mjw_byrne

5 ms·

1.
by mjw_byrne 1y ago
They're pretty different in British English, I struggled to figure it out until I started thinking about how it would sound with an American accent.
2.
by mjw_byrne 1y ago
I've done a from-scratch billing system build. As well as the complexities in the article, some of the logic required can result in rather exotic SQL. Answering questions like "what was the maximum number of concurrent sessions pe
3.
by mjw_byrne 1y ago
It's 40% above a threshold; the trouble is that the threshold is laughably tiny when you compare it to house prices. It's also relatively easily defeated by transferring assets to others well in advance of your death, which is the
4.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
It's good for a delimiter to be uncommon in the data, so that you don't have to use your escaping mechanism too much. This is a different thing altogether from using "disallowed" control characters, which is an attempt t
5.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
> I'm not clear why quotes prevent parallel processing? Because of the "non-local" effect of quotes, you can't just jump into the middle of a file and start reading it, because you can't tell whether you're
6.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
I agree that it's best to pick "unlikely" delimiters so that you don't have to pepper your data with escape chars. But some people (plenty in this thread) really do think "pick a delimiter that won't be in the
7.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
Yep, we had a constant tug of war between techies who wanted to use open-source tools that actually work (Linux, Postgres, Python, Go etc.) and bigwigs who wanted impressive-sounding things in Powerpoint decks and were trying to force &quot
8.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
Right, but the original point I was responding to is that control characters are disallowed in the data and therefore don't need to be escaped. If you're going to have an escaping mechanism then you can use "normal" cha
9.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
It is true for everything that uses quoting, I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
10.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
If you disallow control characters so that you can use them as delimiters, then CSV itself becomes a "binary" data format - or to put it another way, you lose the ability to nest CSV. It isn't good enough to say "but peo
11.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
The idea that binary data doesn't go in CSVs is debatable; people do all sorts of weird stuff. Part of the robustness of a format is coping with abuse. But putting that aside, if the control chars are not text, then you sacrifice huma
12.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
There's just no such thing as a delimiter which won't find its way into the data. Quoting and escaping really are the only robust way.
13.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
I used to be a data analyst at a Big 4 management consultancy, so I've seen an awful lot of this kind of thing. One thing I never understood is the inverse correlation between "cost of product" and "ability to do serial
14.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
I considered this but then went the other way - a \ before anything other than a \, newline or comma is treated as an error. This leaves room for adding features, e.g. \N to signify a SQL NULL. Regarding quoting and escaping, there are two
15.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
Exactly. "Use a delimiter that's not in the data" is not real serialisation, it's fingers-crossed-hope-for-the-best stuff. I have in the past does data extractions from systems which really can't serialise properly
16.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
CSV is ever so elegant but it has one fatal flaw - quoting has "non-local" effects, i.e. an extra or missing quote at byte 1 can change the meaning of a comma at byte 1000000. This has (at least) two annoying consequences: 1. It&
17.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
As with GDPR, the spirit is admirable but the fundamental definitions have been hand-waved. So for the foreseeable future, the expensive lawyers you hire are going to answer the important questions with "well, we don't have much
18.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
"No one wants a preboot password though" - really? Doesn't strike me as particularly inconvenient, especially given the relative rarity of actual bootups these days. I've been using bog-standard FDE for as long as I can
19.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
Just adding another comment to say how brilliant this film is. So atmospheric, such great music, such a grand presentation of the wild west and it's demise. It makes other westerns feel half-baked.
20.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
The map iteration order change helps to avoid breaking changes in future, by preventing reliance on any specific ordering, but when the change was made it was breaking for anything that was relying on the previous ordering behaviour. IMO th
21.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
NAL, but I think GDPR has exceptions for remote access, i.e. if a worker in India is viewing data held in the US, that is not necessarily formally considered a transfer from the US to India, even though the data clearly has made it to India
22.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
4. Stability and backwards-compatibility. I have never seen a Go version upgrade break anything. Meanwhile I have colleagues who do a thousand-yard-stare if you so much as mention upgrading the version of Python we're using.
23.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
That doesn't strike me as a problem. Definitions are often highly abstract and counterintuitive, with much study required to understand at an intuitive level what motivates them. Rigour and intuition are often competing concerns, and I
24.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
These statements always feel a bit circular to me. Sufficiently bad for what? Sufficiently bad to be indistinguishable from a cyberattack. So, "a software update bad enough to look like a cyberattack looks like a cyberattack". We
25.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
Silly clickbait title, which the author even admits up front. UDP and TCP have different behaviour and different tradeoffs, you have to understand them before choosing one for your use case. That's basically it. No need for "Never
26.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
I think statements of the form "X is immoral" are just secular versions of "X is against God's will", in the sense that they (not necessarily intentionally) use linguistic trickery to present a personal preference a
27.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
What exactly are you saying nobody believes? Moral absolutists, moral relativists and moral nihilists all exist.
28.
by mjw_byrne 2y ago
Interpreting the statement charitably, I think they mean "morality and ethics are arbitrary constructs of humankind, not the deep universal principles they are sometimes taken to be".
29.
by mjw_byrne 3y ago
I tend to agree. "All nontrivial abstractions are leaky" reminds me of other slightly-too-cute rules, such as "full rewrites are a mistake" and "never parse JSON manually". I wouldn't call TCP leaky becaus
30.
by mjw_byrne 3y ago
Yep, one of the big wins for Go was preventing this by just not supporting complicated, "clever" code. It doesn't have a ternary expression, "i++" is not an rvalue, you cannot pack a huge amount of work into a sing

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