Readit News logoReadit News
asah commented on Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres   andyatkinson.com/avoid-uu... · Posted by u/pil0u
vintermann · a day ago
A prime example of premature optimization.

Permanent identifiers should not carry data. This is like the cardinal sin of data management. You always run into situations where the thing you thought, "surely this never changes, so it's safe to squeeze into the ID to save a lookup". Then people suddenly find out they have a new gender identity, and they need a last final digit in their ID numbers too.

Even if nothing changes, you can run into trouble. Norwegian PNs have your birth date (in DDMMYY format) as the first six digits. Surely that doesn't change, right? Well, wrong, since although the date doesn't change, your knowledge of it might. Immigrants who didn't know their exact date of birth got assigned 1. Jan by default... And then people with actual birthdays on 1 Jan got told, "sorry, you can't have that as birth date, we've run out of numbers in that series!"

Librarians in the analog age can be forgiven for cramming data into their identifiers, to save a lookup. When the lookup is in a physical card catalog, that's somewhat understandable (although you bet they could run into trouble over it too). But when you have a powerful database at your fingertips, use it! Don't make decisions you will regret just to shave off a couple of milliseconds!

asah · a day ago
counterpoint: IRL, data values in a system like PostgreSQL are padded to word boundaries so either you're wasting bits or "carrying data."
asah commented on Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates   community.letsencrypt.org... · Posted by u/schmuckonwheels
jfindper · a day ago
While I believe you're posting questions out of frustration rather than genuine curiosity, I think it's worth pointing out two things.

One: most of the reasoning is available for reading. Lots of discussion was had. If you're actually curious, I would suggest starting with the CA/B mailing group. Some conversation is in the MDSP (Mozilla's dev-security-policy) archives as well.

Two: it's good to remember that the competing interests in almost every security-related conversation is the balance between security and usability. Obviously, a 60-second lifetime is unusable. The goal is to get the overlap between secure and usable to be as big as possible.

asah · a day ago
serious q: maybe not 60 sec, but why 45 days instead of ~1 day or even hours? at 45 days, it pretty much has to be automated.
asah commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
asah · 2 days ago
PostgreSQL extension providing big speedups on COUNT/SUM/DISTINCT and GROUP BY for the most common data types.

I'm looking for people who have pain around slow analytics, avoiding migration from PostgreSQL, delaying pg upgrades or other big reasons to adopt something like this.

asah commented on You can't fool the optimizer   xania.org/202512/03-more-... · Posted by u/HeliumHydride
asah · 13 days ago
I want an AI optimization helper that recognizes patterns that could-almost be optimized if I gave it a little help, e.g. hints about usage, type, etc.
asah commented on A new AI winter is coming?   taranis.ie/llms-are-a-fai... · Posted by u/voxleone
chomp · 15 days ago
For toy and low effort coding it works fantastic. I can smash out changes and PRs fantastically quick, and they’re mostly correct. However, certain problem domains and tough problems cause it to spin its wheels worse than a junior programmer. Especially if some of the back and forth troubleshooting goes longer than one context compaction. Then it can forget the context of what it’s tried in the past, and goes back to square one (it may know that it tried something, but it won’t know the exact details).
asah · 15 days ago
That was true six months ago - the latest versions are much better at memory and adherence, and my senior engineer friends are adopting LLMs quickly for all sorts of advanced development.
asah commented on Running a business means contact with reality   fredkozlowski.com/2025/11... · Posted by u/fkozlowski
asah · 17 days ago
well... it's a certain KIND of reality... one where numbers fight with "common sense"...

examples... a large paying customer can kill a business... tiny or free users can be great for free marketing and product testing... a weird channel partner can make a business... obscure cashflow and accounting can make/break a business... product development or inventory can require fundraising which comes with wild "strings attached"... and and and...

(having started a number of both self-funded and venture-funded business, in tech small format retail and more...)

asah commented on Credit report shows Meta keeping $27B off its books through advanced geometry   stohl.substack.com/p/excl... · Posted by u/FreeQueso
asah · 18 days ago
LOL "The entity is named “Beignet,” presumably because “Off-Balance-Sheet Leverage Vehicle No. 5” tested poorly with focus groups."
asah commented on Petition to formally recognize open source work as civic service in Germany   openpetition.de/petition/... · Posted by u/PhilippGille
huqedato · 18 days ago
Agree but... these would be hard and expensive to assess objectively, in particular point b.
asah · 18 days ago
??? seems straightforward... among other things, require the applicant to do the work / provide evidence...
asah commented on Why Strong Consistency?   brooker.co.za/blog/2025/1... · Posted by u/SchwKatze
asah · 18 days ago
True serializability doesn't model the real world. IRL humans observe something then make decisions and take action, without holding "locks" on the thing they observed. Everything from the stock market to the sitcom industry depend on this behavior.

Other models exist and are more popular than serializability, e.g. for practicality, PostgreSQL uses MVCC and read consistency, not serializability.

asah commented on Justice dept. requires RealPage end sharing competitively sensitive information   justice.gov/opa/pr/justic... · Posted by u/phkahler
potato3732842 · 20 days ago
The housing problem is a lot like the medical problem but with a 30-50yr head start to the regulatory capture.

You've got what was at one point a broadly accessible necessity, various degrees of government subsidy and market intervention, a bunch of ancillary industries trying to get their place on the coattails enshrined in law, etc, etc. Then that feedback loop was let to run for a couple generations and you get the current shit.

And it can't easily or promptly be cut back because it's such a huge fraction of commerce (slavery was 12% gdp in its day for comparison) that so many people would take a haircut that you'd start a war if you tried to do anything decisive. But on some level you have to, because to quote Tucker Carlson. "there's more to a national economy than real-estate and high finance" (specifically selected to be inflammatory, not like he's anywhere near the only one saying this).

asah · 20 days ago
Interesting analogy!

One big difference: - ~10% of Americans work in healthcare (i.e. big source of income) - ~66% of Americans own their homes (i.e. big asset want to protect) - there's societal stability reasons to encourage home ownership

u/asah

KarmaCake day4355November 18, 2010
About
early@Google, 10+ startups, 3 IPOs, 25 patents.

Investor in very early stage startups - I try to help every company have the best chance of success, and about 1 in 3 do (vs 1 in 30+ for accelerators). https://zerocapital.vc/

https://linkedin.com/in/adamsah

https://github.com/asah

View Original