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parshimers | 5 months ago | on: A SQL Heuristic: ORs Are Expensive

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~dbbook/ is a great overview, specifically chapters 13 and 14 on query optimization. it is difficult to reason about though, and every compiler is different. it takes time and enough examples to look at a query and have an intuition for what the plan should look like, and if there's something the compiler is not handling well.

parshimers | 11 months ago | on: ICE Revoking Students' Immigration Statuses Without Their or the Uni's Knowledge

anyone cheering this on really has no idea how bad this is. higher education is an area in which the US has had a completely dominant position. the smartest and most driven people from all over the world come here to learn, and start businesses here afterwards. it's a tide that raises all ships. it's not at all a mixed bag like outsourcing or the loss of domestic manufacturing.

that dominance is ending now, because of the cruel whims of one man. none of this is based on rules or process. it's the exact kind of fickle brutality people come to this country to escape. the entire thing is like cutting your nose off to spite your face.

parshimers | 1 year ago | on: DOGE employees don't understand the basics of SQL

i think this already happened to some extent, with the Social Security Administration. unless something's changed it's all stored in IMS, i.e. pre-relational. perhaps there's some relational view on top of it but to my knowledge it hasn't been overhauled to anything more modern.

parshimers | 1 year ago | on: ZFS 2.3 released with ZFS raidz expansion

btrfs has similar aims to ZFS, but is far less mature. i used it for my root partitions due to it not needing DKMS, but had many troubles. i used it in a fairly simple way, just a mirror. one day, of the drives in the array started to have issues- and btrfs fell on it's face. it remounted everything read-only if i remember correctly, and would not run in degraded mode by default. even mdraid would do better than this without checksumming and so forth. ZFS also likewise, says that the array is faulted, but of course allows it to be used. the fact the default behavior was not RAID, because it's literally missing the R part for reading the data back, made me lose any faith in it. i moved to ZFS and haven't had issues since. there is much more of a community and lots of good tooling around it.

parshimers | 1 year ago | on: Making an intersection unsafe for pedestrians to save seconds for drivers

It's too bad they didn't put a roundabout here, there's one in the middle of old town Orange and it works pretty well. Terrible waste of money to make the intersection worse like they did.

It also says something that the behavior of the cars here isn't even illegal in California. Entering an intersection on yellow and exiting on red is fine. Right turn on red is also allowed, and many people combine that with a California stop (though that last part isn't legal). All of the above are extremely hazardous for pedestrians and encourage speeding.

parshimers | 2 years ago | on: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

we do have semi-autonomous trains, in the US at least. i'm not sure about elsewhere. PTC stops a large class of disastrous operator errors (overspeed, missed/ignored signal, etc.). it is almost entirely complete on all of the class 1 railroads in the US by now.

parshimers | 2 years ago | on: Safety benefits of roundabouts

the resistance is a problem. there are a few in Pasadena, CA on Los Robles between California and Raymond where it's a roundabout, with stop signs on each entrance. the worst of both worlds.

parshimers | 2 years ago | on: Electric bike, stupid love of my life

A Brompton is really small when folded. Smaller than a carry-on suitcase by volume. It rolls on little scooter wheels on the rear rack when folded. I bring mine into all the places you just listed on a regular basis, except for a gym. For a restaurant, it typically will fit under a table. At a bar, if you are at a table the previous thing works. I've also had the bar staff offer to stash it inside the store room. If someone you are meeting up with is DD'ing a trunk works as well. I've never been in a store so small I couldn't roll it in, you can just pull the seat up a bit and roll it in front of you.

parshimers | 2 years ago | on: It will take years to get Deutsche Bahn back on track

I always hear a lot of grousing about DB, but I took it a lot the two times I visited, and I liked it. Even when there was a horrible windstorm that blew trees all over the tracks and stopped the ICE from coming down to Ingolstadt, I was able to hop onto regional alternates to where the ICE was, and get back to Berlin without too much insanity. The trains are pleasant and clean, and the stations are massive and have lots of nice convenience stores.

Contrast this with Metrolink or Amtrak, and it's night and day. If your train gets cancelled, at least in SoCal, you're likely hosed. You will wait hours upon hours, and some stations that are in the middle of the biggest metro area in the US get 2 trains a day. You can't just hop on something going the right way. Furthermore they are often isolated and have no stores near them.

I also really disagree with the article's implicit assumption that passenger railways somehow, have to make a profit. At least here in the US, that's often implied too, yet the interstates are completely free and funded by the state and no one bats an eye. Why?

parshimers | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is your opinion of “unlimited” PTO?

It's fine if you, your coworkers, and your manager have the discretion to understand vacation is not optional. I've never seen this. It usually ends up being a race to the bottom, driven by people who think working at (or coercing, in the case of managers) a burnout pace is inherently virtuous somehow.

parshimers | 3 years ago | on: A US federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves

It seems very much like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to ban them outright. Require a fume hood, and if that is not enough then at least just ban it for new constructions or remodels. Induction is nice but I don't think it covers every niche just yet, and gas stoves are very desirable in places where electricity tends to go out due to weather.

parshimers | 3 years ago | on: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

Most headunits with Carplay require you to have the vehicle speed sensor connected to them. They also have a compass. So, if you lose GPS, you have the 3 components you need for dead reckoning: A starting location, a heading, and a speed. It works pretty good even in complex areas like parking garages.
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