F_J_H

This otherwise insightful response would have been more persuasive and effective without the first paragraph.

Curious, are you a boss, or have you ever been?

Then move on and find something that is more helpful for you?

Why the need to trash it, (complete with fashionably dragging in gender, race, economic inequality and political ideology), because it doesn't resonate with you?

I got a lot out of it, and am glad he took the time to write it.

To riff on a quote originally about unix:

"Excel doesn't stop you from doing stupid things because then it would stop you from doing smart things."

..for free. Would you have paid $60K - to $100K plus for the same? That is what students are facing now.

Very few would disagree with the intangible benefits of a university education. They question is, how much is it worth, and how much debt should you take on to obtain those benefits?

Agreed, but how much debt should one take on to learn these other skills? (Scott Galloway has been talking about this a lot lately - university degree cost inflation, which has skyrocketed without a commensurate increase in the quality of the product/service.)

There are other ways to pick up these skills, which are much more cost effective.

>>...individual with not much future unless of course they keep learning

This is now true no matter what level of education. Just need to start somewhere, and this is a great option for those without access to funds or the desire to take on the crippling debt increasingly associated with a 4 year degree.

A farmer's donkey dies. His son gets an idea on how to make some money.

Sometime later he turns up at dinner with $200. "Where did you get that money?" His father asks.

"I sold raffle tickets for the donkey" his son replied.

"What?!?" Shouts his father. "You can't sell raffle tickets for a donkey that you know has already died! Weren't people mad?"

"Just the guy who won" said the son, "so I gave him his money back."

No need to apologize. What you said was very clear, and the other commenter has apologized for not fully reading the information, which led to a misguided interpretation of your comment.

As options proliferate, it's nice to have a recommendation. I appreciate this post for that reason.

Animations and transitions are very easy to abuse for sure, yet I've also seen them used very effectively in delivering a message. (Just was in a data presentation today where, without the animation, would have been very hard to grasp.)

So, careful of extremes.

I see this differently. If I go to a "business meeting" and someone has not taken the time to summarize their message in a succinct presentation, and instead hands me a document, I'd "nope" out of there.

"...too ignorant or lazy to demand the precision of a document instead" Wow. What a statement. How about time constrained?

"I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead" -Mark Twain

Yes, I was expecting this comment. A tired cliche I've been hearing for years...

Well, wait until you have to maintain a system where someone has "reinvented the SQL/database wheel" with a "this is gonna be so awesome" custom ORM, complete with totally re-invented referential integrity enforcement...

Meh.

We use Oracle's (newish) autonomous database offering, and haven't really experienced any bugs at all. No worries about backups, very little DBA time, and the on-demand licensing makes it quite economical. We just get on with it, and couldn't be happier.

Of course, YRMV.

Oracle Application Express (APEX).

Comes as a no-cost option with the database, making Oracle the only complete, end-to-end, data management system I know of, where you can build and deploy rich web apps, "out-of-the-box", without installing or integrating anything else.

A friend of mine (experienced developer) built a web app with React, (CRUD and Dashboard) and it took him the better part of a day. Built the same thing with Apex in about 15 minutes.

That's a big reason we use it. Simply can't stand-up data centric, business focused web apps with as quickly with anything else.

YRMV

I'm puzzled by how many people seem to have a huge "mental block" when it comes to SQL.

It is trivially easy to learn, (a weekend), and it is so incredibly powerful. To me, it is a skill like learning how to type properly - it will pay dividends for years to come...

Yep, you could do that and I'm sure it will work well, just like you don't need dropbox because "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."1

Once we signed up with Oracle Autonomous DB, we immediately could start developing and deploying web apps and web services all within the platform, without installing or integrating any other tools, and I'm not aware of another enterprise level platform where that's possible "out of the box". So, re: the original comment, that's why we chose Oracle for a reason other than supporting legacy systems. It helps us go fast, performance is great, and the on-demand licensing gets us all that without breaking the bank. There are definitely other ways to achieve the same thing (as you suggest), but I'd rather not spend my time doing any of that, just like I'd rather not roll my own dropbox, trivial though it may be.

1. see "Infamous Dropbox Comment": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Who's "we"?

Yep - agreed. It's "pick your poison". No matter what tech stack you select, migration away from it is a may be a consideration. (Whether it is a JavaScript framework, PHP to python, C++ to Go, or one DB engine to another.)

If being able to easily switch technology stacks is important to your business success, then you need to optimize for that. That's not the case for me.

So far, yes. APEX in this case is used for data visualization and dashboards, mostly using Plotly.js.

And, the oracle database is the data store for clean/structured data. They use python notebooks and all the other python based goodies for their work - the DB is just where they get their data. (And, sometimes it makes sense to do data processing with the DB). We could end up using Spark at some point - we're not precluded from that.

That is somewhat of a concern, but less so now that they support web services. So, you would still need a basic oracle DB set up in order to run APEX, but you could just use OracleXE, which is a quite capable free version, and then connect to whatever you want.

Also, you see this argument a lot - "what if I want to switch databases"? I've seen more than my share of overly-complicated and highly non-performant code bases, "just in case we want to change our database at some point" (see the ORM messes out there.) Its a problem in theory, and in my experience, not in practice. Never in 25 years of IT work have I switched databases, so it's often a classic case of "prevention worse than the disease".

One case where this use to be an issue was for software vendors that used to sell applications requiring a database, and they had to be ready to work with whatever the customer had. In our day of cloud based apps, this is increasingly becoming less of an issue.

I have not been an Oracle fan in the past, especially because of their complicated (and expensive) licensing, but late last year we moved to their hosted autonomous database. The on demand pricing model makes it quite economical, and the performance is amazing.

However, the killer feature for me is that it has application Express (or APEX) included, which is a complete web application development framework, as well as Oracle restful data services (ORDS). With built-in application development and deployment, it is the only complete, full-stack data management platform I am aware of (enterprise level).

YRMV, but it has been incredible for us, both to support our data science initiatives, and for rapidly deploying applications. I couldn't imagine going back to anything else.

I see the benefits of touch screens, but I really miss tactile controls, like the temperature controls on my Dad's 1978 GMC pickup truck, which is the vehicle I learned to drive in. Three super simple, super intuitive slider type controls for all temperature settings: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iVtb4z2QozY/maxresdefault.jpg

Re: playing the meta game, a great article on coyotes being "too clever by half" and missing the meta game to their detriment came up on HN awhile ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079369

Basic idea - you can be too clever for your own good, and as a result, fail miserably at the meta game, which less clever people don't do.

Awesome - elegantly simple using very common technologies.

I've wondered about this too, but have not gotten around to trying it yet.

We get a gnarly csv log file back from our sensors in the field, which is really a "flattened" relational data model. What I mean by that is a file with "sets" of records of various lengths, all stacked on top of each other. So, if you open it in Excel, (which many users do), the first set of 50 rows may be 10 columns wide, the next 100 rows will be 20 columns wide, the next 45 wide, etc. And, the columns for each of these record sets have different names and data types.

Converting to JSON is obvious, but I've thought about just creating a SQLite file with tables for each of the sets of records. Then, as others have said, can use one of any number to tools to easily query/examine the file. Also can easily import into a pandas data frame.

One concern is file size. Any comments on this? I can try it, but wonder if anyone knows off the top of their heads if a large JSON file converted to an SQLLite file would be a lot larger or smaller?

edit: clarity

Can anyone comment on Coda? First time I've seen it - looks pretty cool.

Although perhaps to a lesser extent, (but probably not for long as they adopt these features), the same goes for other car manufacturers.

Tesla or not, if the company from which you purchased your car goes away, you're gonna have a bad time.

Then all car manufacturers would have to as well. (Tesla is not the only car that "phones home", others do as well, and increasingly so.)

So, to avoid this type surveillance, you would need to forego driving, which is completely your choice. However, this is not merely a "Tesla" problem.