ohlookabird

Thanks for the pointer to this fantastic talk. The excitement, thoroughness and dedication they put into this project along with their entertaining presentation is wonderful.

Back in the year 2001/2002 (I think) I remember doing this with a Wikipedia plugin for Rockbox (https://www.rockbox.org/), which I had running on my Archos FM Recorder. It was truly awesome to have all this knowledge in the palm of your hands without omnipresent Internet.

I do the same and transactions work well most of the time. I use ZFS as filesystem for my DBMS (Postgres), which allows me to do consistent snapshots. Being able to rollback has been helpful for testing complex or large queries as well.

Works very well in my experience. I never get unwanted ads. The only time this is mildly annoying is during election time. Parties usually distribute flyers/pamphlets with their ideas (which are otherwise known, but still interesting to compare to each other).

I was recently surprised to see CS 1.6 running in the browser: https://play-cs.com Makes it way to easy to get sucked into a game or two.

Yes, this helps a lot! For me, it also helps to have a training plan, or simply calendar events that remind me what exercise I should do at a given day. Usually this allows me to trick my mind and avoids the decision whether or not I should exercise and I will "stupidly" do what the calendar says. This made it much easier to develop a habit.

Very useful, thank you!

For many years I worked in a high profile research institute (neuroscience) as an RSE without a PhD. Still don't have one, and that's okay (for the path I'm on). Quite a few of the other RSEs in the institute don't have one either. In total I'd say maybe 50% didn't have a PhD.

With coding, I often find Antoine de Saint-Exupéry helping me to limit myself: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Absolutely! Noticing that it usually takes ~20min for me of getting into the groove was a profound revelation for me a few years ago. I noticed a pattern that if keep on powering through those initial 20min, there is a good chance you can continue being productive for a few hours or even the whole day.

But why would you not be able to reply with the aliased email? I do this regularly. Of course your mail client needs to support this, but using Mutt this is absolutely no problem (just change the FROM header) and I have heard from other users who use Thunderbird that they can also create new identities (just not as easy on the fly). In fact I wrote a small script for Mutt that would automatically set the correct sender if I reply to an email that contained a wildcard. Works pretty well.

How do you mean? This is exactly what I can do with my setup. If you are referring to the use of Gmail: I prefer to run my own infrastructure as long as this is possible.

Nice! I do something similar, but using an automatic aliasing scheme so that I don't have to manually configure an email address for each service and other users can use this without me knowing their aliases. In my setup, aliases can contain wildcards, represented as percent signs. If an alias phil.%@domain1.com is set up, all your examples will be sent to the respective aliased address. I use Postfix Admin with a MySQL database. Hence the Postfix setup looks like this:

    virtual_alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_virtual_alias_maps.cf,
                         mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_virtual_alias_maps_wildcard.cf,
                         hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

The first file is just regular aliases, and is basically a simpler version of the second file (no SQL selections/filters) and could also be merged into a single query with the second file:

    user = mail
    password = <password>
    hosts = 127.0.0.1
    dbname = maildb_postfix
    query = SELECT a1.goto FROM alias a1
            LEFT JOIN alias a2 on (a2.address = '%s')
            WHERE '%s' LIKE a1.address
            AND a1.active = '1' AND a2.address IS NULL

This works, because the percent sign in the alias is picked up by the LIKE keyword. A setup like this allows me to configure many aliases through Postfix Admin's web admin page, including optional wildcard aliases (depending on which users wants that). It has been working very well for me over the past 15+ years. Also, I haven't looked at that SQL query since then and would likely write it in a nicer way today.

Note: with the above code SQL injection could be possible through an alias name, but given that in this setup I am the only one managing the mail accounts, I was willing to take this risk. :-) Postfix Admin might do some cleaning/validation, but I haven't checked on it.

Found it also a while ago (maybe also on HN), and was captivated by it. I had to spend a whole Saturday reading through it. Absolutely horrifying.

I only get this when loading the page:

This page crashed. Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'destroy')

Indeed, thanks for the link! We used this SimpleDB in university 15 years ago and implemented our own database nodes like hash joins, table scans, index scans, etc. as well as the paging logic and more. This was really useful to better understand ideas behind many databases.

Maybe a play on "batteries included"?

For what?

Wow, thank you very much for this link! I had no idea and the comic presentation is fantastic. I couldn't stop reading and read it front to back. It's horrific what these kids had (and surely somewhere have) to endure without a chance of getting out. I hope that person is better now and that his work will help to continue to fight those practices, bring justice and raise awareness. (Like also others did in books and other forms of course!)

indeed, and it looks like neither thinks having a death penalty is somehow problematic...

Thanks! There is also the nice book by Peter Wohlleben touching on this subject (the "wood wide web"): The Hidden Life of Trees.

That's a somewhat common joke in East Germany as well (at least it was in the 80s and 90s). Typically it is a buyer from West Germany though.

Thanks for the pointer, I wasn't aware of this! I was wondering what the problem is, because I use psycopg2-binary in production without problems for ages. It seems the danger of psycopg2-binary is that one can end up with segfaults, due to the libpq library (and hence psycopg2) might use a different libssl than the system one (use by Python, with e.g. urllib and requests): https://www.psycopg.org/articles/2018/02/08/psycopg-274-rele...

Looks really nice. It is however funny to see what it does to road signs (black arrows suddenly turn blue or the orange "don't walk" hand of pedestrian traffic lights seems to disappear). I wonder if this has to do that they use image data from Germany (having slightly different signs than the US).

I don't know, my grand parents (80+ years) get along well with Signal. We have been using it actively over the past years and they can text, call, videocall and share pictures without issues. I am sure the UI can be improved, but it's not unusable at all.

It seems to vary also a lot by region. Take for instance this local news article from yesterday about excess death in some east German states: https://www.dnn.de/Region/Mitteldeutschland/Uebersterblichke...

Among other things it says the excess death in last December among members of a large health insurer (AOK) rose to 250% of the previous year in various heavy hit regions like Zwickau, Görlitz and Sächsische Schweiz ("So stieg die Übersterblichkeit im vergangenen Dezember unter den sächsischen AOK-Mitgliedern in den Landkreisen Zwickau, Görlitz und Sächsische Schweiz auf 250 Prozent des Vorjahresniveau.").

That might be and I am not judging you for this perspective. From a company handling my data I however expect them to be professional wherever they articulate themselves about a serious problem.

Thanks. However, it is just not excusable and a breach of trust. The Backblaze Twitter communication making pretty clear that they don't see a problem with tracking paying customers. We are moving somewhere else.

They might be logically equivalent, but they are not identical if more than two tables are joined. For instance, the current Postgres docs say [1]:

> This latter equivalence does not hold exactly when more than two tables appear, because JOIN binds more tightly than comma. For example FROM T1 CROSS JOIN T2 INNER JOIN T3 ON condition is not the same as FROM T1, T2 INNER JOIN T3 ON condition because the condition can reference T1 in the first case but not the second.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-table-expres...

Hm, wonder why he declines to answer the contact and phone book question twice, but instead deflects…