This is a classic piece, and I love the contradictions in the text. It encapsulates my feelings on good software and code that it almost becomes an art than a science.

TIL this exists

I also like the POSIX “seconds since 1970” standard, but I feel that should only be used in RAM when performing operations (time differences in timers etc.). It irks me when it’s used for serialising to text/JSON/XML/CSV.

I’ve seen bugs where programmers tried to represent date in epoch time in seconds or milliseconds in json. So something like “pay date” would be presented by a timestamp, and would get off-by-one errors because whatever time library the programmer was using would do time zone conversions on a timestamp then truncate the date portion.

If the programmer used ISO 8601 style formatting, I don’t think they would have included the timepart and the bug could have been avoided.

Use dates when you need dates and timestamps when you need timestamps!

Do you use it? When?

Parquet is really used for big data batch data processing. It’s columnar-based file format and is optimized for large, aggregation queries. It’s non-human readable so you need a library like apache arrow to read/write to it.

I would use parquet in the following circumstances (or combination of circumstances):

• The data is very large
• I’m integrating this into an analytical query engine (Presto, etc.)
• I’m transporting data that needs to land in an analytical data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, etc.)
• Consumed by data scientists, machine learning engineers, or other data engineers

Since the data is columnar-based, doing queries like select sum(sales) from revenue is much cheaper and faster if the underlying data is in parquet than csv.

The big advantage of csv is that it’s more portable. csv as a data file format has been around forever, so it is used in a lot of places where parquet can’t be used.

Wow everyone seems to love P3 but I actually liked P4 better. I mean I really enjoyed both, but P4 was a more immersive experience for me. I should reboot my vita and play it again.

I really felt like P4 had deeper connections and relationships between the characters. It felt more real, and that made the tension in the game more exciting. I love every second of it and am still trying to find a game like it.

Don’t get me wrong, P3 was great also. The gameplay was superb and the characters were all great. But P4 still has a special place in my heart.

Yes it can be an issue because the GPS doesn’t know where you are and thinks you are on an aboveground street. Freeway tunnels can have multiple exits too.

Yes but karma makes it worse. It incentivizes getting getting upvotes because you don’t want to “ruin” your karma. Expressing controversial opinions, even if they don’t generate downvotes, are discouraged with karma. Even OP says he gets a dopamine hit by seeing the karma number go up.

I don’t like karma. It incentivizes short, meme-y posts since those are things that get gets a lot of karma.

Yeah that’s a good point. It’s telling that inheritance is by design difficult to change unless you follow very specific rules of good OO design patterns.

I guess it’s easy to write bad code in any programming paradkgm but inheritance makes it easy to screw up.

Most of us have bad memories of over-complex hierarchies we regret seeing, but this is probably due to the dominance of OOP in recent decades.

This sentence here is why inheritance gets a bad reputation, rightly or wrongly. Inheritance sounds intuitive when you’re inheriting Vehicle in your Bicycle class, but it falls apart when dealing with more abstract ideas. Thus, it’s not immediately clear when and why you should use inheritance, and it soon becomes a tangled mess.

Thus, OO programs can easily fall into a trap of organizing code into false hierarchies. And those hierarchies may not make sense from developer to developer who is reading the code.

I’m not a fan of OO programming, but I do think it can occasionally be a useful tool.

If the work I’m doing is on a feature branch on remote or locally, why does it matter to the rest of the team? My integration steps can be done on a server instead of locally. TBD forces teams to collaborate synchronously since changes are pushed straight to trunk. Rebase or squashes are irrelevant here.

Another poster put it great: TBD is trying to solve a culture problem. Feature branches and pull requests into main is much more flexible. The only time TBD make sense is for small teams - like 2 or maybe 3. And even at 2, I’d much rather create feature branches that merge into main.

Precisely. In practice, trunk based development just means your branch is local instead of on remote.

That or messages getting delayed so sorting is out of order. If you are using a score based sort, votes also come in late too. Could also just be bugs.

Federation is buggy and lagged behind especially with the influx of users. It’s currently not scaling very well.

• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3062
• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3101

Edit:

Also see this PSA: https://programming.dev/post/17801 which is a setting for site admins to improve federation, but then again, it may help that much.

There also may be issues between federating between different version of Lemmy.

Yep, though federation syncing is really slowing down. This post from [email protected] is at 44 comments from programming.dev but 112 comments on the beehaw instance.

Ehhh, I don’t quite agree with this. I’ve done the same thing where I used a timestamp field to replace a boolean. However, they are technically not the same thing. In databases, boolean fields can be nullable so you actually have 3-valued boolean logic: true, false, and null. You can technically only replace a non-nullable field to a timestamp column because you are treating null in timestamp as false.

Two examples:

1. A table of generated documents for employees to sign. There’s a field where they need to agree to something, but it’s optional. You want to differentiate between employees who agreed, employees who disagreed, and employees who have yet to agree. You can’t change the column from is_agreed to agreed_at.

2. Adding a boolean column to an existing table. These columns need to either default to an value (which is fair) or be nullable.

Extremely sad day for National Geographic and journalism in general. This is an iconic publication for over 100 years.

I’m sorry that all the staff writers were cut. It seems like articles are outsourced to freelance writers now. They also will stop selling physical copies at newsstands starting next year.

Super cool to see this instance getting great exposure.

TIL about the squircle

Nothing wrong with recommending a Mac. I’m not a Mac guy myself but I am pretty productive with one.