mrbabbage

9 ms·

1.
by mrbabbage 11mo ago
Corporate law is overwhelmingly state law. Every federally tax exempt entity is a state (or foreign) corporation or other kind of entity, and states (or foreign governments) impose rules on corporations registered in their borders. Plus, m
2.
by mrbabbage 2y ago
this is correct. the main advantage of a VAT is incentive alignment. every intermediary producer must collect and remit VAT if they want to claim their VAT refunds for inputs. i.e., a seller of a good in Europe must collect VAT if they
3.
by mrbabbage 2y ago
When you're driving the highway from the international airport at Keflavík to Reykjavík, the first big building you see is a massive Rio Tinto aluminum smelter: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ATHxAWRLKLMf8Gbh8
4.
by mrbabbage 2y ago
bcrypt has a built-in 72 byte limit, which helps with the DOS issue
5.
by mrbabbage 2y ago
Here's another link, from a source that's less personally invested in the ongoing controversy: https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-challenges-brazils-o...
6.
by mrbabbage 3y ago
> We can see this in-action already. Places like California have effectively de-criminalized most/all drug use if you are part of the homeless population. Surprise again - there's more drug use within that community than ever b
7.
by mrbabbage 3y ago
For what it's worth—the Library of Congress published a DMCA exemption for video games that require a use of a no-longer-available verification server. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/expanded-dmca-
8.
by mrbabbage 3y ago
I realize the headline is designed to be attention-grabbing, but "lie" is pretty strong given the warning's actual text. Could the warning be better phrased? Almost certainly—it's a four-sentence digest, designed for a
9.
by mrbabbage 3y ago
How does distracted driving explain increasing pedestrian death rates in America while death rates are flat or down [1] in other industrialized countries? Unless there's a reason why distracted driving particularly affects America, I
10.
by mrbabbage 3y ago
I totally agree that it's not obvious that an ML model is a derivative work. the language of the Copyright Act uses "recast, transformed, or adapted" to describe derivative works, and a pile of model weights isn't clear
11.
by mrbabbage 3y ago
the font size isn't ideal, but I find the line width to be a far larger problem. a traditional book will have around 70 characters per line [1]. by contrast, on my screen (13" M1 macbook air at default screen resolution and brows
12.
by mrbabbage 3y ago
Federal law protects whistleblowers who confidentially disclose trade secrets to law enforcement: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1833
13.
by mrbabbage 3y ago
That turns off the animation but leaves the time delay in place. E.g. if you have a text field selected in the target window, any typing you do won't register until the fade in—fade out animation completes (exact same behavior as
14.
by mrbabbage 3y ago
No, the joke is on us MacOS users who insist on its terrible Alt-Tab behavior instead of leaning into the gesture support. But I do believe the gesture support has fundamental limitations: 1) you have to take your keys off the home row to r
15.
by mrbabbage 3y ago
It's always been here. Different places get to the epiphany at different times -- places like the Netherlands figured this out in the 1980s, in the wake of the oil crisis. [1] The key change of the last few years has been very succes
16.
by mrbabbage 3y ago
The primary purpose of an NDA is to allow the company to enforce trade secrets: the existence of the NDA is proof that the company took steps to maintain the secrets' secrecy. Nothing in this blog post looks like a trade secret to me;
17.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
As someone who came out at 18 (technically an adult), both: - younger—I had a vastly accelerated "social puberty" bc I started so much later than most folks. - older—for the reason you mentioned. - but now younger again—I don&#x27
18.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
Corporations are creatures of the state; they are legal fictions with no existence outside law. Why do you think they have boards? Because the state requires them to. If the state deems it good policy for corporations (say, above $x,000 c
19.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
They feel like Churchill's quip about democracy: self-evals are the worst system, except all the others that have been tried. Ultimately, employers and employees need a way to ensure pay tracks employee value to company. At hiring tim
20.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
Should have (2015) in the title, but I absolutely love stories like this. Even wilder is the detail at the end: they recorded interest payments on the original goat skin until 1944.
21.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
Thanks Simon! I can indeed confirm that this script managed to saturate the database's hardware capacity (I recall CPU being the bottleneck, and I had to dial down the parallelism to leave some CPU for actual application queries).
22.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
Exact strategy to be determined—we're looking at various data layers at the moment. I wish we could do something simple like a rotating log file, but we want to be able to query it in the app (for instance, to show recent logins).
23.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
The second bullet point is underway! Getting audit events out of the main database will be a major headache saver. The first bullet point is on our radar for the near term. We have a very natural shard key in our schema (the customer ID), w
24.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
To be determined!
25.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
More than I care to admit! As mentioned downthread, we're doing some work soon to remove the audit table from the database, which will cut storage usage by over 50%.
26.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
We (Retool) are going to be doing this very soon and cut our database size by 50%+. And you're exactly right: it's so easy to get started by sticking audits (or other append-only data schema) in an RDBMS, but it quickly becomes a
27.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
Hey folks—I wrote the post! This was my biggest Postgres project to date, and it proved quite tricky since I didn't rehearse with a test database of the same size. I learned a bunch about Postgres, not least the incredibly powerful NOT
28.
How we upgraded our 4TB Postgres database(retool.com)
384 points by mrbabbage 4y ago|210 comments
29.
by mrbabbage 4y ago
Zulip came out in 2012, which predates Matrix.
30.
Running safe database migrations using Postgres(retool.com)
24 points by mrbabbage 6y ago|0 comments

More ›