That, and that we didn't know that taking it with us home was even an option in the first place.
So true.
I used to drink a lot of pop/soda. When I initially cut back I stopped buying two liters for the house and only drank when eating out or the like. It always shocked my table mates to see me asking for a to-go cup for my drink.
But now I see those same people getting their drinks to go too, especially after the lockdowns and everywhere was offering curbside drinks.
Yes it is. Asking your waiter to wrap up the rest of your food to go almost never happens in the UK.
Maybe this is creeping in due to seeing Americans doing this in movies. You start to realise how people cope with those huge portions sizes in the US. Many people don't eat everything in one sitting.
It's hard to explain why we don't do it in the UK. We generally assume that packaging is not free so therefore wouldn't expect someone to give free takeaway boxes. Also, like almost everything cultural in the UK, I expect it is rooted in class snobbery. If you need to take away, maybe this indicates that you're poor and need to make a meal last. These aren't conscious prejudices, they're relics of the past and subconscious.
As italian, this kills me, what if there’s leftover? The restaurant just throws it away? Food? For class snobbery? Like the restaurant can’t reuse it, no? So it’s just thrown away?
I assume people would just adapt to the culture by generally not ordering more than they will eat.
Leftovers happen (semiquote)
I regularly ask the waiter how large is the plate or if they do half-plate (quite common) if I'm not feeling very hungry.
If they don't do half-plate and the plates are large I might ask around the table if someone wants to split or take a portion of mine.
What's your point? That there might sometimes be leftovers even if you plan to finish it? So what? People also take left overs home and sometimes never eat them. It could very well be the case that places that don't send home boxed leftovers result in less overall waste than places that do. Especially when you consider the boxes sent home as well.
No system is perfect and a culture of taking home leftovers does not necessarily reduce waste overall.
We're not talking about America, we're talking about the UK.
You're not going to eat re-heated food that you've had at the restaurant a few hours prior, no-one who cares about food ever does (unless you're an American, maybe).
Even if they're non-Americans, this is a verily heavily American-influenced forum so the people here most probably have more American habits compared to the average people in their countries.
> That's a bit universal for what's simply your opinion.
Yes, and that's a feature, not a bug, we're here to share our opinions, this is not a peer-reviewed forum.
With all that said, I still cannot understand how come a person who says he/she cares about food could eat re-heated takeaway stuff (supposedly at the microwave, which makes it double yuck-y).
> "Asking your waiter to wrap up the rest of your food to go almost never happens in the UK."
It happens, I've done it. Certainly at pizza restaurants and such where we've over-ordered. It's easy to chuck half a pizza or whatever in a takeaway box, and they're always happy to do so.
It's just less common in the UK because meals generally aren't so oversized like they can be in the US. In the UK we usually order what we can eat. If there's food left on my plate, it's because it didn't taste good and I don't want it.
The meals aren’t actually oversized in the US, they are serving you 2 or 3 meals when you order. Nobody expects you to eat all of that food in one sitting. Many restaurants even place the to-go containers on your table without asking because it’s culturally ingrained.
No it’s not - we’ve done this many times in London in all sorts of places, chains, small restaurants and even a very fancy restaurant (the waiters there looked positively happy when we asked).
We don’t do it often only because we don’t over-order as a general rule (c.f. my wife’s Chinese family in Canada who over-order every time we go out and take whatever is left home).
> If you need to take away, maybe this indicates that you're poor and need to make a meal last.
I'd say it's the other way around: The British norm of eating everything on your plate was traditionally to avoid food waste.
And even though supermarket food is incredibly cheap these days, the norm is maintained by parents who want their children to eat their vegetables.
So Brits rarely see one another asking for to-go boxes even though many restaurants will offer them for free.
> It's hard to explain why we don't do it in the UK
I wonder if you're assuming I'm not from the UK, I am. I've seen it regularly, across strata. You are not speaking for the entire nation.
Clearly (judging by the mixed comments where some say it's not common, and some say it is) this is a regional thing, but the assumption being made in that thread, and your comment, is untrue.
> ... almost never happens in the UK.
Maybe it's a regional thing?
Seemed to be fairly common in London when I lived there for a few years.
Look up the demographics of London.
It is an exception compared to the rest of the UK.
... about to post the same, particularly in curry places ...
This simply isn't true anymore. Even pre-covid, many restaurants were delivering food and it was becoming normal to box up leftovers.
I've had upmarket steakhouses offer to box up my remaining food despite them not offering delivery.
You're definitely not speaking about the UK as a whole, this is completely normal and rooted in not wanting to waste food.
The wasteful step is to order more food than you will eat. Someone not finishing their meal is what I don't recognise. If someone has a small appetite I am used to them enquiring about portion size and arranging to split dishes with others rather than expect to bag up an excess. There are always people keen to get their hands on anything going spare anyway.
I only see it happen if someone falls ill, is called away or there was an error in the order e.g. you manage to order four entire chickens instead of four portions.
But why is it wasteful if you intend to eat a portion of your dinner for tomorrow’s lunch? All the food is eventually eaten.
Is it because a small paper box is involved? Would you find it less obscene if everyone carried a reusable food container with them to a restaurant to mitigate the risk of offensive boxed leftovers?
This whole discussion feels like "why would you need debuggers, you should not introduce bugs anyway". Even if you are careful you will eventually end up in a situation with leftovers; it may be your fault, but it may also be the restaurant’s fault.
Not really, because different people are different. Some may not have the capacity to eat fewer large portions - like me - and eat less, more frequently.
Many people eat more than they need to at any given time, that is arguably greedy and argubably wasteful in a different way.
Portion sizes are static, appetites vary, letting people manage for themselves is perfectly fine.
> It's hard to explain why we don't do it in the UK
Due to various factors, we can't afford to make more food for that price. So we charge the same (or more) for less food on the plate compared to other countries.
> Also, like almost everything cultural in the UK, I expect it is rooted in class snobbery. If you need to take away, maybe this indicates that you're poor and need to make a meal last. These aren't conscious prejudices, they're relics of the past and subconscious.
This is just you having a hammer and everything looking like a nail. If you're shamefully poor, you're not eating out at all. Cheap takeaway food like fish and chips is definitely not shameful, and people of all socioeconomic classes eat it.
Also this anecdote is from 2006, nearly twenty years ago. It definitely wasn't popular then and now is only likely in certain types of establishment (probably places that do deliveries).
> You start to realise how people cope with those huge portions sizes in the US. Many people don't eat everything in one sitting.
Yep. It conflicts with the "clean your plate!" mentality many kids were brought up with, but realizing that a meal you buy is often really enough for two meals and that it's OK to take some back with you can help both your weight and your wallet.
I do it -- 'please put that meat in a container for me' -- and have for a couple of decades. But then I rarely can afford to go out and most places provide normal portions you finish in one sitting.
I do it all the time, mainly to keep for the dog. I was asked this week at a pizza place if I wanted to take the rest home too. I don't think it's as uncommon as you think.
In Germany, particularly in Hesse from what I've experienced, restaurant staff might take offense if you eat less than half of your meal and refuse to have the leftovers packed up. Just last week, a restaurant in Gießen went above and beyond by including an extra bowl of fruit salad alongside the remainder of our meal. That, I will remember a long time, especially after my wife's startling reaction to discovering a kiwi in the package – she's terrified of the fruit for some reason :)
I can confirm that. The cultural attitude in Germany is that food should not be wasted. One of my favourite café bars in Heidelberg, when it closes, gives away the unsold pastries to the people who are still there -- sometimes a whole bag full.
There are still a lot of Germans around who remember not having enough to eat as children in the late 40s. Yes, their parents had done, or at least allowed, terrible things, but they were children. Meat was especially in short supply, and my 85 year old aunt-in-law is pretty sure they had rat a few times.
So my elderly German in-laws would be horrified with how casually my Texan ones will buy and grill large, expensive slabs of beef, and end up throwing out a good deal of it because it was way more than the bunch could eat. I am, anyway, but have learned to bite my tongue.
Can confirm, my parents grew up starving in the ashes of WW2. My mother hid canned food under her bed, in her closets, everywhere for all of her life. It always annoyed me and when I'd ask her about it she always answered the same, "I hope you never know what it's like to starve".
In the UK, I never have seen it done or done it myself especially compared to when I lived in North America where it was standard.
It is completely true. People do it very occasionally, but not like in America.
A few years ago my family went to a pub / Thai restaurant, and the portions were larger than we were expecting. I asked the owner if he could put the leftover food in a box for me to take away; he said, "Sorry, I can't do that -- what if you took it home and then got sick?" I knew that they also did take-away; so I countered, "Could you give me a box and then forget about it?" He smiled and got me some take-away boxes, then left so he wouldn't see what I did with them.
So, it was sufficiently unusual that I had to be creative to make it happen.
As a rule ... it decidedly is. Yes, it can be done, but the overwhelming majority of time, it isn't,
> This isn't true at all.
It is. Go somewhere like South Africa where you expect with most meals to have a takeaway box, as there's so much food. We might do it, especially if we have kids with us, but it's not something after basically every meal.
Then we put it in the fridge, never to be eaten.
True :) That's why South Africans have US-style double fridges. To store uneaten restaurant food.
In Germany it is also not common, but some people do it (like my mother)
I was surprised he'd never been to a chain restaurant. They're not exactly lacking in the UK or Western Europe in general...
I've only ever seen this done once here.
I’ve only ever seen it done in pizza places that already have takeaway boxes available.
> I’ve only ever seen it done in pizza places that already have takeaway boxes available.
Most, if not all, restaurants have something they can drop leftovers into if you ask for it.
As someone who lives in Spain but is Swedish, I've never had any restaurant tell me "we don't have takeaway boxes" or "no, we won't do that" when asking to take my leftovers with me, neither in Spain or Sweden or any other country I've visited.
Pizza places are also one of the few places in Europe where the portion is often too large.
Otherwise I think the rare occasion where someone requests it is when a younger child has hardly touched their meal.
Dude dies and y’all are talking about to-go portions.
The original posted thread is talking about it, and making a sweeping generalization, I am commenting on that generalization.
So now we have covered PostgreSQL and food waste, how about the topic of avoiding small aircraft for transportation (because they are so much more risky compared to larger commercial aircraft)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatalities_from_aviati...
He was the sole occupant, and he was doing touch and gos (ie practice) not transportation.
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In case the phrasing of the reply you're talking about doesn't clue the reader in to the fact that it's a sorry attempt at bait, if you look at the (three) replies on the account that made that post, one of them pings like a hundred people with a GIF of a kitten captioned with the N-word.
That is tasteless IMHO as well, but please, let's just stop and keep it about him here.
The person writing that, at the day someone died no less, should be expelled from any sane project.
Ah, they're writing it ironically, and on Mastodon. Then they should just be expelled from society.
I thought Mastodon was supposed to be a better Twitter because of all of the federation and everything.
Not better, just decentralized. The same humans can be in either.
It is not better in the slightest exactly because the people on there think they're better
There's nothing preventing someone to run a white supremacist instance of mastodon (it's also what Truth.social is). But the good thing is that other instances can de-federate so their junk remain confined there.
That's the point, yes. And as such it makes no sense to blame mastodon for that. The fact that the moderation of that particular mastodon instance is happy with it makes me never want to interact with this particular instance in any way, and that's another freedom mastodon give to its users.
You're confusing two different things:
- “filter bubbles” that are automatically enforced by whatever opaque algorithm made to boost “engagement” (and ads revenue)
- and the ability for people to join independent forums that are moderated locally (and from which they can move if they dislike the moderation policy). People joining groups where they feel well is not “filter bubbles”, it's how the internet worked before some people tried to rule it all.
It's a pretty obvious troll.
He's been trolling regularly for a week or so.
And it's even more sad just how much flagrant discrimination has come back in full force in just the past decade.
Sincere "What the hell is wrong with you." to him.
>how much flagrant discrimination has come back in full force in just the past decade.
never truly dies. Social media is simply doing the equivalent of sweeping it under the rug. Meanwhile, the rug itself becomes another corner of the internet to fester until they learn to get around the "popular" social media filters.
The cycle just repeats until the core problem is fixed. Sadly that core problem is societal.
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