Hacker News: hans_castorp

New comment by hans_castorp in "A Preview of DuckDB v2.0"

hans_castorp — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:57:35 +0000

The Postgres devs rejected it, because it wasn't part of the standard back then, and apparently work was going on, to include it into the standard.

Now that it's included in the standard, there is work to implement it:

https://hackorum.dev/topics/51960#message-1125429

New comment by hans_castorp in "Hamburg's Stadtpark: A Park Built to Be Used"

hans_castorp — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 06:37:50 +0000

I frowned over the "none of it looked planned" - the whole description sounds as if that swim was exactly that: planned from the beginning.

New comment by hans_castorp in "The startup's Postgres survival guide"

hans_castorp — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:54:37 +0000

Typically no.

In most (all?) cases the pooler manages one pool per database user, so even if there was something leaking, it would not be anything that the database user couldn't access anyway.

But if you are paranoid, you can configure the pooler to run "RESET ALL", "RESET ROLE", "RESET SESSION AUTHORIZATION" and "ROLLBACK" before handing out a connection.

New comment by hans_castorp in "Common prefix skipping, adaptive sort"

hans_castorp — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:45:48 +0000

Their license only disallows publishing the result of a benchmark

But you were always allowed to run your own benchmarks internally.

Back then, you could have installed 10gR1 and 10gR2 and compare the sort performance on identical data sets and queries.

New comment by hans_castorp in "Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone"

hans_castorp — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:29:45 +0000

> Maps and satnav require a web connection.

No they don't require a network at all. The only drawback if there is no network is that the initial finding of the position takes longer. And maps can be downloaded so that they are available offline.

GPS receiver have been working without a "web connection" for ages (e.g. Garmins outdoor devices).

I use my smartphone in "airplane" mode but GPS enabled when hiking. No problems whatsoever.

Commodore 64 Basic for PostgreSQL

hans_castorp — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:08:14 +0000

Article URL: https://thombrown.blogspot.com/2026/07/load-plcbmbasic81-commodore-64-basic.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48772717

Points: 72

# Comments: 11

New comment by hans_castorp in "Barman – Backup and Recovery Manager for PostgreSQL"

hans_castorp — Sat, 02 May 2026 15:35:38 +0000

A side note on pgBackRest: PGX created a fork and announced to maintain it under the name pgxbackup:

https://thebuild.com/blog/2026/05/01/pgxbackup-continuity-su...

New comment by hans_castorp in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

hans_castorp — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:13:30 +0000

German citizen as well.

So with a Jolla phone and Linux laptop, I am left in the cold.

New comment by hans_castorp in "Good CTE, Bad CTE"

hans_castorp — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:57:46 +0000

> If you want something that is more like actual recursion (I.e., depth-first), Oracle has CONNECT BY which does not require the same kind of tracking. It also comes with extra features to help with cycle detection, stack depth reflection, etc.

All that is supported with CTEs as well. And both Postgres and Oracle support the SQL standard for these things.

You can't choose between breadth first/depth first using CONNECT BY in Oracle. Oracle's manual even states that CTE are more powerful than CONNECT BY

New comment by hans_castorp in "Better JIT for Postgres"

hans_castorp — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:46:54 +0000

Ah, didn't see the caching part.

Plans for prepared statements are cached though.

New comment by hans_castorp in "Better JIT for Postgres"

hans_castorp — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:37:44 +0000

> and it has no way to serialize a query plan to some form that can be shared between processes

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/parallel-query.html

"PostgreSQL can devise query plans that can leverage multiple CPUs in order to answer queries faster."

New comment by hans_castorp in "FBI is investigating Minnesota Signal chats tracking ICE"

hans_castorp — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 06:45:20 +0000

This is simply not true.

Some people are investigated because they spread lies, insults and threats. Things that would be investigated (and punished) as well, if done "off line".

The freedom of speech does not mean "freedom to harass, threat or insult people".

The oppression of free speech seems to be happening much more in the USA, where you are not allowed to criticize the politics of the ruling party any more.

New comment by hans_castorp in "Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems"

hans_castorp — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:04:36 +0000

Postgres does index de-duplication. So it's likely that even if you change the strings to enums, the index won't be that much smaller.

> Furthermore, why have two indexes with the same leading field (status)?

That indeed is a valid question.

New comment by hans_castorp in "Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android"

hans_castorp — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 10:48:08 +0000

Can we please stop calling it "sideloading"? It's simply "installing" software on hardware that I own, and that I should have full control over.

New comment by hans_castorp in "Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations"

hans_castorp — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:17:04 +0000

No relational database implements syntax highlighting. The tools you use to write and execute SQL queries implement that.

New comment by hans_castorp in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

hans_castorp — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:33:42 +0000

Or use a hand as a 5-bit integer, then you can count to 31 :)

New comment by hans_castorp in "Radboud University selects Fairphone as standard smartphone for employees"

hans_castorp — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 12:06:53 +0000

I was going to refer to the new Jolla Phone, but then I realized that it doesn't have a headphone jack.

New comment by hans_castorp in "Just the Browser"

hans_castorp — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 22:25:33 +0000

It does if you look into the README for Firefox

https://github.com/corbindavenport/just-the-browser/tree/mai...

New comment by hans_castorp in "I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great"

hans_castorp — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 22:29:53 +0000

Graphene only runs on Pixel phones

New comment by hans_castorp in "Late night pizzeria nearby The Pentagon has suddenly surged in traffic"

hans_castorp — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 11:45:55 +0000

So what's his "Drill, baby, drill" about? He thinks renewable energy is the something sent by the anti-christ. The only energy source he accepts is burning fossil fuels or nuclear power.