simula67 (u/simula67)

simula67 commented on Moldova broke our data pipeline avraam.dev/blog/moldova-b... · Posted by u/almonerthis

simula67 · 14 days ago

RFC 4180 [1] Section 2.6 says:

"Fields containing line breaks (CRLF), double quotes, and commas should be enclosed in double-quotes."

If the DMS output isn’t quoting fields that contain commas, that’s technically invalid CSV.

A small normalization step before COPY (or ensuring the writer emits RFC-compliant CSV in the first place) would make the pipeline robust without renaming countries or changing delimiters.

That way, if/when the DMS output is fixed upstream, nothing downstream needs to change.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4180.html

simula67 commented on Germany: Amazon is not allowed to force customers to watch ads on Prime Video zeit.de/wirtschaft/2025-1... · Posted by u/febed

jonhohle · 3 months ago

Good! In the US ads were added after telling Prime members they’d get ad free content as part of their membership. I complained about this during a meeting (I worked on Prime during the Prime Video launch), but was shot down because the ads were pre-roll trailers for Amazon produced content. Of course that turned into just ads, everywhere. I’m glad the court saw it for what it was: bait and switch.

simula67 · 3 months ago

I am glad to hear that there was someone who argued for the right course of action in the Amazon Prime organization. I don't know why this is not being fought by other regulators. I also paid for Amazon Prime, expecting to get ad-free content, and then they started to add advertisements. This may not be fraud, but it is definitely lowering my opinion of Amazon.

simula67 commented on Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers news.alvaroduran.com/p/en... · Posted by u/fagnerbrack

Aurornis · a year ago

I’m constantly amazed by how much the crypto community thinks they understand fractional reserve banking while getting it so completely wrong.

In fractional reserve banking, money that is loaned out is accounted for as liabilities. These liabilities subtract from the overall balance stored (reserved) at the bank. The bank is not printing money new money, no matter how many times this idea gets repeated by people who are, ironically, pumping crypto coins that were printed out of thin air.

I think it’s incredible that cryptocurrencies were literally manifested out of bits, but the same people try to criticize banks for doing this same thing (which they don’t).

simula67 · a year ago

> The bank is not printing money new money, no matter how many times this idea gets repeated by people who are, ironically, pumping crypto coins that were printed out of thin air.

It is now widely accepted that bank lending produces new money[1][2]

[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3lP3BhvnSo

simula67 commented on Microsoft Faces Broad Antitrust Investigation from US FTC bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/ndiddy

simula67 · a year ago

I hope they at least split Office and Windows into seperate companies. Hopefully, then we may get Microsoft Office on Linux.

simula67 commented on Phrack 71 phrack.org/issues/71/1.ht... · Posted by u/ghostway

M4v3R · 2 years ago

From the Introduction:

> After the past several decades of humanity putting all of its collective knowledge online, we are seeing more ways to prevent us from accessing it.

This hits so hard, especially for someone who saw the Internet becoming this awesome, huge open library that everyone can access and contribute and then witnessing it being paywalled, drowned with ads and slop, monetized to oblivion, sometimes straight up disappear. It's heartbreaking.

simula67 · 2 years ago

The worst part of it is that the "true Internet" is probably still out there, but we can't find it anymore. The search engines have gotten way worse over the years and we no longer have good enough filters to ignore all the nonsense.

simula67 commented on What Happened to Perl 7? (2022) blogs.perl.org/users/psc/... · Posted by u/edward

metayrnc · 2 years ago

Are there any circumstances where starting a new project with perl makes sense today? I am curious because I only encountered perl in legacy codebases.

simula67 · 2 years ago

Even today, Perl is the only scripting language with more than 200K modules and no Global Interpreter Lock.

simula67 commented on Google Mesop: Build web apps in Python github.com/google/mesop... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

alabhyajindal · 2 years ago

Let's say you want a frontend for your server and have never written HTML before.

Where so you start? If you have decided on using Python for the UI you have a handful of libraries each with their own documentation. To get started you need to choose one and then read the guides.

If you decide to use HTML you have a whole lot more resources. I'd argue you'll be able to make a frontend faster using this approach.

I understand the hesitation because of the complexity associated with JS. Maybe you're thinking about bundlers and minifiers when you think about writing a frontend with JS.

But you don't need that. You can create amazing user experiences with a plain HTML, CSS and a JS file.

simula67 · 2 years ago

While you may be able to create amazing experiences in JavaScript, JavaScript still has multiple problems:

1. It is inconsistent [1]

2. It does not have many features that programmers love and other languages have.

3. It has a community that holds different values from what other programmers value themselves.

If people want to continue development in JavaScript, they can. But since JavaScript has a monopoly on the (fairly large) 'frontend development for the web' market, there will always be attempts to find an alternative.

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat