The secret sauce to Amazon's success is an obsessive compulsive focus on money.
Readit Newspetalmind commented on Thoughts on (Amazonian) leadership daemonology.net/blog/2025... · Posted by u/stock_toaster
petalmind commented on Quarkdown: A modern Markdown-based typesetting system github.com/iamgio/quarkdo... · Posted by u/asicsp
Some things I would want to see in a typesetting system:
- Having a typesetting quality and control like TeX does, including mathematical typesetting, although improvements could be made to that, too. (I think I would also like the syntax more like TeX has)
- You can include PostScript codes within the document which can run during the typesetting process (rather than only during output), therefore allowing it to affect decisions of page breaks, etc, as well as allowing PostScript to draw diagrams and control text rendering. (I had written a PostScript program to load PK fonts, so that would make it possible to use PK fonts from TeX as well.)
- Full support for non-Unicode text (without converting it internally to Unicode). (It is OK if it also supports Unicode as long as the code to support Unicode is avoided when not using it (in the entire document or in a part of it).)
What is "non-Unicode" text exactly?
Here are some scans from a 1957 Soviet book on nuclear aircraft:
https://xplanes.tumblr.com/post/30938386375/from-the-cover-o...
https://xplanes.tumblr.com/post/30941448265/from-nuclear-pow...
https://xplanes.tumblr.com/post/30944519719/from-nuclear-pow...
https://xplanes.tumblr.com/post/30947450568/from-nuclear-pow...
https://xplanes.tumblr.com/post/30952419021/from-nuclear-pow...
petalmind commented on Money lessons without money: The financial literacy fallacy anandsanwal.me/financial-... · Posted by u/herbertl
“What [schools are] bad at is teaching people to win in adversarial environments. And they're also bad at the meta-game of reminding someone that knowing the basic mechanics of some process does not make them an expert, but does make them a mark. Said differently: if you know which hands win in poker, thinking that this means you know how to play the game makes you a mark, not an expert.”
https://capitalgains.thediff.co/p/teachingfinance
“And it's hard for a teacher to end a class by telling students that they got an A+ in financial literacy and are now equipped to get ripped off in entirely new ways by an entirely different set of adversaries. But it's also impossible to create a repeatable standardized test that accurately simulates such an adversarial environment, because any time everyone gets the same correct answer, that answer would need to become wrong.”
So what you’re saying is, we need Nicholas Cage to abduct him to preserve the appreciation?
Funny that Nicolas Cage comes up in this context. Here is a trivia snippet from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23468450/trivia/:
> During an interview, Osgood Perkins recalled a story from production where he learned Nicolas Cage has a particular skill that he says no other actor possesses: the ability to recognize how high or low he is able to speak without messing up the audio. According to Perkins: "The sound guy came over to me one day...(he) comes up to me a couple of days into Nic being on set and he's like 'Oz, I've never seen anything like it. When Nic is mic'd, I'm watching the dials, when Nic goes big, he goes right to the line. Anything more, a decibel or two over that, and it would be hard to use. Then he goes down, he goes soft and his whispering and he's barely talking, he goes right to the line. Anything past that line, you wouldn't be able to use it. He knows where the lines are. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life'."
Maybe Cage can contribute to the sound design problem actually.
petalmind commented on Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing minimalmodeling.substack.... · Posted by u/thunderbong
The point is, the schema is not inherently unreasonable as the article is implying. There's a reason to make the comparison and take both versions seriously, not just show off the normalized version.
Yes, absolutely, just present it in "historical misunderstandings" section.
My only concern is that it is presented as if it was something natural to begin with.
petalmind commented on Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing minimalmodeling.substack.... · Posted by u/thunderbong
This is a false alternative:
The fact that there are situations when implementing referential integrity is difficult does not mean you shouldn’t do it at all.
Secondly: relational model is based on logical-physical independence. Referential integrity is specified at the logical level and does not dictate any particular implementation. OTOH violating 1NF makes it impossible to even specify RI constraints.
NoSQL databases do not implement RI exactly because it is not possible to even specify it due to the lack of formal data model. And that’s not their strength but one of the many weaknesses.
The story about optimising Oracle performance by giving up data integrity is only an illustration of why you should not use Oracle :) Just use Postgres.
There is no problem with RI in Postgres as long as you remember to have an index on FK columns. Using CTEs allows you to perform data manipulation in a single statement with constraints enforced at the very end.
Similarily: giving up data integrity due to microservice architecture cargo cult is… tail wagging the dog.
> The fact that there are situations when implementing referential integrity is difficult does not mean you shouldn’t do it at all.
> Referential integrity is specified at the logical level and does not dictate any particular implementation. OTOH violating 1NF makes it impossible to even specify RI constraints.
Now we're bargaining. If referential integrity does not dictate any particular implementation, then having an application-level RI and no database-level constrains should also be acceptable. Yet this is not a common FK enthusiasts position.
We just had a discussion of DSQL where a lot of people were saying things like "no FKs thus no real database". Well, I dunno.
petalmind commented on Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing minimalmodeling.substack.... · Posted by u/thunderbong
I believe it's a joke. However ... if you store a CV as a blob then separately store skills, experiences in a different table --- does that make the db design imperfect?
Ah, okay.
Yeah, I was thinking about the way how to actually build a non-1NF database. So far my best idea is to store sqlite files as blobs in a different database.