petergeoghegan

8 ms·

31.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> I’ve heard that there has been an uptick in suicides. I expect it to get worse before it gets better. I imagine that people in this situation are typically overwhelmed by the shame. I would also venture to guess that specimens like Mic
32.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> So this crash has done them no real harm and taught them all a valuable lesson. It’s something every generation goes through. Why can’t I be entertained by it also? That also seems fine, provided you draw the distinction. (I don't
33.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> You can have schadenfreude at Bernie Madoff getting caught and still sympathize and/or empathize with his many, many victims. Exactly. Madoff's crimes were despicable because of the way that they hurt individuals and families
34.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> I think the most horrible is when techies celebrate a crash, without thinking about the middle class/lower class people who may have lost their life savings I absolutely loathe this article, but you have a point. It seems unseemly
35.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> I also find the comparison to tech stocks odd. Stocks are, of course, a fever dream. Very true. But arguments in favor of cryptocurrencies often rely on absurd false dichotomies that start from a reasonable premise, and take it somewhe
36.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> Because many of the costs of their irresponsible practices are externalized. I'm sure that that's true in at least some important cases. I don't see what it has to do with formal verification.
37.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> And yet, there almost certainly were lawsuits. So maybe you found evidence that perfectly counters my theory. It changed software, but only a little bit. There seems to have been something akin to an "accident chain", where a
38.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> You can prove programs are correct. The only possible flaw they can have is the specification is wrong. So specifications are kind of like programs? Have you heard of logical positivism? > That's very much not what I said. Ther
39.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> One of the major challenges will be teaching industry programmers how to write proofs and convincing them that they want to do this. "Industry programmers" are pretty far from being a monolith. There are a myriad of different
40.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> Nirvana fallacy. The point is that it can be much better and eliminate ALL non-design bugs. Serious question: do you really believe that? > That's just stupid. Show me the studies. There is a kind of HAL-9000 quality to many of
41.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
How about: skeptical of formal verification?
42.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
This sounds like motivated reasoning to me. Have you heard of Therac-25? You might be inclined to suggest that that could have been prevented if only they'd used formal methods. Perhaps that's true. It's something that could
43.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
The most important job of VACUUM is usually to make sure that queries remain responsive -- it's roughly comparable to a "full scan" within generational garbage collectors (for managed language runtimes). VACUUM does reclaim s
44.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
The difficulty comes from the fact that VACUUM requires most of the same state that is required when processing a user transaction. For example, VACUUM needs the commit log to check whether a given transaction ID is for a transaction that c
45.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
There seems to be a perception among Rust programmers that C's status as a defacto standard came to be in spite of C's contradictions, rather than as a result of them. Skimming the Rustonomicon just now left me with the impression
46.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
It will be in Postgres 15, which will be out later in the year
47.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> as of 2017 at least the plan was to implement merge using the underlying insert on conflict mechanism That was something that was discussed at length at the time, but ultimately rejected. And so the implementation of MERGE in Postgres
48.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> "every statement is atomic" Statement-level atomicity doesn't mean that you cannot get race conditions like the one that I described - it just means that the statement succeeds or fails as a whole. It's quite clear
49.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
The Oracle docs introduce MERGE as follows: "Use the MERGE statement to select rows from one or more sources for update or insertion into a table or view. You can specify conditions to determine whether to update or insert into the tar
50.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
Did you read the text that uhoh-itsmaciek posted?
51.
by petergeoghegan 4y ago
> a proprietary syntax for upserting despite the common practice of using merge w/hints for doing upserts in most other engines I was the primary author of the feature. That decision wasn't related to hints at all. MERGE just d
52.
by petergeoghegan 5y ago
The important point is that many (though not all) queries are executed by looking things up in indexes, as opposed to searching through all of the data in the table. The internal pages of a B-Tree index are typically a fraction of 1% of the
53.
by petergeoghegan 5y ago
Why would the database "allocate space" unless it was truly necessary, in any case? While char(n) works that way, most applications don't actually use it, no matter the underlying DB system.
54.
by petergeoghegan 5y ago
> The bugs are not caused by speculative execution. Actually, they are. It seems like you're arguing against the existence of any kind of low-level hardware/software interface. C is strongly associated with that interface, bu
55.
by petergeoghegan 5y ago
> I personally believe that we would be much better off with lower level instructions exposed to us, and putting the complexity in software There have been several initiatives that sound vaguely like that, none of which actually worked o
56.
by petergeoghegan 5y ago
CONCURRENTLY needs to wait for old transactions to go away, including those that haven't (and won't ever) touch the table that you're building an index on. So it's not waiting for a lock as such - it's waiting for o
57.
by petergeoghegan 5y ago
> In Postgres, by contrast, any schema change, even adding an index with the CONCURRENTLY option, needs to at least momentarily hold a totally exclusive lock that blocks all writes and reads on the table. It's true that every DDL st
58.
by petergeoghegan 5y ago
> That these two entities overlap so much is a very bad thing, and definitely a liability if things turn bad from a legal perspective. You are the one that is filing confusing, duplicative trademark and servicemark claims that waste the
59.
by petergeoghegan 5y ago
> The PostgreSQL Association of Canada; Postgres Europe; and Fundación PostgreSQL will transfer... The first two organizations are almost the same thing as the core team, for all practical purposes (unless you're a lawyer, say). The
60.
by petergeoghegan 5y ago
> No, the Founder's are the Founding members (5). The document says: "The Founder [singular], Mr. Alvaro Carlos Hernandez Tortosa, is Honorary Life Member..." It goes on to say: "...the willingness of the Founder [sin

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