H HandsOnMoney personal blog

Spanish traders set the standard for GnuCash database design

handson.money 5 min read

TLDR: Spanish traders in the 1600s did not want to count their thumbs, which influenced GnuCash's database design choices in 1997. Much like a horse's arse set the standard for railways . How seemingly odd design turns out to be a genius solution that serves people pretty well.

Points

133

HN comments

81

Submissions

1

Cited by

0 commenters

Tech Industry & BusinessDatabases & Data2026

Related posts from the same era

Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

Mahad Kalam20253,406 points1,470 comments details

Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

Anthropic20262,920 points1,579 commentscited by 14 details

Claude Fable 5

Anthropic20262,626 points2,159 commentscited by 10 details

Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

Motorola News20262,358 points884 commentscited by 10 details

Claude Opus 4.6

Anthropic20262,346 points1,031 commentscited by 9 details

.name Termination

Neil Fraser20262,230 points547 commentscited by 4 details