tlocke

11 ms·

61.
by tlocke 4y ago
Whenever someone says, 'we have a staff shortage' I hear, 'we're not paying a high enough salary'.
62.
by tlocke 4y ago
I got an email a few days ago saying that a couple of my Python projects were 'critical', and I'm not sure what to make of it all. On the one hand I like working on the software and listening to users and improving it and it&
63.
by tlocke 4y ago
Curiously, in this case the people of the UK actually wanted to be lied to in order to 'get Brexit done'. The previous prime minister (Theresa May) was honest about Brexit, saying that it would involve putting a customs border dow
64.
by tlocke 5y ago
My rule of thumb is that the quality of software is inversely proportional to the distance between the user and the programmer. If the programmer is in direct contact with the user you generally get good software. If there are layers and la
65.
by tlocke 5y ago
> As to returns to IP holders, those are often the pension fund, who then pay the pensions to pensioners who then spend it on stuff. Pensions aren't distributed evenly across the population, it tends to be that the richer you are, t
66.
by tlocke 5y ago
To me, it's not a problem that my code is used for commercial gain. I use the MIT licence (a permissive licence). The key thing for me is that it doesn't give companies a competitive advantage, rather it puts companies that don&#x
67.
by tlocke 5y ago
I work on a few Open Source libraries and they're used by companies that make a lot of money, and people often regard me as a mug for doing the hard work for free so that other people can make lots of money. The argument I give in resp
68.
by tlocke 5y ago
Is this still true? The latest version of Ubuntu will run fine on most laptops that Windows will run on, and LibreOffice provides an equivalent to MS-Office. I'm not sure about Photoshop because I don't use an image editor, but in
69.
by tlocke 5y ago
For me, it's all in the licence that the content is under. I contribute to Stack Overflow and Wikipedia because the content is under an Open Source licence. For Quora and Reddit the licence is proprietary and so I don't contribute
70.
by tlocke 5y ago
I agree that information shouldn't be duplicated, but in one of my projects I've taken the opposite approach and made the FAQ the only place that certain information is presented. It's for the library https://githu
71.
by tlocke 5y ago
One problem with Ion is that it doesn't have a map type, but instead a struct type that allows duplicate keys. I created Zish https://github.com/tlocke/zish as a serialization format that addresses the shortcoming
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by tlocke 5y ago
True, I should have put better. Maybe, 'Why would a company invest in research if a patent troll could come along and extort money from them from day one?'
73.
by tlocke 5y ago
My response to that is, why would a company invest in research if a patent troll could come along and put them out of business on day one?
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by tlocke 5y ago
It's difficult to work out the cost of nuclear in France because the electricity industry is so intertwined with the state. For example, how much does their insurance cost? I bet they're effectively insured by state which doesn&#x
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by tlocke 5y ago
I think we're talking at cross-purposes. I'm saying that it's only when the supply from renewables exceeds total demand, you need storage. Otherwise if the supply from renewables doesn't meet demand then there's not
76.
by tlocke 5y ago
To take the USA for example, it'll play out like this. As more and more renewables are built there will be periods where the amount of renewable electricity will exceed demand. During these periods, electricity will be very cheap and w
77.
by tlocke 5y ago
To address the baseload question. Baseload for a period is the level below which demand doesn't drop. Baseload isn't a relevant figure if you're running a power network. The job of a grid operator is to make sure supply match
78.
by tlocke 5y ago
So to address the point of renewables and storage. Storage of the electricity produced by renewables is only needed when it exceeds demand. The UK is part of a European grid, and so a wind farm in Scotland only needs to store electricity if
79.
by tlocke 5y ago
Nuclear may or may not beat coal, but the competition is with renewables. Nuclear is far, far more expensive than renewables.
80.
by tlocke 5y ago
The fact is that nuclear is extremely expensive, and only gets built where there's huge government subsidy. The subsidy that renewables get pales in comparison to nuclear subsidy. Take the UK for example. Here we have a relatively free
81.
by tlocke 5y ago
The problem is that the operating costs are very high for nuclear (insurance alone is huge). Financially you're better off shutting down nuclear and putting the money into renewables.
82.
by tlocke 5y ago
The UK is different from the USA because it doesn't have a written constitution. Then UK has a parliamentary system but the USA has a presidential system. I'd say that from a constitutional perspective the US system is most simila
83.
by tlocke 5y ago
Actually, I retract my comment that Facata has better performance than SQLAlchemy with raw SQL. Really, the only reason I can think of for using Facata over SQLAlchemy is if you don't want the extra functionality that SQLAlchemy gives
84.
by tlocke 5y ago
That prepared statement caching is a feature of a particular DBAPI driver rather than SQLAlchemy itself. I take your point though, and I'd say that Facata is designed to be an alternative to DBAPI 2 rather than an alternative to SQLAlc
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by tlocke 5y ago
Thanks! Facata is really a low-level API, so the only SQL that's sent is what's explicitly sent. That means it wouldn't have a 'with' for transactions because that would require SQL to be sent 'behind the scene
86.
by tlocke 5y ago
You could do that, but Facata works at a lower level, so for example you can use prepared statements, which SQLAlchemy doesn't support. Also, Facata has better performance and fewer dependencies if you only want to use raw SQL.
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by tlocke 5y ago
That's a good idea. I'll look into it, thanks!
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by tlocke 5y ago
Creator of Facata here. DBAPI 2 is the standard for accessing SQL databases from Python, but since it's about 20 years old now, I thought I'd have a go at updating it in the form of a Python library that's a wrapper for DBAPI
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Show HN: Facata – Connect to SQL Databases from Python(github.com)
24 points by tlocke 5y ago|11 comments
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by tlocke 5y ago
Cars tend to diminish quality of life. Local, walkable and cyclable neighbourhoods on the other hand enable people to flourish. When people have to travel by vehicle, trains and trams are superior to cars.

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