jcdreads

I like that everyone is trying to make something like SQL that reads more naturally to them. More alternatives is good! SQL is a widely accepted standard, and has strictly defined and super broadly accepted semantics.

As someone who has written quite a few half-baked-for-general-use but fit-for-purpose SQL generator utilities over the years, I'll suggest that if you intend for a novel syntax to be a general SQL replacement then being isomorphic to SQL would massively increase usefulness and uptake:

1. novel syntax to SQL; check! Now novel syntax works with all the databases!

2. any valid SQL to novel syntax; a bit harder, but I'd start by using a SQL parser like https://github.com/pganalyze/libpg_query and translating the resulting AST into the novel syntax.

3. novel syntax to SQL back to novel syntax is idempotent; a nice side effect is a validator/formatter for "novel syntax"

4. SQL to novel syntax back to SQL is idempotent; a nice side effect is a validator/formatter for SQL, which would be awesome. (See also https://go.dev/blog/gofmt, which is where I learned this "round trip as formatter" trick.)

I don't mean for this to sound negative, and I know that 2, 3, and 4 are kind of hard. Thank you for building prql!

My response to this question or to "Are we there yet?" has always been, "Yep, we've arrived! Hop out!"

Best delivered while the car is still at speed for maximum frustration. (Also best when the mood is already light.)

I miss DabbleDB greatly.

I once made a real meals-and-visits schedule signup sheet app for a sick relative (dozens of folks signing up for slots over days, etc.) in about 20 minutes, including learning a bunch about the tool.

Ultimately it "just" made CRUD apps, but it made the process amazingly fast. The equivalent of updating a Django model and view was usually a click or two with no waiting, and the only typing was to name things.

Generation [ obviously.

Any wrist-mounted Fitbit will do this, even the tiny ones without a screen. I've been using one as my only alarm for about a year, and it works great.

Disclaimer: I work for Fitbit.

Edit: Also, the battery needs a 90-minute charge only once or twice a week.

I have rolled an extensive (purpose-built) general data quality system at work, and would love for there to be a general purpose tool that does the same sort of thing. I would love to use, contribute to, or otherwise make real an open source version of such a tool.

There is an enormous need in several industries for this sort of thing; but most people don't really know they need it yet.

Fanta is one kind of coke that I didn't see much growing up.

My brother and I used to argue about whether Orange Fanta counted as a coke. He thought it wasn't, because it was orange soda and not cola. I thought it was, because it was sugary carbonated soda.

My wife refers to them all as soda or pop. The industrial name for them all is "soft drink", which I think means they don't have alcohol in them.

It's a very regional, kind of random thing.

It is almost entirely big city. Most American cities, considered by themselves, would be over there on the left with Washington.

Here's a visualization of this; mostly bluer cities and mostly redder non-city:

http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/

The Project Euler problems might be right up your alley. They are little programming exercises that start easy and rapidly become harder. Along the way you figure out enough math to make the programming easier, or at least enough to make better algorithms. The forums are enormously helpful. http://projecteuler.net/

Ah. My refusal to read press releases about scientific papers when the original is available bites me again. The press release is definitely less useful, and the quoted coauthor's quote less measured, than the original paper.

It's sarcasm. (viz. George Carlin, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGOBm2J4tn0 at about 2:20 in; the whole thing is classic Carlin at his most abrasive.)

The authors do not say "drastically lower our population very quickly" anywhere in the paper. The closest I can see that they come to saying this is in the conclusion, where they talk about, "reducing world population growth and per capita resource consumption" (among other things) as being "vital".

Please save your accusations of irrational, hysterical agendas for them that advocates hysteria and the abandonment of reason.

Full text of the speech: http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/wellesley/2012/06/youre_...

Why choose?

_"At any time"? Do you mean "With a court order"?_

A National Security Letter would do just as well, and at least two years of data need to be at the government's disposal. Without addressing the merits of National Security Letters, I should point out that one covering your data, or many people's data, or all of Facebook's data, might arrive at any time.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter * http://www.aclu.org/national-security-technology-and-liberty... * http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s0803b/final.pdf

http://xkcd.com/933/

Primary source:

http://www.quantumnano.at/

Without addressing the merits of either copyright or patent protection, I believe you're confusing the two. Folks around here tend to believe that software patents are bad; the view that copyright is bad is less widely shared. In fact, open source licenses /rely/ on the protections afforded by copyright law.

I was amazed watching the video of Bret V. using a tool like this, but even given those expectations I'm impressed with how cool this is to use. Thank you very, very much for showing us this.

(Only such a beautiful specimen deserves such nitpicking, but: it's not a _genius_ talk, it's an _ingenious_ talk. _Ingenious_ is the adjective form of the noun _genius_.)

This is fantastic! I've been ephemerally plotting my GPS tracks for a few years (though I'm only up to about 1.6M points), but the thought of publishing my tracks on the open internet has always seemed just a little too creepy, even by internet standards.

Beautiful maps, though.

Drivers in most U.S. states (I can only speak for VT, PA, and MA) are required to carry liability insurance in order to drive legally. The amount varies.

Robot drivers are a new and unproved technology. After not too many years I'd expect that they will cause way fewer accidents per mile driven than human drivers.

Anyone thinking of doing Swing programming (or, indeed, Swing programming at all) should check out the seesaw library:

https://github.com/daveray/seesaw

It makes a great deal of the pain of Swing syntax and boilerplate evaporate in a way that, importantly, feels very much like Clojure. It does this more elegantly than any other Swing wrapping library I've played with, which is a lot of them.

Thank you very, very much for this.

Note: Installing failed for me until I replaced git:// with https:// in two places in script/deps. Then it worked.

This is great.

I usually tell people that planes fly by pushing air down and backward: down so the airplane doesn't fall and backward so the airplane moves forward. I tell them this because otherwise they completely forget, and jump into assertions about implementation details like laminar airflow.

Now I know to _first_ talk about air going backward and down and _then_ to point them at the conclusions section of this article, referring them to the body of the article for detail. A-and then I'll get back to my work so I can get home at a decent hour.

Oh man, bugging people in pine with talk was the worst/best. Kids, it was a world in which someone could destroy your email session and spray characters all over the screen just by IM-ing you. Everyone knew how to do it, and everyone checked in on one another all the time (using who or w of course), so the odds against your completing a long email and sending it before someone wrecked your pine session were pretty long. The really hardcore kids figured out how to compose emails in pico or vi and then mail them from mail.

A year or two later everyone started using gopher and Mosaic and Eudora instead, which was obviously way more civilized.

...unless Goldman stopped selling derivatives on chemotherapy drugs and instead began to stockpile a large fraction of the available chemotherapy drugs in warehouses in Detroit.

Even if you trust a company not to do you harm with the information they store, there exist entities that can compel them to turn this information over. For example, the information can be (sometimes secretly) subpoenaed by the U.S. government.

The choice between being evil and not being evil can be an easier one to make, practically speaking, than the choice between being evil and becoming the target of federal criminal prosecution.

Probably worth noting about the author:

> Robert A. Muenchen is the author of R for SAS and SPSS Users and, with Joseph M. Hilbe, R for Stata Users. He is also the creator of r4stats.com, a popular web site devoted to helping people learn R. Bob is a consulting statistician with 30 years of experience

Disclaimer: I hate R's syntax, but my company's analytics group uses R for just about everything.

My wife had her wallet stolen on the T (in Boston) once, which would have been manageable but for the fact that Massachusetts driver's license ID's were your Social Security number. The thief (or someone) then used her SSN to open a series of credit cards and rack up a bunch of charges—computers, car repairs, etc.—the aftermath of which took at least a few hundred hours of hassle spread over three or four years to clear up. (Getting our first mortgage somewhere in there made it even more painful.) Mercifully, it eventually cleared up.

MA driver's licenses no longer use SSN as far as we can tell.

I ran a lunchtime SICP reading group at my last job wherein we read a section or two at a time and someone (usually me) would illustrate the concepts by walking through our own Java code base (a big industrial ad server). It helped that we were already using a bunch of functional programming idioms, and that we had a few little compilers in the code to begin with, but viewing all that agile-developed code through such a pure academic lens remains one of the more professionally rewarding exercises I've yet had.

Even though I'm still mostly a mouth-breathing Java programmer; at work anyway.