woevdbz

It is mostly true but not always, eg in the output of GROUP BY ROLLUP, a NULL value is used to indicate rows representing subtotals / partial aggregates

> Personally, I think that the existing PostgreSQL behavior (NULLS DISTINCT) is the "right" one

SQL is old enough and this debate so unsettled still that I think it should be clear there isn't a categorically right behavior here anymore than there is a clear winner between tabs and spaces.

As an example of the irreconciliable weirdness of NULL, consider that "NULL = NULL" is false, and so is "NULL != NULL", while rows with NULL still group together in GROUP BY.

I appreciate you giving folks the option.

An example where NULLS DISTINCT might make sense in a constraint is when a table is used to store an analytical cube roll-up (eg output of GROUP BY ROLLUP), where NULL in a dimension column has special meaning (it indicates subtotals). Having multiple rows with the same NULL key could, in some of those cases, be an error leading to double-counting.

> If your religion means something to you but no one can tell by any visible sign it is indistinguishable from having no faith.

By you, not by me

> If you every instant of your life is infused by your faith how does it show?

It shows somewhat because I take actions that are in accordance with my faith, but there's no big "tell", it's not particularly easy to distinguish from generally trying to be a good person.

Why does faith have to cause embarrassment or discomfort in front of others, or even be shown to others, in order to "matter"? That might apply to evangelist faith or faiths placing emphasis on proselytism, but does not apply to every faith.

This is the kind of premium that practicing Catholic parents may be willing to pay to extend a sanitized, pro-church environment for their children, beyond the Catholic primary schools where these children have gone to before. (And which might have well cost more...)

> Others believe their religion means something.

I think you may be confusing finding one's religion to be meaningful with some kind of need to broadcast it. I feel every instant of my life to be infused by my faith, yet because it is personal and does require me to testify outwardly about it, it doesn't usually make me want to discuss it with others. You don't get to judge whether it means something to me or not...

Not only that, but monetizable DAUs, which is basically an advertising metric consisting primarily of folks whose only actions on a given day might just be "checking my feed, liking a couple posts", and from which fake users are likely already removed without there being a strong reason to shut down their accounts. Whatever ad impressions those users get don't get billed to advertisers, and there's no strong motive to shutting them down if they haven't published anything contravening Twitter's policies...

> this saves having to have 2 vehicles (or 3)

Maybe this saves having to rent a car for the occasion...

Even then. Friend of mine busted his daily commute SUV before a long road trip. Ended up renting a much more fuel efficient sedan. Could not believe how little gas he used on the way. Maybe next time he'll rent again.

Trucks in the US are a stupid status booster for most people. Once you start seeing cars as a box to safely get you, your passengers and your cargo from point A to point B for a decent amount of time and money, and stop thinking about how what you drive makes you look, not a whole lot of trucks make sense anymore.

> I am very much an Adam Smith invisible hand adherent

The ICE ecosystem already benefits from large involvement of the government in securing fuel supplies. The EV ecosystem also benefits from large involvement of the government in electricity production and distribution. Both sectors benefit hugely from government involvement in road building and maintenance.

The whole transportation industry, and infrastructure in general, is very much not an "invisible hand" sector... More like layer upon layer of government involvement. I think you'd probably disagree with a lot of people who've voted in some form for these things.

> We can use the EV credit as a tool for improving efficiency. Instead of subsidizing per kWh of battery, we subsidize per mile of range. The first 50 miles of range (ie to be a plug in hybrid, but need at least 6.6kW charging speed) are incentivized at $100/mile of range. The next 200 miles of range $25/mile (under the condition of 100kW fast charging capability).

> That way car companies are incentivized (even more) to maximize miles per kWh.

As long as battery charging times are so slow, IMO car companies already have a ton of incentive to make their EVs efficient, as range is a big differentiator and batteries are such a large cost component. I suspect there isn't a lot more efficiency that would be gotten out of a change to incentive structure.

> Also, a Hummer EV is displacing other large vehicles. And if everybody drove subcompacts or other hyper efficient gasoline cars then we’d have less of a problem anyway. But not everyone is doing that. And a lot of people don’t want to.

This is a big source of waste and inefficiency though. People just needing to commute by themselves from A to B and buying pickup trucks or large sedans with poor efficiency, then whining whenever energy costs shoot up.

As a taxpayer, I would much rather if my taxes subsidized programs that encouraged people to be more frugal with their vehicle type choices.

If this were the case, I would expect many more successful companies to have discovered this secret competitive advantage. It's not like employee-owned or union businesses are new. They've been around forever at the timescale of the Internet, and it's not like they haven't tried investing. I used to work for one that tried to diversify into tech and I can tell you what I saw: during growth phases, union pay wasn't competitive enough to retain top talent (due to a more egalitarian pay structure than the industry), and pretty quickly the strategic long term prospects of the company became pretty bleak compared with where the industry was going. So everybody who stayed aboard the egalitarian pay ship basically sunk with the ship.

Again I agree exceptions exist, but if it was some magic secret sauce, it'd probably be obvious by now...

A "competitive advantage in the capital market" means something that VCs require from the companies they invest in, like "strong founder team" and "established product market fit". I don't see a lot of VCs demanding or preferring unionization among the companies that they invest in. Do you know of many VCs that have pro-union stances? Even if there are some, I think it's fair to say they're not the majority, hence it's likely a unionized business will not have as good of a capital-raising opportunity as a non-unionized business.

No the argument is not about VCs putting class interests above profits, it's about them putting their profit first, together with a perception that unions decrease the amount of profit that is distributed to capital owners as opposed to labor, and decrease the strategic maneuverability of the business by diluting control over operations between management and unions.

> It still seems like the easiest solution is for all the startups to unionize so they don't have any choice: they can either invest in unionized startups or they can stop being VCs.

Yes. Or fight for workers' rights in the even broader sense (not just startups or tech).

Right, that works until you need more funding (unless you can raise from employees, but that also has consequences and limits). I'm guessing that Mapbox is angling for an acquisition or more funding at some point.

It sounds like OP wants to be a part of the kind of social change that fundamentally cannot exist independently of politics but trying to enact it without.

A single company, especially one that is not generating monopoly/oligopoly profits and is still dependent on funding, is not really able to: unionizing creates a steep competitive downside on the capital market that is not offset by enough employee retention benefit to be worth it, and that alone creates existential risk for the whole company. Long term, it simply helps another competitor to come up without a union.

Systemic problems need systemic solutions. It saddens me a bit that people want social change so much but dislike politics so much more that they take up the wrong fight, and then retreat to something like making videogames, which frankly as an industry has an even worse track record than tech in terms of respect for its workers.

I hope OP changes their perspective and fights a wider fight, either on behalf of a party or of a larger union.

Not saying it needs to be planned in advance, but that there needs to be a very strong competitive advantage in some use case, not just checking the feature boxes. Continuing on the case of Python users moving to Go, they're probably not doing so for interactive use-cases or avec to scientific libraries...

Does checking the concurrency box make OCaml an awesome choice for some use case?

You mention Rust for example but that language is sort of built around a zero cost abstraction principle, which is very much not the case of OCaml, so I still think it's going to be viewed as risky for highly performance sensitive work.

I like the language, but I'm not sure that it actually targets any mainstream application. If you look at something like golang, it's very geared towards online server work bc that's what the language maintainers wrote it for, hence a lot of focus on GC-induced tail latency. Python and its package distribution system are great for glue code that's going to pick from a wide library of modules. C++ is amazing for portability and performance / zero cost abstractions. Java has its weird cult in enterpriseware and also is an OK glue layer for mobile UI stuff.

Comparatively, OCaml was initially written with symbolic operations in mind, and thus I personally think it's a great language for writing parsers, compilers, modeling systems etc. The type system makes it easy to avoid certain kinds of common errors in those programs and the tail latency of GC operations is typically not as important for those applications as overall throughput. I don't think that heavy symbolic computations are a mainstream target though. To be clear I think that's absolutely OK for a language not to aim for mainstream use; but if one wishes for mainstream use, then it's important to be clear about the kinds of use-cases within mainstream that will be targeted.

It has been a while since I played with the language though, so maybe things have changed since. Happy to learn more if I'm wrong and OCaml now has a clear mainstream target use case in mind.

I don't know that that's valid advice. I know at least one friend whose startup was founded on one premise, which failed quickly, and left the team with enough runway to pivot to an eventually successful, and completely different, business.

I'm really curious how Observable will fare in the VC bear market. They seem to be a fantastic team of conceptual thinkers but I'm not sure what the cash flow looks like for this kind of tooling

> Every article must mention the effect of whatever is being reported upon the downtrodden

Not if you read foxnews.com or worse... There's still a format there, the themes are different. It's about celebrating good guys with guns, eyerolling at progressive people ("snowflakes") or policies, whining about what straight white folks have to deal with these days, etc.

I don't know if it's any worse now than it's been historically TBH.

As evidenced in the 2016 US elections, their collective power is limited. It is not directly the power to control the military and police forces.

Journalism is this weird profession where its individual members have very little personal power and clout, because doing good research and writing is not a huge barrier to entry. Most are just freelance cogs in a big capitalistic machine that isn't doing very well by capitalist standards. But collectively they wield immense power to set the narrative that essentially drives democracy. I suspect this encourages pack behaviors.

Maybe less likely to be blocked by some firewall policy?

Curious if the web based version of vs code works for this?

This is an inspiring read, and somehow it makes me think, without looking at the author's name, that the author is very likely male. I imagine solo backpacking was/is a very different adventure for a young woman.

The pitch sounds great, the app reviews do not

No. You should still be able to buy fresh strawberries from your local farmer at any time they are in season. Which might be almost never, same as it used to be. And sometimes more expensive, also same as it used to be. But you haven't lost that due to cheap strawberries coming in from another place in addition to the locally produced ones. People eating fresh avocado in Chicago haven't lost anything at all.

Are you suggesting that we should move the sun to Ohio so that strawberries could be grown there? Water is an easier thing to move but maybe I'm not understanding.

Yes but how much of what you could buy at a supermarket produce aisle came from those wetlands? I know irrigation destroys ecosystems that it drains water from, and am just pointing out that it also results in higher food production. Both things are true.

I marvel at the bounty of delicious and nutritious food that arises from ambitious irrigation projects. California produces an insanely high share of the fruits and vegetables grown in the US and it is largely because man made water transportation projects turned a desert into fertile land.