jeff-davis

7 ms·

31.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
"Most of this comes with an extraordinary amount of bureaucracy" Navigating bureaucracy involves skill and willpower. A lot of schemes rely on people failing at it (public and private).
32.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
Can you explain?
33.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
"the two adults suffered 'non-life threatening injuries' and the two children were 'unharmed.'" Remarkable. Is there something about a Tesla that could account for this or is it just modern best practices for s
34.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
"Harvard students, who can be very risk-averse and afraid of failure..." An interesting statement, which seems worthy of its own article.
35.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
Naive question: why can't A/B testing work by implementing the tech on a few fields and not on others?
36.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
The consequences of C in long-lived software are somewhat known. Granted, the track record of C is mixed, but many important projects have been successful with it. Rust is exciting and proving itself about as rapidly as such a language coul
37.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
I'll answer in theory , because I haven't used it. And I assume there are lots of ways this theory breaks down in practice. The first (theoretical) benefit is that it removes a lot of redundancy. Databases already offer a lot of
38.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
If someone can write their own SQL, it would be trivial to DoS the system. My guess is that the sublanguage is meant to prevent that (but it's just a guess).
39.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
The US seems to be about 2% national parks: "The total area protected by national parks is approximately 52.2 million acres (211,000 km2)" -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_parks_of_th... &q
40.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
Query planners often choose the algorithm based on data statistics (as described in the article). Compilers generally just make a lot of constant-factor improvements without changing the algorithm. One exception might be the tail-call optim
41.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
I generally think that's a good idea, but be aware that the protocols are more interesting than you might first imagine, and that leads to a lot of the differences between drivers for different databases. For instance, when setting a u
42.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
The fact that more labor has been specialized makes it harder to maintain a critical mass of unspecialized, informal labor. If someone helps you paint, it might be months or years before you have an opportunity to really reciprocate. And si
43.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
"I enjoy just hanging out and having a beer, but also painting a room, building a porch, doing a little demolition" Perhaps that's the differece: specialization. More contractors and take-out meals mean less working with frie
44.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
The first real program I wrote was a forum in perl. But I didn't want to use "advanced" features like "use" (perl's word for importing a module). It just seemed too magical. So, I had limited time manipulation
45.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
Is accurate polling a good thing? It's not clear to me that democracy is helped by knowing what everyone else thinks.
46.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
What you are describing is called "internal fragmentation" and it's always a problem at some level in any system. There are tons of ways to mitigate the problem including variable-length data, out-of-line storage, and compres
47.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
I'm happy with mine, even though I did notice the brightness keys don't work (but there's a software slider in ubuntu that does the same thing, so I don't really care). Way better than the last two Lenovos I had. Your mi
48.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
For databases, I'm reluctant to rely on PGO (profile-guided optimization) because the workloads are so varied. There's a risk of over-fitting to the profiled workloads at the expense of others. Though there may be a lot of opportu
49.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
Less-powerful people tend to appeal to principles more, because principles tend to align with their benefit. You don't know whether the principles really exist until you see currently-powerful people hold themselves to the principles.
50.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
Is this just a general problem in science? Science is highly objective, but the process of attaining scientific credibility is prone to all kinds of human problems. Expecting the judicial system to sort through this better than the scientif
51.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
A single programming language, isn't always a "single language" across different code bases. Especially for languages like C and C++, there are many different approaches that different code bases use -- memory management stra
52.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
pg_upgrade is the way to do in-place upgrade between major versions: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgupgrade.html
53.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
CSV logging is also available: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-loggi...
54.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
The version support is five years: https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/ As long as you stay well ahead of that, you are fine. However, I'd strongly recommend testing your applications with new versi
55.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
Postgres has released a new major version each year for a long time. The only change is that versions used to be X.Y.Z, and now it just used X.Y. Now, X gets incremented for every major version, so it seems like it's moving faster.
56.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
I would add: can explain the level of complexity being introduced and how it will be managed. More complexity raises the cost to support and develop new features in a non-linear way. If you do features A, B, and then C; feature C might seem
57.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
What is the calculation for hiring mercenaries vs volunteers vs drafts? I would guess it depends on whether you have money or not. But it also seems like there are other dangers, like being outbid at the last moment by the enemy and having
58.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
Would one have the same feeling traveling on a ship into the open ocean before they knew that there were other life-sustaining continents to be found?
59.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
"The average record store lasts 2.75 years. The average dentist business lasts 19.5 years." Average means nothing unless the distribution is normal. And business longevity is not a normal distribution.
60.
by jeff-davis 4y ago
I'm pleased to see the word "causation" reappear along with the word "science". But I'm disappointed to see the word "proven". It isn't proven, and there are a number of problems. One is that the

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