supportlocal4h

If you had to make a few users and passwords and specify which tables were allowed for different users it is only because you chose to design your app this way. You must have felt there was some good reason to divide it up like that.

If that was the case, sqlite would have been unsuitable for your needs.

In other words, the complexity you describe was not caused by postgres. It was caused by your app design. Postgres was able to accommodate your app in a way that sqlite cannot.

Sqlite does have the "it's all contained in this single file" characteristic though. So if and when that's an advantage, there is that. Putting postgres in a container doesn't exactly provide the same characteristic.

For young impressionable readers, this is just a note that the parent comment is one person's opinion. There are opposing opinions here and throughout society.

Why is it a forced choice?

I think it would be super interesting if there became a GMail of Matrix--one super-dominant provider--but it was still possible to have Fastmail and Protonmail etc of Matrix. So you could actually still host your own little community that could still interact with the giant gorilla even if it was challenging to do so. Imagine that whichever federated protocol were extended with spam-blocking features that complicated federation such that it was even harder to run a server than it is today. But it was still possible, especially for those with enough money.

So every once in a while a newcomer like TikTok could blow up and become a fad, but some old grandma could just keep plugging away on their hilariously old-school service and still follow their granddaughter's high school swim team hosted on the hip new shiny service all the kids are going for today.

Ellsberg very eloquently articulated the fallacy that juniors were less trustworthy. I don't think their junior status is an issue. I think perhaps the bigger concern is their quantity. I'll leave it to probability and game theory experts to discuss whether it is better or worse to have more people capable of wielding such a weapon.

It used to be that elite status was acquired through bravery, intelligence and integrity

It used to be that people tried to manipulate public perception to appear brave, intelligent, ...

That's a completely different topic. I'm tired of hearing people spout about a legal obligation to grow.

If you mean "it will hurt somebody's feelings" don't say "it's illegal". Those words do not mean the same thing.

If a company earned a $1 dividend for the last five years and the stock price is $10, what is wrong with paying out $1 dividend again next year and having the stock price stay at $10?

If a stockholder wants a bigger payout they can sell their share and invest the $10 in some other stock and take their chances.

Personally, I think a $10 share that pays out $1 and is still worth $10 is incredible. It doesn't bother me at all that neither the price nor the dividend has grown. It doesn't bother me that the square meters of manufacturing floor space hasn't grown. I don't mind that the number of employees hasn't grown. It's ok that the number of SKUs has stayed the same.

It's perfectly legal to not grow at all.

>pump up the stock price and enrich the current shareholders.

The problem here is that doing anything else as a publicly traded company is illegal.

No, it is not. You aren't breaking the law just because your stock price didn't go up.

Commercial ISP. People had dialup internet access before there were commercial ISPs.

Perhaps you missed the part about not needing distro-specific packagers by providing a way to run third party apps without having to trust third party packagers. You can deny access to the camera or filesystem or network without ever auditing the source code and trust that the software cannot misbehave in that aspect.

This isn't a knock on the value of package managers or maintainers. It's just an obvious step in better security. It seems silly to argue that integrity among package maintainers is the only safeguard we need. I personally like the little piece of plastic that my laptop has that slides across the built-in camera. It's not a software solution, or even an electronic safeguard. It's even better than the little DIP switch on my phone. I say, why not?

I'm not convinced that people who are not paying Redhat for RHEL Workstation support count as customers on this question.

But this is still an odd statement. Previous customers who very much relied on LibreOffice might move to some other platform or at least some other support service. Thus they would no longer be Redhat customers and Redhat would still be loyal to their customers.

I suspect the number of RHEL Workstation customers to be a relatively small part of Redhat's customer base. And those that depend on LO support to be even smaller. I don't expect this to affect RH's bottom line in any negative way.

So only people capable of auditing source code and build scripts deserve to be able to trust software? There should never be any other way to offer trustability?

There were plenty of plausible alternatives before Sun bought StarOffice and made it Free software. There were plenty of plausible alternatives when the Libre folks "freed" LibreOffice from Oracle.

LibreOffice is still the standard-bearer for open source office suites. It isn't competing with WordPerfect or AmiPro or Lotus 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro like it used to. The proprietary stuff have largely died and lost to the two big gorillas.

It is as important as ever to have the likes of LibreOffice around. There are plenty of plausible alternatives to Redhat itself, but surely everyone understands how important they and their like have been and continue to be.

Please read the book. One guy follows a funky compass provided by...God(?) from Jerusalem to some coast. On the coast God shows him where to mine ore to make tools. God shows him how to build a ship that can weather a long sea voyage all the way to the Americas.

The whole book has all sorts of interventions from God. Like every page is about God. If you're hung up on Egyptian writing you missed the whole point. That's the least incredulous part.

And some 18-year-old kid in the 1820s says an angel led him to these gold plates with all this modified Egyptian writing and God showed him how to translate it into English.

So this book is going to be a bunch of crazy nonsense, right? Read it. Seriously, read it. It is a better read than anything you did in your high school or college lit class. We can't have a decent critical discussion about the physics of it until you've read it.

I'm open to a discussion about this. It just so happens that I have recently witnessed many very generous people give out 100,000s of dollars in scholarships to local high schoolers. I'm willing to consider that those donations should also be taxed.

I'm also open to discussions of a flat tax and abolishing food tax and lots of other tax ideas. Including allowing tax deductions for charitable giving and tax exemptions for lots of things. I'm ok with allowing some, but I see the room for abuse. We'll never eliminate all abuse and we'll never get everything exactly fair. But we can keep making tweaks in the never-ending pursuit.

My family is amused when I criticize the physics in a movie when a bridge collapses in an unrealistic way. Apparently I don't have any issue with the talking dog that flies across the river and uses mental telepathy to form a giant wave that catches all the pieces of the fallen bridge and pushes them back into place to restore the bridge. No, my beef is with the poor grasp of physics because of how the bridge fell down.

Joseph Smith didn't discover gold plates. He was led to them by an angel sent by God. The question of whether a decendant of inhabitants of Jerusalem could have buried some modified Egyption writings in North America 1000+ years before Joseph was born... that question is kind of small when considering if there is a God and if any such God takes a direct interest in individual people.

FWIW, I happen to believe that there is a God and that God cares very much about you.

Now, about that bridge...

The church in question regularly teaches that people should build up their savings against any reversal of fortune. It also teaches to be generous to those in need. It strives to set an example in both things.

Your wikipedia link is about some rumor started a half century after the founder was murdered. It's a bit like George Washington's cherry tree. It may be a well-known story, but it isn't part of the constitution or a motivation for any governing action.

I think it is entirely appropriate for the government of Sweden to build some security for a rainy day. I think it is appropriate for my neighbor to do the same. I don't see any reason why the local community church should not. So why should a multinational church be different?

I'm reading other headlines about whether US politicians will extend the debt limit in time. Wouldn't it be a relief if instead we criticized them for building too large a reserve?

Everything is political. Absolutely everything.

From the size of a parking lot to whether a browser can be included in an OS. To express an opinion on such things is an act of political activism.

Abortion, gun contol, vim. Which one is not political? Which one is not a matter of religion?

It is a current truth that there are modern apps of interest to me written in Python that I can't install because I need some special dependency manager or environment manager or something and it looks like I will do serious harm to my system environment if I follow the installation instructions.

Excelscript

I was recently asked to recommend a language for a new team. My boss (who won't be writing or even reading any of the code) suggested Python. His reasoning: it's what the kids are learning in college these days.

So here I am as the team Senior, looking at current and future team members and deciding on whether to be selfish and choose what's good for me, or trying to figure out what makes something good for the team. Is it better to pick something with a large hiring pool? Is it better to pick something with fewer footguns? Is it better to pick something with higher performance? Is C# really ok if we need Mac support? Is Swift ok for one-off glue apps that run on Linux? Is Zig too young? If a team of five has a Java geek, a Rust zealot, a C# fan, and somebody who only knows Python, can we just agree to all learn and use Go? If I know my replacement will undo whatever I choose, does it really matter?

Compare your Rust with my JS:

let decrement = _=>set_value.update(value => value -= 1)

I don't understand your complaint about syntax. The real difference here is the concept of a move and a dereference. JS lacks these concepts and naturally has no syntax for them.

Somewhere there is a team that is over the top happy about an incredibly successful explosion. Their job was to make sure that if flight path deviated beyond some threshhold that the whole vehicle would be blown into tiny parts that would become ballistically safe. They were on the edge of their seats on how well that would work.

They saw the lift off team celebrate their success. They saw the booster team fist pumping. They saw the concern from the separation team and their own anticipation spiked. They saw the flight correction team studying realtime data intensely and taking some pride that all that spinning was semi-controlled. The anxiety for the demolition team had to be through the roof. Then, finally, it happened. The system they had spent so much effort to design and integrate finally deployed. It didn't fire prematurely. It didn't fail to deploy. It got everything exactly right.

There is still a ton of data to evaluate, and some improvements to be made. But that unnoticed team from the back of the shed at the back of the lot is celebrating picture perfect execution. Here's a salute to real engineers doing real work, getting it exactly right, and getting no credit. Well done.

My child attends a small, arguably underfunded, rural public school. It does not have enough faculty to teach Chemistry or Physics every year. Spanish is the only foreign language taught.

The student body generally excels. A graduating class of 120 students might have a dozen who score 30+ on the ACT. And, of course, there is perhaps an equal number who fail to graduate.

They all go to the same school, but I wouldn't say "the same system is thrust onto the rich and poor alike." The most important system in the education of a child is not within the walls of a school. It is within the walls of their home.

It is simply true that a certain level of affluence is necessary to provide a stable learning environment * in the home *. Affluence does not guarantee that stability, but it increases the odds so dramatically that its affect should not be ignored.

Why pay for college later on when you could pay for high school now? School districts charge thousands of dollars in fees per student directly to parents. Public school is not free even if it is greatly subsidized. Our state claims it costs something like $25k/year to educate one student. If taxes, etc cover 95% of that, the parents are on the hook for $1250 per child.

It is entirely possible for people to be paid to produce something that is made available at no cost to certain other people. For example, that hand sanitizer dispensor at the pet store. Yes, somebody is paying for it.

In the case of a standards body, the people that do the work can get paid in various ways. The finished product can be published "for free".

In some research contexts this could very much be expected. If researchers were paid through tax-funded grants, for instance, the results of the research should be available to those tax payers. If they are also available to non-taxpayers, perhaps there is some altruism at play.

It's not an absolute given. But it's not an unreasonable expectation.

So your premise is that a company should draw out their interviewing process so that the top 60% of candidates will accept offers elsewhere and they can lowball the 40% that stick it out? And you justify this because they would only have a 10% chance of landing any of the good candidates?

Let me guess, are you an actual hiring manager?

I'll point out just one side effect. A highly qualified candidate interviews with three companies. One does two interviews in a week and extends an offer. The others take two weeks to get back to the candidate, then do two interviews and a take home, then two more rounds of interview. Meanwhile, the first offer is on the clock.

The only reason not to accept the first offer is because one of the other companies is that much better to work for. So the companies with the most onerous processes lose out on the best candidates or have to offer double the compensation to keep them in the maze.

The reality is that most companies can do fine with average employees. Bad hiring practices that lower the talent or increase costs don't kill them.

I would guess that 95% of the people I know exceed the speed limit 80+% of the time they drive. In fact, just suggesting that it is ok to drive the speed limit in the left lane of a U.S. freeway would draw near universal condemnation.

Imagine an individual who actually obeys the speed limit 99% of the time, exceeding it only by mistake. Imagine they are late to a once in a lifetime event. I think it almost impossible for the average do-gooder to contemplate the mental struggle of whether it is ok to--just this once--go 3 or 4 mph over the speed limit. Normal people wouldn't even hesitate.

Now imagine you are a concientious LEO driving a marked vehicle. There is practically no speed at which you will be punished. Every normal person is doing 5-10 over the limit. Some tap their brakes when they see you. But you can do 20 over the limit and never tap your brakes even when you see another police car. In fact, you rationalize, you all by yourself will impede traffic if you don't drive at least 10 over.

How do you not develop a sense of exceptionalism? Even if you are a good person? And, of course, how do you presume to pull another cop over and give them a ticket?

Now extend that beyond speed limits into every aspect of law enforcement. Is it reasonable to expect 80% compliance of the very best officers? No? So why should it surprise anybody to get <50% compliance from 15% of officers? Especially when you get <50% compliance from 80+% of non-officers.

The by-the-book officer is great for a comic movie. We all cheer for them in the theater. But on the street in real life they are intolerable to 99.9% of the public. Happily we all cut each other some slack. I think 1-5% percent is naive, or doesn't include the 10-20% grace we automatcally ignore by necessity in life.