petalmind

7 ms·

1.
ID Design and Primary Keys(anchorsandlinks.com)
2 points by petalmind 7d ago|0 comments
2.
Vintage Scientific Papers with LaTeX(github.com)
113 points by petalmind 7d ago|10 comments
3.
Thinking about tests: assertions and matchers(zverok.substack.com)
2 points by petalmind 28d ago|0 comments
4.
by petalmind 2mo ago
> to just copy a bash command from a website and run it (sometimes with sudo! O.o ) to install software. how is that different from the good old days of wget ftp://ftp.something.org/software-2.10.tar.gz tar zxfv
5.
by petalmind 3mo ago
Claude Epitaph
6.
by petalmind 5mo ago
I think I understand this "Cartesian product" reasoning behind 4NF/5NF, I just find it irrelevant I guess. Cartesian product is explained in Kent: case (3) in https://www.bkent.net/Doc/simple5.htm#label4.
7.
by petalmind 5mo ago
Thank you, your take on the evolution from spreadsheets to proper databases is englightening.
8.
by petalmind 5mo ago
Could you share an example of writing stule that you enjoy?
9.
by petalmind 5mo ago
> Might it be a consequence of lack of disk space in those early decades A plausible explanation of "normalization as a process" was actually found in https://www.cargocultcode.com/normalization-is-not-a-process
10.
by petalmind 5mo ago
I have so many questions about that. Should that normal form basically replace 5NF for the purposes of teaching? Why do they hate us and do not provide any illustrative real-life example without using algebraic notation? Is it even possib
11.
by petalmind 5mo ago
Imperative mood "normalize" assumes that you had something not-normalized before you received that instruction. It's not useful when your table design strategy is already normalization-preserving, such as the most basic text
12.
by petalmind 5mo ago
Yeah, no NULL is ever equal to any other NULL, so they are basically unique.
13.
by petalmind 5mo ago
> Someone, somewhere writing down a list and that list being blessed with the imprimatur of Academic Approval (TM) One problem is that normal forms are underspecified even by the academy. E.g., Millist W. Vincent "A corrected 5NF de
14.
by petalmind 5mo ago
Frankly I don't think that overcounting is solved by normalizing, because it's easy to write an overcounting SQL query over perfectly normalized data. I tried to explain the real cause of overcounting in my "Modern Guide to S
15.
by petalmind 5mo ago
One day I hope to write about denormalization, explained explicitly via JOINs.
16.
5NF and Database Design(kb.databasedesignbook.com)
203 points by petalmind 5mo ago|83 comments
17.
by petalmind 5mo ago
Do you know if Redex could be a tool that would be useful in my situation? Claude suggests it, but I need to learn a lot of Redex to understand how to apply it. I have a general understanding of what operational semantics is. Or maybe, are
18.
by petalmind 5mo ago
You reimplement `while` in terms of `loop`, but do you know that `loop` is also a method :)
19.
by petalmind 5mo ago
Even Ruby `parser` gem uses S-expressions in their documentation: https://github.com/whitequark/parser/blob/master/doc/AST_FOR...
20.
by petalmind 5mo ago
> on the 'reflection' level, where most languages have specific keywords that cannot be used 'first class' with the rest of the language. In Ruby this is also the other way around, and it's one of my pet peeves.
21.
by petalmind 5mo ago
Yeah, I was also going to say that conflating trivial syntax and "supremely easy to learn" is a very weak flex. The first Smalltalk-80 book you randomly find is 560 pages. Also, there is a weird bargaining with "but not block
22.
by petalmind 5mo ago
> Ruby has syntax sugar, no need to remove the funny parts. This is just an intermediate representation, it's not meant to be used directly (even though you can do that, of course).
23.
by petalmind 5mo ago
> Lisp? Then I would use Lisp... Lisp has completely different runtime semantics. Even the lexical scope in Ruby is extremely peculiar. One of the hard parts of writing this document was to remove the intuitive influence of Lisp becaus
24.
Rubysyn: Clarifying Ruby's Syntax and Semantics(github.com)
72 points by petalmind 6mo ago|16 comments
25.
by petalmind 8mo ago
Question: but how many different numbers can you fit in 64 bits using your encoding (sorry I understand the general approach but I have no idea how that fast hierarchy works). I guess it's still 2^64 different numbers? So basically yo
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A modern guide to SQL JOINs(kb.databasedesignbook.com)
2 points by petalmind 9mo ago|1 comments
27.
by petalmind 10mo ago
Fantastic. Each case is basically an SCP object.
28.
Some people can't see mental images(newyorker.com)
183 points by petalmind 11mo ago|368 comments
29.
by petalmind 11mo ago
"The Mom Test" book seems to be about this exactly: https://www.momtestbook.com/
30.
by petalmind 11mo ago
> Overusing DISTINCT to “Fix” Duplicates I wrote a small tutorial (~9000 words in two parts) on how to design complicated queries so that they don't need DISTINCT and are basically correct by construction. https://kb.data

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