HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

cha42

51 karma · joined December 25, 2020

submissionscomments
cha42··on I made a search engine worse than Elasticsearch (2024)
I use PostgreSQL full text search and GIN indexing and often find it to be good enough and fast enough without the hassle to have to handle a second engine just for search.
cha42··on DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data
If I may:

Their is a huge conflict of ingerest of giving this power to a major economical actor that vastly depends on public investment and under public scrutinity.

Executive should have the audit right and in some measure probably it should be widespread to all citizens up to sensitive data not being leaked. But what good is there to give this power solely to one of the richest and more powerful man in the world? This is crazy.

cha42··on Printf debugging is ok
Logging is static in CLI world but you can reproduce this easily with pdb in python
cha42··on Fermat's Last Theorem – how it’s going
Recently I found myself happy to find bug in code I have writtdn for those reasons.
cha42··on PgPDF: Pdf Type and Functions for Postgres
It can be useful for improving ingestion pipeline: put your pdf collection in a temp table and then extract with pure SQL the information you want.
cha42··on Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
Or toothpath dynamic.
cha42··on Pipe Syntax in SQL
Any syntax with a let operator to name stuff or a lambda abstraction.
cha42··on I am starting an AI+Education company
I don't understand at all my kids choices in game or way of spending time at all

It seems completely random but in a coherent way. It is wonderful.

Anyway, you are right and not pedantic at all.

cha42··on Symbolica Computer Algebra System
The largest fancy math object I know is probably the proof of the following theorem:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-51074-9_...

The proof is 200Gb large. I am quiet sure now even larger proof exists, in particular thet exhaust some combinatorial property on graphs.

cha42··on Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet
Sealable spreadsheet is also awesome ! Congrats for the delivery.
cha42··on Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet
Do you have any simd-optim in parsing all those large files ?

I have read that you write some of your own parser for perf boost.

(I am one of the author of https://github.com/V0ldek/rsonpath)

cha42··on Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform
So who build an hackernews room for fun ?
cha42··on On-demand JSON: A better way to parse documents?
Maybe you need a query engine and not a parser.

Shameless promotion of my beta engine

https://github.com/V0ldek/rsonpath

cha42··on Postgres as queue
If you have an infra that need to scale so much then Postgresql isn't the right tool indeed. The right tools for your use case probably doesn't even exists and you will have to build one.

It is not a mystery why all webscale companies endup designing their own DB technology.

That being said, most of the DB in the wild are not remotely at those scale. I have seen my share of Postgresql/ElasticSearch combo to handle below TB data and just collapsing because of the overeng of administrating two DB in one app.

cha42··on Postgres as queue
you can certainly encode queue in many ways. mkfifo just work. But integrating the queue in the DB isn't a bad idea if you want to have both the queue and the db in a shared state.

I am happy that my queue inherit ACID properties.

SQLite simply doesn't allow concurrent write so it is a no go for a queue.

I don't know much about SQL Server and MySQL but I wouldn't favor a lockin closed source software or anything remotely connected to Oracle.

At the end, only Postgresql remains I guess. Also, Postgresql is super solid and the closest to SQL standard.

cha42··on Transforming Postgres into a Fast OLAP Database
I would say that the biggest missing features is not being able to mix normal and delta tables.

This would allow easier reporting within a very active db without too much bother.

cha42··on Non-deterministic execution of Python functions
It is the same notion exactly actually.

The code isn't magically solving NP vs P but it does simulate non deterministic run through a potentially exponential exploration.

cha42··on Non-deterministic execution of Python functions
I would argue that it is an already classical idea in the 70s. Non determinism is nothing new.

The cool stuff here is the simplicity of the interface to it and its integration thanks to high order functional constructs (decorator).

cha42··on Non-deterministic execution of Python functions
Yes, the cool thing here is just to use higher order to provides the user non-determinism seaminglessly within Python while in prolog this is a built in feature.