JeffRosenberg

Yeah, that’s why the population of California is so tiny, people voting with their feet. /s

> our application code and DB access are separately versioned, our sprocs can change right under our feet from aberrant (i.e. extremely rare, insane) DBAs

Your database (and its migrations) should be source controlled along with the rest of your code. Problem solved, now you can take advantage of some of the legitimate benefits stored procedures have to offer!

What I find wild is that this control over international banking, and the sanctions it enables, is a key benefit of the US-led world order that Trump is trying to dismantle. I’m quite sure he doesn’t understand this, but a key consequence of his efforts to stop the US from getting “ripped off” is that we will soon no longer have the ability to impose these sorts of sanctions as the global economy re-routes around American control.

This was really interesting, but I admit I bumped on this throwaway detail:

> Our sleep consultant's plan arrived as a PDF full of conditional logic: wake windows, nap caps, what to do when a nap fails

Every so often, you get a glimpse into a whole world you never knew existed.

> at this point some of them are great-great-grandparents

And yet, insanely, they’re STILL the generation in power. Still breaking things even in their dotage.

It always felt like a huge miss to me that Microsoft didn’t bring Access to the web and/or mobile apps. For all its flaws, it was a simple drag-and-drop editor that almost anyone could use to build simple apps that could power decent-sized businesses.

> Republicans are telling companies "You can't discriminate against employees because of their race or gender" and that the Democrats are saying "No, we need to discriminate against employees who are the bad race or the bad gender".

That's the way conservatives have always framed affirmative action, DEI, etc. It sounds satisfying, but it's overly simplistic and lacks historical nuance.

The problem is that we've actively discriminated against people based on their race and gender for centuries. We haven't just refused to give them jobs, we've refused people the opportunity to better themselves -- shut them out of education, the housing market, etc.

That sort of broad exclusion from economic and social capital can't be reversed overnight. So that means it's not enough to just say "okay, we'll stop discriminating against you starting now." We should aim to redress past wrongs.

Does that mean "discriminating against employees who are the bad race"? I don't see it that way, although I understand that some people might. I don't think anyone is arguing that we should hire or promote unqualified people. But if a few candidates are similarly qualified? As a white man, I can understand that for the entirety of our country's history, _my_ race and gender would have entitled me to preferential treatment. Having to cede that advantage to others for a time seems only fair.

In the US, our butter comes in wrappers that divide each stick into 8 tablespoons, so it's actually very easy -- you can visually see where to cut.

They did support it from the mobile app, but in a way that always outraged me. They would only allow you to use Smile on mobile if you agreed to turn on all notifications and let them spam you with ads. Turning off notifications -- either through their app or through iOS settings -- resulted in their disabling Smile for you.

> This doesn't allow for YoY inflation. $1M today won't be the same tomorrow. The license should expect to issue new versions frequently to keep up with the economic landscape.

That's addressed at the bottom of the definition of a small business:

> Adjust these dollar figures for inflation according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index for all urban consumers, United States city average, for all items, not seasonally adjusted, with 1982–1984=100 reference base.

> The BusKill team publishes cryptographically signed warrant canaries on a biannual basis.

The canary-002 says:

    Status: All good
    Release: 2021-06-13
    Period: 2021-06-01 to 2021-12-31
    Expiry: 2022-01-31

EDIT: Oh, the issue is just that they failed to update the wording of: "We plan to publish the next of these canary statements in the month of June 2021." Looks like a copy from canary-001.

Look at that, there's an entire section on internals. Honestly, I didn't even consider looking there, I just assumed it would be all about syntax and never bothered to check. Thanks!

Narratives about racism in America are about the systemic, structural ways in which our country disadvantages black people, not about individual people's feelings or even actions. It's possible for individuals to have different experiences without negating the fundamental truth that the deck is stacked against black Americans. As just one example, white wealth is tied to homeownership, which was denied to blacks for decades.

None of this is to deny the pain of the author's experiences, which is very real. My point is that this isn't the sort of thing we're talking about when we talk about racism in America; it's about the system as a whole.

For me, implementing PARA in Notion has helped with that. I have one big database just called "Content", and then links to Projects/Areas/Resources. So if I'm not sure where something goes, I just put link it to all of them.

I actually loved Windows Phone. I got one because it was the cheapest possible option after my "real" phone broke, and I was surprised at how polished it was. It was such an interesting, opinionated take on a phone interface; I wish it had had a chance to succeed.

I try to start any UPDATE or DELETE by writing out a transaction first:

    BEGIN TRAN;
    
    -- TODO: update statement
    
    ROLLBACK;

Usually I'll run it with the ROLLBACK first, to confirm that it impacts the number of rows I'd expect, and only then change my ROLLBACK to a COMMIT.

Man I hate this. I sort of get wanting to support robust file sharing for teams, but let's be honest: 99% of file uploads on teams are going to be silly gifs.

I recently had to create accounts for work benefits at TWO different sites that had user name complexity requirements, and actually rated the strength of my user name! That's something I had never seen before, and it seems pretty misguided.

The worst of these also had a 20 character password limit (at least it wasn't 8!), along with several of these nonsense requirements that limit repeated characters. I couldn't manage to generate a password they would accept. Eventually I realized that not only did they allow only certain specific special characters, but their password length validation was wrong and would only accept 19 characters because they were testing for <= 20.

> And of course we’re always hiring engineers. If you have an interviewing.io account, you can take a look.)

Wait, you need to have an account just to see their open jobs? That seems like more of an antipattern than anything you could put in a job description.

Agreed, although that doesn't help me as a US citizen :-)

I agree with all the comments here that this seems pretty sketchy, and that "de facto" acceptance seems more like "accidental" acceptance. But I've been interested in the idea of "global citizenship" for a while... Are there any less sketchy organizations working towards a similar end?

99.999% of the time, no. But the consequences of forgetting are disastrous, and it's happened to plenty of well-meaning but distracted and preoccupied people. It was one of my greatest fears when my kids were young.

Scrolling down has been overridden to scroll to the right instead. So just scroll up and down to read. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Git greps work if you're trying to search all the logs. I would think this detailed documentation would be most important when you're trying to understand a specific file or line of code. In that case, it's:

- git blame (who wrote this?)

- git show (look at the commit surfaced by blame)

Then use `git log --oneline` and you don't have to see the lengthy details, until the inevitable day when you find you need them.

For me, this becomes more true the longer and more oddly specific the domain becomes. I'd feel perfectly fine with biketours.com or duderanch.com, but no way would I visit best-bike-tour-discounts.com or discount-dude-ranch-vacations.com.

I agree with this, particularly the bit about using Upwork. It doesn't pay well, but will give you a concrete task and a paying customer to hold you accountable. Submit a relatively low bid, with a relatively long timeframe, and be honest upfront about why the bid is so low. Then muddle through and figure it out as you go!

I have no idea if this is applicable to your particular situation, but I'll share what helped me. Maybe you're similar to me, but YMMV.

I tried on and off to learn programming for years, and I was never able to get any traction until I started doing it as part of an actual job. I just have never been able to get myself to focus on manufactured projects whose only purpose is learning to code. I needed actual business problems to focus on, and an environment where I couldn't just abandon my project with no repercussions.

I started out small, and with tasks that were related to my (non-programming) job -- these made my life easier but weren't on anybody's radar at the business. I was selling mortgages at the time, and built myself a better mortgage calculator, slowing delving into Excel's Visual Basic for Applications when I wanted to do things Excel wouldn't let me do without code.

After getting comfortable with that, I found more opportunities to do light programming that helped make my job easier, in the few hours at a time when I didn't have critical tasks in my day-to-day work. I started using SQL and VBA in Microsoft Access, then moved on to SQL Server and C# by taking a few freelance jobs. They paid terribly, but I took them more because they forced me to solve real problems using "real" programming tools. Eventually I was able to turn that SQL Server and C# toolkit into my full-time job.

TL;DR: what I needed were real-world problems to solve. If you can, find some way to write some simple scripts to simplify your everyday life, and use that to build on.

Under the right circumstances, sure. But it hardly seems like these are exceptional circumstances. This would be like eating at a restaurant, then asking if they'll accept 50% of the bill "because I've already spent too much at restaurants this year."

As a SQL Server developer, a lot of the advice here applies to SQL Server as well (or at least advice that isn't specific to PG tools, such as "Don't use psql -W"). However, the biggest issue with applying these practices to SQL Server is that terms that seem similar may in fact be radically different. For example, the `timestamp` data type in SQL Server isn't at all what you'd think, and `text` is an old deprecated type with poor performance.

So I think there's some good high-level advice here that applies across multiple flavors, but the specifics are really only applicable to PostgreSQL.