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jamie_ca

916 karma · joined January 22, 2009

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jamie_ca··on Litestream v0.5.0
Either joins for a fat query, or aggregate the subqueries.

For the latter, it's along the lines of `select * from posts where ...` and `select * from authors where id in {posts.map(author_id)}`. And then once it's in memory you manually work out the associations (or rely on your ORM to do it).

jamie_ca··on Highest bridge unveiled at more than 2,000ft above ground
Lots of tech was developed and commercialized as a byproduct of the space program. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...
jamie_ca··on Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
If you're running linters for formatting etc, just get the agent to run them on autocorrect and it doesn't need to know the status as urgently.
jamie_ca··on EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners
A _great_ spin on this is Tunic, which has an in-game manual that you find pages of as you play, and is written in an in-game language so you kinda sorta need to work things out based on the diagrams and other notation.

At a base level, it tells you about abilities that you have from the beginning of the game but don't know the buttons to press to trigger them, but it goes much deeper.

Great game, 100% recommend.

jamie_ca··on US to rewrite its past national climate reports
https://www.iea.org/countries/china/energy-mix

Their green energy line _is_ on the increase, but it's effectively flat compared to the growth lines on coal and oil.

jamie_ca··on Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions
Alberta has been struggling with this lately, the province on the whole keeps voting in 90% or more Conservative MPs, but Canada on the whole puts the Liberal party in charge. And so Albertans get frustrated that they don't feel like they've got any voice in things.

Little do they realize that a more proportional system that would have them elect reps from the "bad" party in order to get them reps in the ruling party to advocate internally for Alberta does have benefits...

jamie_ca··on How to Design Programs 2nd Ed (2024)
Direct link is https://htdp.org/2024-11-6/Book/index.html which says "Released on Wednesday, November 6th, 2024 7:36:10pm"

I think this is the 2024 digital release of the 2014/2018 physical publication.

jamie_ca··on Sam Altman and Jony Ive Will Force A.I. Into Your Life
Baldur's Gate 3 nailed execution out of the park, but I don't know what I'd point to as innovation that puts it meaningfully beyond what Neverwinter Nights expansions coming out in 2004-2005 were doing.
jamie_ca··on I tried Windows gaming on a Mac
Note also that Whisky is no longer maintained, author suggests using CrossOver.

https://docs.getwhisky.app/maintenance-notice

jamie_ca··on Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)
Nope, that's a quote from early in the book.
jamie_ca··on A new Sudoku layout with 81 uniquely shaped cells
Interesting idea, but for clarity the cells need to be smoothed to ensure each cell edge has a minimum length.

eg. In the example image the top-left cluster has a given 9, where the orange line marking the run goes out to the right at what to me looks like a corner.

jamie_ca··on DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next
If Mozilla can make up a significant portion of funding by selling default search engine placement, I'm sure an independent Chrome could get 10x that (based on userbase/usage) and be reasonably self-sufficient for continued browser development.
jamie_ca··on How the U.K. broke its own economy
I'm in the 45-49 age bracket this year. In BC (Canada), a 95th percentile income for that age is $126,000 (2021 Census). Before any deductions (specifically retirement investments that reduce taxable income) I'd be looking at a 26.85% tax rate, with a marginal rate of 38%. So pretty much the same rate here.

Not to say that Canada's overall economy is particularly any better than the UK's, and especially Trump's tariff threats will do a number on us.

jamie_ca··on 1% Equity for Founding Engineers Is BS
Test Double is a consultancy that's now employee-owned https://testdouble.com/news-and-awards/software-consultancy-...

But yeah that was a situation of a privately held company opting to make that transition, I'm not sure they had any investors to complicate things. And they're definitely an outlier.

jamie_ca··on Show HN: An homage to Tom Dowdy's 1991 screensaver, "Kaos"
If your HTTP referer is HN, it redirects to https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png
jamie_ca··on Remote Code Execution in Marvel Rivals Game
They tried some years back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer) but it didn't really hit big. That said recent updates to SteamOS and agreements around logo/branding use hint that we're likely to see a few other options in the coming year or two (alongside some 3rd-party handhelds running SteamOS).
jamie_ca··on Show HN: SudokuVariants – play and construct different variants of Sudoku
Looks neat.

The CtC community is pretty prolific, and if your colors could match theirs that'd be much easier to parse. https://youtu.be/mkomrpQG388?t=212 has most of them all at once, I think palindrome is the only one missing from there.

Also, if your solver could pick up shift for corner marks and control/command for center marks, that'd be a nice quality of life pickup compared to Sudokupad.

jamie_ca··on Show HN: News Minimalist – News ranked by significance
As an RSS user, I would love an RSS of the main page content, one entry per story over 5.5 is a perfectly reasonable baseline.

Also: It'd be great if you had a feed tag in your HTML head, so RSS readers could pick it up straight out of your homepage URL instead of needing to manually hunt for the right RSS link.

jamie_ca··on Justin Trudeau promises to resign as PM
Offtopic to politics, but browsers these days support arbitrary text anchors.

docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Fragment/Te...

your link: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

jamie_ca··on Advent of Code 2024 in pure SQL
I did something with JSON back before there was reasonable native support - it's certainly not robust, but it handled a few syntax variants for a use case where we had an extra attribute column that serialized JSON, and wanted to surface one of the fields as a proper column on the table.

https://blog.tracefunc.com/2011/11/19/parsing-json-in-sql-ht...

jamie_ca··on Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1
Also: When served from a CDN like your link above, popular CSS like Bootstrap had a decent chance of _already_ being in your browser's cache, so despite downloading more initially you'd come across sites using the same version that meant _no_ delay downloading CSS for it.
jamie_ca··on Show HN: Aide, an open-source AI native IDE
FYI the youtube embed on https://docs.codestory.ai/features is broken (both Firefox and Chrome, MacOS).

https://support.mozilla.org/1/firefox/132.0.1/Darwin/en-US/x...

jamie_ca··on Alleged M4 MacBook Pro unboxing video
I was comparing notes with a new coworker the other week - I've got an M1 pro, he's got an M3. Running an individual test for a feature we were working on (in Rails) lines up with the 25-30% numbers quoted up thread a bit, but that's the difference between my machine taking 40sec or so vs his taking 30 or less.

It's noticeable when you've got it to compare against, and I'm looking forward to work's hardware refresh cycle bumping me to M4 next year, but I still don't think I'd upgrade if it were a personal machine (and if I can get a decent discount to buy out the depreciated M1 for personal use I'm planning on that rather than looking at anything new).

jamie_ca··on DOJ accuses Visa of monopoly that affects price of 'nearly everything’
Costco (in Canada at least) doesn't work with Visa. It's cash, bank debit cards, or Mastercard. (No AmEx/Discover either.)

It can be done, at scale, but definitely a business risk.

jamie_ca··on Lottery Simulator (2023)
Maybe, "the time when expected value is the lowest"?

The BC 6/49 lottery (6 balls 1-49, one bonus ball) for example has 53% of the common "prize pool" split amongst all 4-ball matchers, so if you're not hitting the jackpot you get less cash out of a high-demand drawing.

And given the prize pool is something like 18% of net receipts... yeah EV is still well in the negatives.

jamie_ca··on How the Totem Compass Works
Yeah, they've got an SOS button on the back that'll (silently) make your friends' devices blink to say "come find me." Not sure how noticeable it would be on the dance floor without a noise or vibrate, though.
jamie_ca··on Gitlab is reportedly up for sale
I do stacked PRs for complex changes, and Github has been updating branch bases to support this workflow for at least two years now.
jamie_ca··on Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
The worst was King's Quest V, which you could play for 3-4 hours and soft lock yourself by deciding to go east into the mountains before you had done _everything_ possible in town and west in the desert. It didn't warn you you couldn't return, and if you didn't have an extra save it was back to the beginning.
jamie_ca··on Two million checkboxes (written in Elixir)
Here's the meme https://www.reddit.com/r/elixir/comments/gpdlp4/the_more_i_l...

It's not so much that it does things others can't, it's that it does all the things, running in the same application space, and things like background jobs, or a caching layer, or cron are all things that most stacks these days need to sort via another library, and Erlang/Elixir apps just do it all on BEAM.

jamie_ca··on Ask HN: Is it just me, or does the job market for IT seem bad today?
That looks just like a regression to the trend line - connecting the two endpoints on the graph correlates on par with the growth from 2015-2020. The recent hiring boom was an overcompensation from the 2020 covid dip, and now we're back to business as usual.
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