[HN Gopher] What 'Project Hail Mary' teaches us about the Planet...
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What 'Project Hail Mary' teaches us about the PlanetScale vs. Neon
debate
Author : konsalexee
Score : 37 points
Date : 2025-07-05 11:38 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.alexoglou.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.alexoglou.com)
| chubot wrote:
| Hm I feel like I jumped into the middle of something and don't
| understand the conclusion.
|
| What's the beef between PlanetScale and Neon? Benchmarking,
| uptime, vibe coding?
|
| The quote at the end doesn't really help me. Which one is good
| for what?
| sinnickal wrote:
| Edelman PR
| konsalexee wrote:
| Long story short, I didn't want to make that
| analysis/distinction because it would miss the point.
|
| They excel in their respective areas based on the architectural
| decisions they've made for the use cases they wanted to
| optimize for.
|
| PlanetScale, with their latest Metal introduction, optimized
| for super low latency (they act like they've reinvented the
| wheel, lol), but they clearly have something in mind going in
| this direction.
|
| Neon offers many managed features for serverless PostgreSQL
| that were missing in the market, like instant branching, and
| with auto-scaling, you may perform better with variable
| workloads. From their perspective, they wanted to serve other
| use cases.
|
| There's no reason to always compare apples to oranges, and no
| reason to hate one another when everyone is pushing the managed
| database industry forward.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Well, I imagine at least the emotional aspect of this
| squabble had more than a billion reasons injected via
| Databricks.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| To make it shorter than OP's reply, from my understanding of
| the offerings:
|
| - PlanetScale for predictable load. You pick a config (CPU,
| memory) and if you don't have traffic it sits idle, and if you
| have traffic it's limited by the config you picked.
|
| - Neon for scalability. You pay for compute hours, so if your
| traffic is spikey (e.g. concert ticket sales), you don't pay
| for idle resources during low traffic, and get all the compute
| you need during high traffic.
| crims0n wrote:
| Tangentially related, is this book worth the hype? I don't read a
| lot of genre fiction, but don't like to miss out on the
| exceptional (just finished and loved Flowers for Algernon, as an
| example).
|
| Edit: Sounds like an enjoyable, low commitment book. Will give it
| a try, thanks for the feedback.
| ecshafer wrote:
| No. Any Weir anything is not going to break into the tier of
| exceptional. Its YA fiction level writing with a bit of science
| sprinkled in.
| loteck wrote:
| Almost nothing is worth the hype but the book is an enjoyable
| page turner if you like space adventures and speculative
| science. Audiobook also got some extra attention, I'd go with
| that if you like audiobooks.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| This. It was fun and very readable, but not something I have
| any desire to go back and read again.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| I loved the Audiobook.
| ItsHarper wrote:
| Admittedly I am a sci-fi fan, but I loved it so much. The
| science fiction aspects are not the best part.
|
| Don't watch the trailer for the movie though, it's very
| spoiler-heavy.
| jowea wrote:
| I liked the audiobook a lot, but I'm a SF aficionado, so my
| opinion may not be relevant. The other comment may be correct
| about the "serious literary critic" opinion.
| konsalexee wrote:
| It was really enjoyable to read. And I also do not read a lot
| of fiction, with my last book being the Hitchhiker's guide to
| the galaxy series.
|
| My verdict is that Project Hail Mary was way much more engaging
| in terms of story-telling. The concepts were cool, and tbh I
| look forward for the movie and see if the adaptation will be
| nice
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Yes, absolutely.
|
| It's maybe not a literary masterpiece and it's suspiciously
| similar to The Martian if you squint. But not many books can
| get me laughing out loud the second or third time through.
|
| It's a really fun read and I find the aliens particularly
| compelling in a way that most Sci-Fi doesn't get right.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Please remove that spoiler.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| It is a super fast, super fun read.
| sbelskie wrote:
| If you don't read/like much genre fiction, I would say probably
| no. The pacing is well done and I genuinely find story
| compelling, but the writing while solid-ish is not exactly of
| high literary quality.
|
| Additionally, in terms of genre I actually find Weir's books to
| be more like detective novels than sci-fi, though obviously
| lots of sci-fi elements in them.
| jetbalsa wrote:
| I've found and some have proven that sci-fi is just a setting
| of sorts, a background to the story at hand. For instance the
| Backyard Starship series is 100% a detective / cop novel set
| in space. Asimov did one called The Naked Sun that was pretty
| much a murder mystery and from what I understand written to
| prove a point that sci-fi really is just a setting to what
| ever main genre you want out of it.
| sbelskie wrote:
| Yea that makes a lot of sense. The first Expanse novel (at
| least Miller's storyline) fits here as well.
| jetbalsa wrote:
| I also think anime is in the same boat, there is a ton of
| different stories you can tell and how they are animated.
| its a shame it gets all lumped together like it does
| jowea wrote:
| I have the same opinion, likewise for fantasy. But a lot of
| scifi and fantasy stories really have similar tropes and
| plots, even if it is possible to write say, a romantic book
| with scifi trappings. There are also some books like I,
| Robot that really are about the scifi and not just another
| genre in a scifi setting.
| JonoBB wrote:
| I typically prefer somewhat deeper and more thought-provoking
| material, but I enjoyed this book. It's a light page-turner,
| written-to-be-turned-into-a-movie type book. Overall, I would
| recommend it.
| trey-jones wrote:
| It's funny, I would not put this or the Martian into made-to-
| be-movie category, mainly featuring a single protagonist
| alone with his thoughts of how best to effect survival. I
| haven't (and probably won't) see the movies. I preferred the
| Martian very much compared to PHM, but I did enjoy it. Just
| had a problem with suspension of disbelief to do
| trivialization of language learning and communication
| (especially alien).
| w-ll wrote:
| I liked all of them but i thought the length and the
| production for a PHM movie would be a lot. Compared to
| Artemis, no need for aliens, and a shorter read.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| It was on my reading list for a while, and after the movie
| trailer was released, it finally nudged me and I read it. Took
| a few hours. It is very easy to read, quite enjoyable being a
| 'plausible' sci-fi. Though, spoilers ahead, alien part of the
| story was somewhat disappointing, by being not alien enough.
| AngryData wrote:
| I thought it was a pretty good book as someone who reads a lot
| of sci-fi. It has a few unique ideas and plot points I haven't
| seen before, is an accessible read to anyone, and has a
| satisfying conclusion.
| _qua wrote:
| It's a fun read but, just like his other books, very one-
| dimensional characters with no depth. Not really remarkable
| literature, more of a bunch of Wikipedia articles strung
| together.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| if Project Hail Mary isn't a good sci-fi book, what is a good
| one?
| drexlspivey wrote:
| I liked Daemon by Daniel Suarez, I read it many years ago
| but it's more relevant now than ever (the story is about a
| rogue AI).
| mrgaro wrote:
| Depends a lot what you are after, but look for writers like
| Dan Simmons, Arthur C Clark or Alastair Reynolds.
| moomin wrote:
| Children of Time
|
| There's lots of answers to this depending on taste, but you
| also get into arguments about whether such and such is
| space opera or planetary romance. Children of Time is hard
| SF the way a reader from the 1960s would have understood
| it.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| I second this -- but, at the same time, it's such a shame
| that Tchaikovsky hasn't written anything else worth a
| damn, despite writing something like three novels every
| year!
|
| His two most recent, _Shroud_ and _Service Model_ , are
| bloated, uninspired, and borderline unreadable. I guess
| he's now subject to that curse of established authors,
| where editors are scared to mess with their manuscripts
| and trim the fat.
| gwill wrote:
| Dune, Children of Time, Neuromancer and Blindsight.
|
| for "sci-fi" that reads like fantasy, the Sun Eater series
| is really fun.
| cylinder714 wrote:
| I just saw an Apple TV teaser for Neuromancer!
| dwedge wrote:
| Iain M Banks Culture series
|
| The Mote God's Eye
|
| Anything by Asimov
|
| Also there's a lot of great short stories in this genre.
| For example the road not taken by Harry Turtledove
| Latty wrote:
| I agree that I really don't like Andy Weir's character
| writing: his dialogue in particular is rough, but despite
| normally characters being what I'm there for in stories, I
| give Project Hail Mary a bit more credit than this. The story
| has some interesting ideas and I think Weir's strength is the
| mystery of process: you see a challenge, and then you get to
| enjoy the competence porn of someone successfully going
| through the process of finding a solution, and I think he
| nails doing that in a really engaging way.
|
| I do think the movie will probably end up better than the
| book: having a screenwriter go over the dialogue alone will
| do a lot, I think.
| K0balt wrote:
| Meh, to me it failed to engage. Characters very one
| dimensional, I'd call it young adult level sophistication .
| Some cool ideas though.
|
| TBF I am trying to write fiction for the first time in my
| writing career, and I also suck at characters and non contrived
| story engagement, so I'm not trying to throw stones here. I do
| hope, however, to do better in my first published fiction.
| pjerem wrote:
| The hype, absolutely not. I found the writing to be very poor.
| However I enjoyed it. The story is refreshing and
| straightforward.
|
| To be fair, I read it months before the movie announcement and
| it really felt like reading a movie plot. If you prefer, I
| thought that the author had a great story idea but cared very
| little about writing a book, like he already knew this was for
| Hollywood.
|
| I think with good production it's going to be a better movie
| than the book.
|
| Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
| diggan wrote:
| Obviously subjective, but I had seen The Martian before I
| read the book (many years after seeing the movie), and liked
| the book way better than the movie. Read Project Hail Mary
| right after finishing The Martian, and enjoyed that one even
| more. I guess the writing is a bit dry, but it kind of makes
| sense and I quite like it. I'm cautiously optimistic about
| the new movie.
| ericol wrote:
| > Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same
| thing.
|
| That's the very feeling I had when I read 'The Martian'.
| While I was reading it I actually thought something to the
| tune (It's been years now) "This reads like a movie".
|
| Guess that explains why the movie is so faithful to the book.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same
| thing._
|
| The Martian was actually originally published in a serialized
| form, one chapter coming out every so often.
|
| > _It didn 't start out that way though. "The Martian" began
| as a series of self-published chapters on Weir's personal
| blog._
|
| > _Then Weir decided to put the book on Amazon, selling it
| for the website 's lowest possible price ($0.99)._
|
| * https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/how-
| andy-...
|
| > _Having been rebuffed by literary agents when trying to get
| prior books published, Weir decided to put the book online in
| serial format one chapter at a time for free at his website.
| At the request of fans, he made an Amazon Kindle version
| available at 99 cents (the minimum allowable price he could
| set).[9] The Kindle edition rose to the top of Amazon 's list
| of best-selling science-fiction titles, selling 35,000 copies
| in three months, more than had been previously downloaded
| free.[9][11] This garnered the attention of publishers:
| Podium Publishing, an audiobook publisher, signed for the
| audiobook rights in January 2013. Weir sold the print rights
| to Crown in March 2013 for over US$100,000.[9]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel)#Publ
| i...
| izacus wrote:
| If you can handle the terrible Gary Sue main character, it's a
| fun summer read.
| UltraSane wrote:
| The audio book is very very good.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I enjoyed The Martian even more, but perhaps only because I
| wasn't prepared for how good it was. I was bored in Stockholm
| airport and thought "haven't I heard of this book oh HN?",
| flipped a few pages, and decided to buy it. It quickly became
| clear that I had a new favorite book (and it still is)
|
| PHM, from the same author, I was very much expecting to be very
| good to amazing. It delivered, but it's a different feeling
| when you see it coming
| woile wrote:
| Yes, it's a nice book. Especially if you are not a native
| English speaking and you are looking to practice your English
| reading skills. I enjoyed the book and so many of my friends.
| It's very easy read, and it falls under the hard sci-fi
| category. I also enjoyed the expanse books!
| bananapub wrote:
| andy weir is the dan brown of this genre
| sho_hn wrote:
| It's Space MacGyver, and does that very well.
| bitbasher wrote:
| I don't get it. Sending a query to a remote server is going to be
| much slower than sending the query to local database. When has
| Postgres not been enough on its own?
| abroadwin wrote:
| For me it's all about the branching Neon provides. Being able
| to instantly and automatically have a branch of my production
| data for every dev branch is incredibly useful.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| Aren't there data security concerns with this?
| akulkarni wrote:
| I agree with the overall sentiment of this post.
|
| I've learned (sometimes the hard way!) that every design choice
| comes with real trade-offs. There's no magic database
| architecture that optimizes every dimension (e.g., scalability,
| performance, ease-of-use) simultaneously.
|
| Social media often pushes us into oversimplified "winner vs.
| loser" narratives, but this hides the actual complexity of
| building great infrastructure.
|
| Recognizing and respecting these differences makes us smarter
| engineers, better community members, and frankly, just more
| enjoyable people to chat with.
|
| PS Thank you for helping me add a new book to my list :-)
| mrcwinn wrote:
| tldr; Supabase. XD
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