Hello HN, just read about Pocket shutting down. I migrated away from it 2 years ago and built a small migration tool to transfer the data to Safari‘s reading list. Might be useful for other Safari users :)
Author here. Thank you (and others) for mentioning SELECT FOR UPDATE. Definitely missing at least a footnote in the article.
Note that "one step" updates (e.g., SET followers_count = followers_count + 1) are still not in place. They are regular transactional updates that rewrite the entire row. Still, they can achieve higher throughput because there is no application/database roundtrip between locking and committing.
Those two problems sound like they could differ substantially in perceived business value. Maybe it’s not how hard management think it is, but how valuable?