TIL this exists

I also like the POSIX “seconds since 1970” standard, but I feel that should only be used in RAM when performing operations (time differences in timers etc.). It irks me when it’s used for serialising to text/JSON/XML/CSV.

I’ve seen bugs where programmers tried to represent date in epoch time in seconds or milliseconds in json. So something like “pay date” would be presented by a timestamp, and would get off-by-one errors because whatever time library the programmer was using would do time zone conversions on a timestamp then truncate the date portion.

If the programmer used ISO 8601 style formatting, I don’t think they would have included the timepart and the bug could have been avoided.

Use dates when you need dates and timestamps when you need timestamps!

Do you use it? When?

Parquet is really used for big data batch data processing. It’s columnar-based file format and is optimized for large, aggregation queries. It’s non-human readable so you need a library like apache arrow to read/write to it.

I would use parquet in the following circumstances (or combination of circumstances):

• The data is very large
• I’m integrating this into an analytical query engine (Presto, etc.)
• I’m transporting data that needs to land in an analytical data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, etc.)
• Consumed by data scientists, machine learning engineers, or other data engineers

Since the data is columnar-based, doing queries like select sum(sales) from revenue is much cheaper and faster if the underlying data is in parquet than csv.

The big advantage of csv is that it’s more portable. csv as a data file format has been around forever, so it is used in a lot of places where parquet can’t be used.

The autocomplete is nice but I don’t find it a game-changer. The comment about writing tests is on point though, but that’s the only place I found out useful.

Dude, if you’re being obtuse on purpose because you have an ax to grind against Rust, try a different approach. You’re not getting anywhere, clearly by the fact that no one agrees with you.

If you don’t like that Rust has a restricted trademark, then call that out instead of trying to label the software and it’s license as non-free. It’s literally called out in my source that name restrictions ipso facto does not violate freedom 3.

But if you genuinely believe that the implementation of the Rust language and it’s trademark is burdensome to create a fork, and you want people to believe you, then you gotta bring receipts. Remember, the benchmark that we both quoted is that it “effectively hampers you from releasing your changes”. It being “not a piece of cake” doesn’t cut it.

Hint: Google Rust forks since their existence also undermines your claim.

Good luck.

Please read this and try again.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#packaging

Rules about how to package a modified version are acceptable, if they don’t substantively limit your freedom to release modified versions, or your freedom to make and use modified versions privately. Thus, it is acceptable for the license to require that you change the name of the modified version, remove a logo, or identify your modifications as yours. As long as these requirements are not so burdensome that they effectively hamper you from releasing your changes, they are acceptable; you’re already making other changes to the program, so you won’t have trouble making a few more.

If you are being intentional about its use, then you can get a lot out of it. But for some, maybe even most, YouTube is a distraction.

Just because you can get part of your education remotely or through self-learning didn’t mean “anything can be learned online”.

And if you were hiring a math tutor for your kid, would you prefer a self-proclaimed expert from watching YouTube videos or would you want someone who got a degree from a credentialed university? And even if you don’t care, why are you surprised that others would be skeptical of the YouTube expert?

Remote learning can be fine for some things, and self learning through informal channels are also fine, but it’s not a full on replacement for formal education in all cases.

No sorry, that’s just fundamentally false. You can’t just learn titration techniques from watching a video. You can’t learn phlebotomy without an instructor watching you do it to a patient. Hell, you aren’t learning how to drive a car from playing a video game.

And I’m not sure where you are pulling the “if you are that powerful” from. You really have an ax to grind don’t you.

Ah yes, I’m sure the formal training received by doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, and engineers is just an over-hyped “education” that can all be replaced by online MOOCs.

There are real problems with education, especially with the costs, but “anything can be learned online” is the worst take I’ve heard in a long while.

I feel the opposite. We should have mandatory voting for all federal general elections. Treat it like jury duty or taxes - voting is a civic duty. You should be compelled to cast a ballot even if you leave it blank because you have no preference.

Of course, this can only workwith automatic voter registration and 100% mail-in ballots.

Yep, this is the convention. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to enforce it. Encouraging good git commit messages is probably the bottom of the things I can coach. I’d be happy if commits were properly squashed/rebased and that we all followed the same PR merge strategy.

"I can read this Perl scrip"t should translate to “I’m lying”.

Most of us have bad memories of over-complex hierarchies we regret seeing, but this is probably due to the dominance of OOP in recent decades.

This sentence here is why inheritance gets a bad reputation, rightly or wrongly. Inheritance sounds intuitive when you’re inheriting Vehicle in your Bicycle class, but it falls apart when dealing with more abstract ideas. Thus, it’s not immediately clear when and why you should use inheritance, and it soon becomes a tangled mess.

Thus, OO programs can easily fall into a trap of organizing code into false hierarchies. And those hierarchies may not make sense from developer to developer who is reading the code.

I’m not a fan of OO programming, but I do think it can occasionally be a useful tool.

Ehhh, I don’t quite agree with this. I’ve done the same thing where I used a timestamp field to replace a boolean. However, they are technically not the same thing. In databases, boolean fields can be nullable so you actually have 3-valued boolean logic: true, false, and null. You can technically only replace a non-nullable field to a timestamp column because you are treating null in timestamp as false.

Two examples:

1. A table of generated documents for employees to sign. There’s a field where they need to agree to something, but it’s optional. You want to differentiate between employees who agreed, employees who disagreed, and employees who have yet to agree. You can’t change the column from is_agreed to agreed_at.

2. Adding a boolean column to an existing table. These columns need to either default to an value (which is fair) or be nullable.

Story time:

There was a long data pipeline that produced wrong results. The wrong results were subtle but reproducible. Each run was about an hour long in dev, and there was no intermediate data set. It takes some input, runs for an hour, and produces an output.

The code was inherited and was a bit of a mess. Instead of digging through the code, I re-ran the pipeline through from about 6 months ago when we knew there was know bug. It was about 100+ commits since that time.

Mind you, the bug could’ve been anywhere in the codebase as far as I was concerned.

Took about a day of git bisect to narrow it down… to nothing. I found out that running code from the first commit from 6 months ago also produced incorrect data. Oops. That’s weird though because the code was running correctly back then.

A few days of debugging later, and I eventually found the culprit: a dependency package got bumped a couple weeks back. Some sort of esoteric parser had a bug but didn’t fail. It incorrectly parsed some data after the bump. Going back a version fixed the bug.

So yeah, git bisect killed about a day of my time.

Lots of people here lamenting about this. But the truth is that good code is easy to modify/delete.