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silvestrov

Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault on Monday November 02, 2026 @05:24AM (#50335058)
> on some 50K lines of code

also some 3rd party libraries are overdesigned/overcomplicated because everybody wants the library to do everything for everybody.

This overcomplication can easily introduce security problems that is not present in the 1K solution.

But eMudhra wanted to (was required to) export the keys.

So using an HSM in the first place is a security theater. Or that this HSM isn't really an HSM since it allows for export of the private key.

The trusted enclave in a MacBook is more secure than this HSM.

Even just a human glancing at the private key should do it.

Don't they even test script changes on a staging server? How could there be such a script error in production that was not caught in testing/staging?

This sounds very like a fundamental organization error, not an innocent whoopsie. It should lead to a permanent ban of the organization.

Re:The Future of CSS on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @05:18AM (#50177968)
date pickers are something that quickly gets overly complex and site specific.

They are only simple when you have no restrictions on which dates that can be selected.

But a date picker for a hotel, airplane travel, restaurant, ... might have to show some days as disabled or some days that are "cheap offer" dates.

To this add anything that needs to select an interval, like an airplane return ticket.

An interesting fact is that China has passed "peak coal" in 2024 while still growing with about 5% in a year.

Denmark had peak coal early (2003) due to early investments in wind power. Coal is now practically gone.

We might see China get the same shift in electricity source as Denmark had over the past 20 years, just much faster.

Re:The insider trading you're allowed to do on Friday October 16, 2026 @06:47AM (#50116772)
I think the major reason the Nokia engineers didn't jump ship to Apple/Google is that they did not want to move to another country.

The article is written like it assumes the Nokia HQ was next door to Apple/Google.

There is another type of insider trading: If an engineer had stayed at Nokia but bought a lot of shares in Apple after Apple launched the iPhone, would that still be considered insider trading when the engineer did not have any non-public information about Apple, only in which way the general market was moving?

A lot of people laughed at smart phones in 2007-2010, the market majority did not value them and did not predict Apple's stock would grow.

Re:Things to know if you get cancer in 2026 on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @04:34PM (#50094764)
> new folder on my Mac, and after appointments I’d dictate what happened and what the doctor said

I cannot recommend this enough, including writing down almost every day about symptoms and progress. I didn't have cancer, something else, but it was very valuable to be able to go back and see exactly how long time a symptom has been present and when it disappeared.

Doctors also seem to react well to being able to be precise in descriptions of what happened when.

Re:Improving site performance by shipping more CSS on Sunday September 27, 2026 @09:02AM (#49866330)
Personally I don't think this reduction in size is big enough compared to making all css names unreadable and thus very difficult to debug.

It also makes it much more difficult to create personal browser extensions as all css names are now unreadable.

Re:Agreement between the USA and Denmark (1951,2004) [pdf] on Saturday September 19, 2026 @12:47PM (#49768063)
Denmark never denied an approval, so it has no meaningful difference.

At one point the US had 17 small bases in Greenland. Almost all have been abandoned by the USA on its own initiative.

Look at this map: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Former-US-air-bases-in-G...

Today there is only the small Thule/Pituffik base.

The US has closed the bases because they make no sense with modern military and satellites.

Re:Sweden pauses Denmark power cable over EU grid rules on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @08:43AM (#49535412)
This is a good live map of how Europe is partitioned into zones and what their prices are. Right now you can see a large price difference between Sweden and Denmark and also with Norway.

Britain is often suffering high prices, likely due to lack of capacity in connections with the mainland EU.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK2/live/fifteen...

Re:Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982 on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @08:37AM (#49535343)
Commodore 64 in 1982 cost US$595 ($2,059 today).

ZX Spectrum in 1982 cost $200 ($692 today) for 16 KB model and had a 48K model for 40% more.

It was the difference between affordable and unaffordable for many people.

Re:Bug Blindness on Sunday August 30, 2026 @10:12AM (#49498837)
Very limited: as soon as you have cleared a notification it is gone forever and old notifications are also gone rather quickly.

https://www.lifewire.com/iphone-notification-history-1189516...

Re:Bug Blindness on Sunday August 30, 2026 @09:37AM (#49498556)
I think this comes from the same problem as notifications on iPhones: if you dismiss them accidentally then it is very difficult to find out what it was.

It is missing the equivalent of the "history" in e.g. browsers and YouTube.

If a user dismisses an alertbox on desktop, why isn't there an history menu item that shows the previous 100 alert messages?

Re:HTML Can Do That on Thursday August 20, 2026 @12:11PM (#49376609)
I'd really wish I could force ISO format for the date input as the current "platform native" is confusing for some users when the OS use a different language than the web page that is shown.

For some multi-country companies it makes sense to have all admin pages in English no matter the underlying OS language. Imagine sending a screenshot where the OS date format is different from what everybody else expects from an English page.

Re:PostgreSQL for Everything on Wednesday August 19, 2026 @10:56AM (#49362508)
PostGIS is also another very useful addition for storing, indexing, and querying geospatial data.

http://www.postgis.net

Re:Choose Boring Technology (2015) on Friday August 14, 2026 @09:37AM (#49298516)
In the old days 25 years ago, x86 hardware was the main source of unreliability.

Today x86 hardware is super reliable and unneeded complexity in the software stack is the main source of problems.

Re:Hollywood Stopped Making Movies in Hollywood on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @06:01AM (#49166390)
Los Angeles has mountains/water on all sides so it can't grow in size.

It also utilizes the space extremely inefficiently. Single level single family houses everywhere and the rest is parking space. The few parks are difficult to access by kids arriving by foot/bike.

This is what results in the high rent: Can't grow supply and don't use existing land efficiently.

Density: LA = 8,210/sq mi, Lisbon = 17,040/sq mi, Paris = 10,100/sq mi, Amsterdam = 13,670/sq mi, Copenhagen = 19,195/sq mi. (from wikipedia)

Look at Google Street maps: LA is a hellscape of concrete and asfalt. Lisbon and Amsterdam are much nicer and greener and they stil have higer density.

precision loss in floating point is often exponential.

If 64 bit isn't enough, then very quickly 128 is also not enough.

If precision is important then you will very often want systems that represent every number as an interval [a, b] meaning that the true value is between those 2 numbers. This makes you able to detect loss of precision due to e.g. d = a / (b - c) where b-c can result in a number close to zero which makes uncertainty grow. If you use this formula iteratively then precision is lost completely no matter how many bits there are in your floating point variables.

Re:When random.bytes() runs but doesn't work on Sunday August 02, 2026 @05:33AM (#49142714)
When looking through all the other commits the user has made: they all lack a good commit message.

This is systematic for that user. Either the user needs to improve or let go.

The organization needs to learn that good commit messages are a requirement for anything to do with crypto and payment systems.

One of the most interesting innovations in the Ukraine war is their internal market place for drones, letting each drone group decide which drones they want to procure and use in battle.

It is not a top-down decision, production and supply as other armies use for their weapons logistics.

Re:98% Isn't Much on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @09:17AM (#48817361)
Supermarkets often have so low margin that building for the 98% of customers means that all of the profit has disappeared.

Profit is often at the margin.

The KISS version of regulation would be that stores are not allowed to use the word "buy" when you don't get full ownership and must use the word "license" instead.

Also it should be marked clearly that the company can rescind the license at any moment without giving any reason why.

Re:Is America Becoming a Gerontocracy? on Saturday June 27, 2026 @05:07AM (#48696519)
Denmark does not have a problem with age. It has gone the other way: members are younger today than in the old days. Graph: https://www.ft.dk/-/media/sites/ft/billeder/infografikker/ta...

Average age is 44 years !!!

The oldest is 72. Youngest is 23. Majority is 30-54. https://www.ft.dk/-/media/sites/ft/billeder/infografikker/ta...

source: https://www.kristeligt-dagblad.dk/danmark/det-nye-folketing-...

Perl has the negated if statement:

    return unless fooOK;
    return unless barOK;
    return unless bazOK;
    # do something
> trains about the same amount

The nice thing about trains is that they can run on electricity.

It does require investing in overhead wires.

Re:The only scalable delete in Postgres is DROP TABLE on Monday June 15, 2026 @09:04AM (#48540659)
Problem is that PostgreSQL does not support LIMIT on the DELETE command.

I have no idea why, it seems such an obvious feature for supporting large databases.

Re:There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing on Saturday June 13, 2026 @03:54AM (#48514613)
It is like writing novels: it is not the spelling or typing on the keyboard that is the bottleneck.

It is always the creative world building part.

The main criticism of the Harry Potter books are not spelling or sentence structure, it is the plot holes and contradictions in the world build.

The same holds for software.

Re:Arithmetic Without Numbers – How LLMs Do Math on Sunday June 07, 2026 @03:15AM (#48432630)
This is a very nice and fresh page layout.
Re:The perils of UUID primary keys in SQLite on Saturday June 06, 2026 @03:32AM (#48422386)
Good trick is to prefix all such keys with magic, i.e. a couple of letters that identify type type of key.

Then it will always be a string and you will be free to change the format/type of the key in the future to UUID or whatever you like.

Re:You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @06:31AM (#48382181)
I'd really like a collection of unit tests for parsers. There is a lot of details that can differ between parsers.

E.g. in "Section C" the resulting KeyThree is "value 3▵▵▵▵▵▵▵value 3 continued" where each "▵" symbol is a space.

I think most people would expect a single (or no) space here.

I would guess that most software would strip the comments in SectionC or rearrange the output so that it will result in a diff even when nothing in SectionC changed.

So if you edit the file by hand in the same style as shown in the examples, then most editors would not be able to make a minor edit without making a large diff as many sections would be formatted differently.

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