News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

BrentOzar

So, counterpoint: I live in Vegas, and I know firsthand that giving my phone number (which isn’t a Vegas number) at the host stand for check-in has allowed me to bypass lines, every time.

If you frequent restaurants owned by the same company (in this case, José Andrés), you can end up as a VIP, and they’ll treat you differently. I’ve waltzed right up with no reservation, given my phone number, get greeted by name, and get sat down instantly despite everybody in front of me getting quoted a long wait time for the same number of people. Complimentary glasses of champagne, etc.

Even works in other cities.

So I’m just saying, I’m kinda okay with losing my privacy in exchange for that convenience.

Yeah, we use this kind of stuff and so do most of our friends. Makes it really convenient when you go on vacations, want to let friends into the house, want to check on it, want temps to automatically adjust back to normal when your plane touches down in town, etc.
Re:Modernize Every SQL Server to Azure SQL or Fabric DW on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @08:25AM (#49977392)
Oh whoa, didn't expect to see this on here. :-D
Re:DeepSeek Harness Desktop for macOS and Windows on Friday October 02, 2026 @11:16AM (#49934457)
It works with lots of providers, including local ones.

After you log in, click on your name/picture in the bottom left, Settings, Models. Has a huge list of models supported in the dropdown, plus a "custom model API" tab where you put in the name you want, the base URL, the protocol, and your API key.

Nailed it. I constantly get “cold emails” that were clearly written by an AI that read 2-3 pages on my web site, my LinkedIn bio, and something else on my social media. They all follow the same formula: try to break they ice with something funny about somewhere I took a photo recently, then segue into what I do for work, then offer to help me do it better - usually by offering leads or CRM improvements.

It’s such an obviously repetitive recipe that someone must have published as an example somewhere, and now lots of people (or bots) are trying to follow it, all mining for gold that doesn’t exist.

The cup holder situation, on the other hand… (992.1 owner)
Re:Databases Were Not Designed for This on Sunday April 26, 2026 @06:28PM (#47915414)
> What if an executive makes a wrong business decision

I jokingly tell students, "We all know executives are gonna make bad decisions no matter what the data says. Might as well give them the random numbers more quickly."

Re:Databases Were Not Designed for This on Sunday April 26, 2026 @06:27PM (#47915406)
> This is basically the same as saying “databases weren’t designed for interns to run live inline migrations in prod”. Yeah of course they aren’t.

And the same as saying "databases weren't designed for non-technical people to connect with report-building tools like Power BI and Excel and run reports in the middle of peak customer checkouts."

As a DBA, I'm constantly surprised by what people think will be completely harmless to hook up to the database server - and then how much havoc it causes. Gonna be a rough decade.

Re:"Car Wash" test with 53 models on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @03:50AM (#47134592)
> Back in the 1970's we'd pull a spark plug and screw in a hose to use the compression phase to inflate tyres.

You'd inflate your tires with a gasoline and air mix?

Re:Cartoon Network channel errors (1995 – 2025) on Monday December 22, 2025 @06:41AM (#46353384)
And why?

Sometimes it's just amazing to look at how much dedication someone put into a list like this, and wonder what they do with this information. It's inspiring (to me at least.)

In a park near my hotel, there's an elderly gentleman who uses a giant brush to paint calligraphy on concrete walkways every morning. He paints it with water - so it gradually evaporates over the course of the next hour or so. I admire his work in the same way I admire this web page.

Re:Autoland Saves King Air, Everyone Reported Safe on Sunday December 21, 2025 @07:30PM (#46350089)
There are rumors that there were 2 pilots aboard, and that one of them accidentally triggered autoland, and they couldn't figure out how to turn it off:

https://vansairforce.net/threads/garmin-emergency-autoland-i...

Re:Sharding to Contain the Blast Radius of Data Breaches on Friday December 12, 2025 @07:30PM (#46250736)
> I have also seen this used in other formats quite successfully - Fandom/Wikia (used to?) use a MySQL database for each sub-site.

Stack Overflow used it as well, with a database per site (DBA.StackExchange.com, ServerFault, SuperUser, Ask Ubuntu, etc.)

I have a bunch of clients using it. Another drawback with this design is high availability and disaster recovery can become more complex if you have to account for an ever-growing number of databases.

> If you are on AWS and AWS goes down, that's covered in the news as a bunch of billion dollar companies were also down. Customer probably gives you a pass.

Exactly - I've had clients say, "We'll pay for hot standbys in the same region, but not in another region. If an entire AWS region goes down, it'll be in the news, and our customers will understand, because we won't be their only service provider that goes down, and our clients might even be down themselves."

Re:Why TigerBeetle is the most interesting database in the world on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @08:12AM (#45436748)
Because I'm sure other people will ask - no, it does not support SQL.
That isn't a new phenomenon.
> what stops me is the sudden drop in corporate sponsorship of them.

That's true in two ways: not only are less companies paying to send their attendees to training, but less companies are paying to sponsor these events as well.

> I'd be curious to hear how often newbies showed up to these SQL events pre-COVID.

Large SQLSaturday events used to regularly get 300-400 attendees, and a good 10-20% of them were new to the field. I would regularly do a show-of-hands in my session asking how many of them were attending a SQL Saturday for the first time, and it wasn't unusual to see half the hands go up.

People learn SQL every day, believe it or not.

You're right - Twitter used to generate FOMO amongst those not attending, plus make it easier for attendees to coordinate after-hours events. Both of those factors are diminished.
> The range only needs to cover the period between mandated brakes.

I was confused there for a second until I realized you meant "breaks."

Re:Copilot Chat in VS Code is now open source on Friday June 27, 2025 @02:04PM (#44398903)
I have a hard time getting excited about this when they have such an atrocious record of handling pull requests in VS Code already: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pulls
Author here - whoa, didn’t expect this to hit HN. Here for any questions, but I think the post speaks for itself.
Summary of the video: 24 hours before the fatal helicopter-American CRJ midair crash, a similar event was prevented by TCAS (traffic collision avoidance system) because the plane was above 1000 feet altitude. It shuts off below that.
Re:PostgreSQL Is the Database Management System of the Year 2024 on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @07:44AM (#42710257)
Yep, nothing's changed there around transactions.
It sounds like you're not training it with your existing code base, and that you're running it with relatively small contexts. Have you done any custom LLM training on your code base, and what model are you using?
> SQL Server is one of the few commercial DB's that does real nested transactions

Not sure where this myth keeps coming from, but no, it does not:

https://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/a-sql-server-dba-myth-a...

Because it's more about trends than current rankings.
> Anyone knows which movie was that?

Strange Days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)

Can’t you send PDFs to a Kindle? Been a decade since I used one, but I vaguely remember that being a thing.
> no trouble uploading all of that data in less than a week

When you're doing e-discovery, deadlines are often measured in days - not just for the upload time, but for the analysis and finding the needle in the haystack.

Physical honeypots.

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