IBM to acquire Confluent

kept by eddie dec 12, 25

Hacker News commenters react to IBM's acquisition of Confluent with widespread skepticism, citing IBM's history of poor acquisitions and suggesting Kafka alternatives.

the broken economics of databases - by almog gavra
Database vendors charge high prices but earn slim profits because they must recover large fixed costs, constantly innovate to avoid commoditization, and compete against cloud providers who own the underlying infrastructure.
also on Confluent, #business-strategy, #open-source
Show HN: DuckDB for Kafka Stream Processing
SQLFlow uses DuckDB to enable stream processing of Kafka data with SQL, claiming setup in under 5 minutes.
also on Kafka, #infrastructure, #open-source
ADD / XOR / ROL: The missing OS
Large-scale distributed infrastructure lacks a complete datacenter OS analogous to a single-machine OS, with only fragmented proto-OS components existing today.
also on Kafka, #infrastructure
A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI
A Linux Foundation working group proposes DocLang, an XML-based document format optimized for LLM tokenizers to reduce cost and improve accuracy in enterprise AI document processing.
also on IBM, #enterprise, #open-source
After "AI": Anticipating a post-LLM science & technology revolution
The massive overinvestment in LLM datacenters is unsustainable and will lead to a bust that makes GPU supercomputers cheap, fueling a new science and technology revolution.
also on IBM, #infrastructure