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interlocutor

Re:What Is a Database Transaction? on Sunday February 22, 2026 @09:37AM (#47111352)
A lot of database tools these days prioritize instant sharing of updates over transactions and ACID properties. Example: Airtable. As soon as you update a field the update shows up on your coworkers screen who also has the same table open. The downside of this is that Airtable doesn't do transactions. And the downside of not doing transactions is potentially dangerous data inconsistencies. More about that here: https://visualdb.com/blog/concurrencycontrol/
Re:Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015 on Sunday February 15, 2026 @05:25PM (#47028323)
Ever heard of Django? ASP.NET? Most UI frameworks, including ASP.NET Core, Spring Boot (Java based framework), Ruby on Rails, and Django (Python) are all based on MVC.
Re:Reasons Not to Become Famous (2020) on Sunday December 21, 2025 @03:41PM (#46348226)
Here's a better list:

- Being under the public eye—all the time—is one of the top reasons to not be famous. Famous people must constantly self-monitor what they say and do because casual mistakes can trigger disproportionate backlash or headlines.

- You lose the ability to have genuine, equal interactions—people treat you differently, with deference or expectation, rather than as a peer.

- Privacy disappears as curious strangers can easily discover where you live, details about your family, and how much wealth you have—information you'd normally share only with people you trust.

- Strangers form opinions about you before ever meeting you, based on whatever fragments of your public persona they've encountered.

- A public persona can become a cage, limiting your freedom to change, experiment, or reinvent yourself.

Re:A Letter to the American People on Saturday March 01, 2025 @06:10PM (#43224966)
There is a method to this madness.

Elon Musk's strategy is to control the government operations through controlling its IT department.

The smart people of 18f stands in the way. By removing it and hiring his loyalists to run the government IT he gets to control the government's operations.

Re:Software Design Principles I Learned the Hard Way on Sunday April 28, 2024 @11:20PM (#40194097)
In go you mix state with logic (example below), which apparently is a "major catastrophe" according to some on this thread.

   type Engine struct {
       HorsePower int
   }

   func (e Engine) Start() {
       fmt.Println("Engine is starting with", e.HorsePower, "horsepower.")
   }
Re:Form to DB on Thursday February 22, 2024 @11:02PM (#39476811)
Also, Visual DB has Airtable-like features
Re:Form to DB on Thursday February 22, 2024 @08:50PM (#39475911)
This does a better job: https://visualdb.com/
Wasn't he president of some kind of startup incubator? Some "combinator" company.
It seems you only support Postgres. Do you have plans to support other databases as well, such as MySQL?
Re:Why Checked Exceptions Failed on Saturday July 15, 2023 @02:58PM (#36739871)
In the case of map function hopefully you're using it with methods that don't fail in serious ways, and don't need strong error recovery. If so Java has RuntimeException to handle that case. If serious errors are possible and strong error recovery is needed, then you need to avoid the conveniences offered by functional style programming.
Re:Why Checked Exceptions Failed on Saturday July 15, 2023 @01:59PM (#36739399)
> write generic functions that take functions as arguments and re-throw the errors thrown by these functions

There is a philosophy that applies here: simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible. The scenario you're mentioning is not common enough that the language design should be centered around it.

Do you mean Turbo Pascal? He didn't design it, Niklaus Wirth did. Or do you mean C#? James Gosling designed most of that (C# got its start by copying 90% of Java). Do you mean TypeScript? That's mostly JavaScript.
Re:Common Beginner Mistakes with React on Sunday March 12, 2023 @12:24AM (#35116967)
Or Airforms if you don't like coding: https://airforms.com/
Re:Were React hooks a mistake? on Saturday March 11, 2023 @04:40PM (#35113043)
What about it doesn't scale? Most UI frameworks, including ASP.NET Core, JSP and JSF (Java based frameworks), Ruby on Rails, and Django (Python) are all based on MVC. If MVC doesn't scale the folks who maintain those frameworks would have noticed by now.
Re:Show HN: Airforms – never build another CRUD app on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @05:27AM (#33341455)
Does Retool have a query builder? Does it support query parameters? If not how do you find the record you want to update? Does it support displaying fields from lookup tables (i.e., tables joined via foreign key)? How do you pick a record from a foreign table (when you want to update the foreign key itself)?
Re:Show HN: Airforms – never build another CRUD app on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @12:49AM (#33339957)
I am a founder myself and I haven't put founders' info on our website for a simple reason... one of the cofounders has not yet quit his day job and he doesn't want his employers to know he is moonlighting.
Nothing has changed in the last 4 years. Any time you have props and state, updating props is best done by replacing the component by changing the key. If you think hooks has fixed this, you are welcome to point to an article or code that demonstrates that.

All of this complexity is completely unwarranted, which is the point of the article at the subject of this thread. You can do it with simple vanilla js and it is easier. Javascript developers tend to buy into frameworks too easily without realizing the framework is making some things more complicated than without any framework.

> This is categorically false. If you want to update props in a stateful component it is exactly the same - just pass new props.

https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/06/07/you-probably-dont-need-d...

> When state changes, components passed that state in the form of props are re-rendered.

https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/06/07/you-probably-dont-need-d...

> I have never heard these spouted as the benefits of React.

You will find this if you read enough of React developers' blogs. JavaScript and DOM these days are fast enough that most pages can completely re-render the page and replace the whole DOM in one shot and you won't be able to tell the difference. The downside of doing that is that you lose focus, selection, scroll position, etc. So preserving those things is the benefit of React.

> Where do you find this recommendation?

https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/06/07/you-probably-dont-need-d...

> keys are usually only used for repeating sets of elements

Not true at all!

React works well for simple, non-interactive components. Complex, interactive components are going to have state. Stateful components don't work so well in React. If you want to update props in a stateful component, the recommendation is to replace the component entirely by changing its key. At the point all of the benefits of React (preservation of selection, caret position, scroll position etc.) vanish. You might as well use vanilla js instead of React.

What does using Vanilla JS look like? Here's an example: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka It uses two tiny 500-line libs. It uses TSX files, just like React. It has components, just like React. It doesn't have incremental screen update, but neither does React, if your components are interactive and stateful.

Re:Why Jony Ive left Apple to the ‘accountants’ on Sunday May 01, 2022 @10:42AM (#31225393)
Ive may have done great work under Steve Jobs, but his work since Jobs' passing has been disastrous.

Let's consider Jony's performance on software design first. This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7: The Verge wrote in their review: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious." Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction."

And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products from Jobs era are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed.

Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors were horrid, and when you added those Crocs-like cases it looked more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. That the 5c didn't do well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone.

As an Apple shareholder and customer I am glad Ive is gone.

Re:Ask HN: Tools to visualize data in SQL databases? on Sunday February 13, 2022 @03:16PM (#30325182)
This is a Windows app but can do the job: http://pebblereports.com/
Supply of eligible candidates comes from universities. Any discrimination at that stage certainly has an impact on the pipeline.
It is C# vs Typescript. Modern JavaScript is a very good language, and when enhanced with TypeScript's static types, it is every bit as good as C#.

XAML and MVVM is all about two-way data binding. JS frameworks copied it at first. But now it is widely recognized that 2-way data binding is a bad idea.

You can use for Web development too.

And why is it better than Web technologies? Even if you don't want a server involved you can still make a desktop app using Web technologies.
This page explains the problem with this very well: https://www.inlinereferencecheck.ca/blog/is-the-work-number-...

Imagine for a moment that your current employer is paying you significantly less than the market value for your role based on your skills and experience, and attempts to request a review of your compensation have been rejected. You may then consider looking for work elsewhere. It’s likely that the question of your current salary will come up at some point during the interview process with a potential employer.

What would you do in this situation? On the one hand, if you’re honest about how much you currently earn, the potential new employer may be reluctant to offer a significantly higher wage… even if it is the “market value”. On the other hand, if you exaggerate your current salary to reflect a figure that’s on-par with what you should be earning, you risk getting caught in a lie when that employer screens you using The Work Number. Clearly, neither situation is ideal.

Re:Challenges in the diagnosis of magnesium status on Sunday June 27, 2021 @07:38PM (#27656502)
The l-threonate works better for sleep. I take two 50mg tablets per day. In addition I take 400 to 600mg of "magnesium lysinate glycinate chelate" per day to help with muscles.

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