HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

swasheck

1,414 karma · joined June 30, 2011

submissionscomments
swasheck··on Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job
yeah. ignorantia juris non excusat applies to both the speed limit and passive data theft
swasheck··on PgAdmin 4 9.13 with AI Assistant Panel
i want to love datagrip but it big, slow, memory-hungry, and presents an unfamiliar paradigm to me over against most tools i've used for admin tasks. other than this last issue, do you have any suggestions for streamlining the experience?
swasheck··on C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper
the data types were introduced with SQL Server 7 (1998) so i’m not sure it’s accurate to state that it’s considered as the new thing.
swasheck··on Happy Map
i love this blend of storytelling and sharing.
swasheck··on 100M-Row Challenge with PHP
in all my years doing database tuning/admin/reliability/etc, performance have overwhelmingly been in the bad query/bad data pattern categories. the data platform is rarely the issue
swasheck··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
i wanted to hate apple so much at the advent of the smartphone era, so when i made the switch from flip to smart, i went with a samsung and gingerbread and it was such a universally awful experience compared to the iphone mobiles my employer issued (before BYOD). i gutted it out through the life of the contract and switched to iphone for my personal as well and have been quite happy up until ios 18. if there is no appreciable change in the next version, i plan to export my curated music library/playlists and walk away from my "sign in with apple id" accounts and set up new ones. liquid glass is just that painful and hostile of a user experience.
swasheck··on Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance
2a. Many of the "illegal" immigrants are, in fact, legal. 4. immigration status is a civil matter, not a criminal matter.
swasheck··on Young adults report lower life satisfaction in Sweden
i interpreted it as "for the phenomenon noted in Americans, they blamed social media."
swasheck··on The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know
Dapper is an unmitigated joy for me. i get to write the best sql needed for the case and then let the micro-orm handle the rest.
swasheck··on Pg_lake: Postgres with Iceberg and data lake access
i have so desperately wanted to love and use ducklake, but have come across some issues with it in practice (pg catalog). they seem to have to do with maintenance activities and ducklake suddenly throwing http/400 errors on files it created. i’m not sure if it’s due to my write patterns (gather data from sources into a polars dataframe and insert into the ducklake table from the df) into the partitioned tables or something else.

it’s ok in dev/test and for me as the person in the team who’s enamored with duckdb, but it’s made the team experience challenging and so i’ve just kinda reverted to hive partitioned parquet files with a duckdb file that has views created on top of the parquet. attach that file as read only and query away.

i may work up a full example to submit as an issue but up until now too may other things are dominating my time.

swasheck··on A SQL Heuristic: ORs Are Expensive
disjunctions and stats could be a pretty nasty combination in mssql. i think it got a bit better ca. 2016 with the CE updates, but i’ve had quite a few occurrences where the solutions were the union all approach
swasheck··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)
i've been incrementally hiking the via francigena (https://www.viefrancigene.org/en/walking/) and am working through integrating my gpx, geotagged photos, and oura ring data to both illustrate my journey and analyze how different terrains and altitudes affected the collected biometrics.

ingesting/parsing gpx layers into duckdb using python to extract tags and load api data. using minio right now but ultimately want to push to cloudflare free tools or vercel.

swasheck··on US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees
i’m hard-pressed to think of an industry whose financial principles i’m more skeptical of than the airline industry. post-9/11 the industry cratered and they said they needed to add fees to keep from going bankrupt. united created ted, their own low-cost no-frills carrier which was actually decent. once air travel recovered, they (airlines, in general) kept the fees and have been turning record profits ever since. united dumped ted so that they could return to focus on squeezing customers there.

i love travel but i hate dealing with airlines. their executives rank up there with health insurance as some of my least favorite personalities.

and one last thing, other than (eventually) telecom way back in the 80s, has there ever been an industry whose deregulation has been a net win for consumers? i’m genuinely curious and not asking sarcastically

swasheck··on Postal traffic to US down by over 80% amid tariffs, UN says
maybe there’s a new application of delay, defer, deny
swasheck··on Postal traffic to US down by over 80% amid tariffs, UN says
chaos and uncertainty are the result of what appears to be fundamental ignorance of how complex economic systems work. policies are being drafted and executed based on a cursory understanding of how things work, and undergirded by barely-suppressed racism.
swasheck··on Postal traffic to US down by over 80% amid tariffs, UN says
> It may be accomplishing what was intended -- but I don't think that people in the US (even those paying attention) understand what was intended.

this is what i suspect too. most of his common supporters i interact with parrot the “america first will revitalize the economy and job market” and then when that doesnt happen they do the same with “i’m willing to deal with temporary bit of pain in order to ensure american interests are protected.” these comments are almost always framed against the Obama and Biden administrations and never stand on their own merit (e.g. “unlike biden who …”).

to be perfectly fair, I’m not entirely sure what the ultimate goal is, though. My perception of the character of the person of the president has been dim for many decades so when it’s something that he champions I immediately chalk it up to something that would serve his own self interest above that of any group of other people

swasheck··on F1 in Hungary: Strategy and fast tire changes make all the difference
rain and safety cars!
swasheck··on The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping
i wonder if the antisocial trend that has been discussed here have led to an unhealthy skepticism of others. tiktok videos that tell my late teen daughter that a boy who doesn’t check _all_ the boxes is unfit or unworthy of relationship and intimacy. there’s wisdom in looking for flags (red, green, or otherwise) if you’re seeking a committed relationship, but they honestly create so much fear and skepticism in her (and her peer group) and functionally objectify boys as emotional and practical vending machines that are held to a 100% standard. essentially they are a different form of pornography that sets up unrealistic expectations for potential partners.

instead of using it as a tool and saying “hey, let’s try this” (sexually, emotionally, practically), they’re conditioned to just pull the ripcord if you don’t meet expectations

swasheck··on Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files
what i wish i could find would be a solution that would bookmark the page, store the full text of the page i bookmarked, with the option to highlight any important sections.

the closest i've found is hypothes.is but i'd love to find an extension that maintains this information locally so that i dont have to periodically auth to a web service.

swasheck··on The great medieval water myth (2013)
i definitely phrased it awkwardly (and incorrectly, upon the 3rd read) and, upon re-reading it, it is confusing to me as well

i was trying to say that i read that it was a show of wealth to serve wine that was less than 50% diluted, but that the norm was to serve 1 part wine to 2 parts water. thank you for the clarification.

swasheck··on The great medieval water myth (2013)
that's really good information. do you have sources on that? i was just citing the one i'd read but i'm happy to learn more - i'm fascinated by these sorts of things.
swasheck··on UMichigan study: EVs are cleaner than ICEs over average vehicle life
I don’t get the sense that this is a problem in countries where accumulation of wealth and property as a show of power and success is the ultimate goal
swasheck··on The great medieval water myth (2013)
also, recalling from memory, standedge argues that the early perspective on wine was that it was simply a higher order of beer. it makes sense because there earliest beers were not hopped and would probably profile similarly to wine.

however, grape cultivation was more difficult/technical than grain cultivation which elevated the class of wine. it was also prized for its relative stability when diluted, with some maintaining the same (or better) flavor profile when diluted 1:2 water:wine. it was a true show of wealth to serve wine that was less than 1:1. (a history of the world in 6 glasses)

i’ve tried this with a few wine varietals and i can see what he’s saying in some regard, but it definitely alters the profile in ways.

swasheck··on uBlock Origin Lite Beta for Safari iOS
i’m currently just using a nextdns profile after using adguard for a long time. i switched because i hoped that i would stop getting the annoying admiral modals telling me to turn off my ad blocker. do any of the these solutions trick the anti adblock solutions?
swasheck··on Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
i can agree with the theory behind what you’re saying, but also sense that the practical application of individual freedoms has become increasingly prevalent and acute
swasheck··on Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
the point was good until you tried to compare it to lead in the air. there are a few factors that make it impossible to use the same argument between lead in the air and fluoride in the water
swasheck··on Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
yes, and i think that’s a pretty recent reading of the US comprehension of freedom. my sense is that the collective individualistic tendencies have ballooned.

even as recently as the early 90s, my civics classes emphasized the importance of other people’s rights and that of the expression of your individual rights infringed on the rights of others then it was an irresponsible and improper use of individual rights.

it seems like this has devolved into people whose perspective on individual rights loosely aligns enough to coalesce and shout the loudest to create policy. until someone in the in-group’s individual freedom is impacted and the group fractures into smaller coalitions. rinse. lather. repeat.

swasheck··on Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
the debate in this thread is a reflection of the politico-scientific standing of the united states. it seems as though fluoridated water has come to be treated as a synechdoche for the role of science (and public health) in society. both sides are trying in earnest to defend their meta-position (“freedom” vs “society”) but slip into logic errors (usually cherry picking and straw man). i think this is because of the context switching between the part (fluoridation) and the whole (freedom/society).
swasheck··on After layoffs, Meta rewards top executives with a substantial bonus increase
pretty sure they’re referring to the post-housing bubble crash and the brief and ineffective 99% protests
swasheck··on Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
moderately off-topic because we're here discussing acoup.blog, but i just finished the fall of civilizations podcast episodes on the rise and fall of the mongols. it's really fascinating and sheds quite a bit of light on some things that have been mythologized about chinggis khan
← PreviousPage 3 of 24Next →