https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages

It's completely Excel's fault for pushing their type-inference and making it difficult for users to define or supply their own.

Power Query does a better job handling it, but you should be able to just supply a schema on import, like you can with Polars or DuckDb.

It's another example of MS babying their userbase too much. Like how VBA is single threaded only because threads are hard. They're making their product less usable and making it harder for their users to learn how stuff works.

You can import a DSV into Excel without mangling datatypes in a few different ways. Probably the best way is using Power Query.

A DSV generally does have a schema. It's just not in the file format itself. Just because it isn't self-describing doesn't mean it isn't described. It just means the schema is communicated outside of the data interchange.

It is possible to import a CSV into Excel without type conversion. I just tested it two different ways.

While possible, it's not Excel's default way of doing things. Not always obvious or easy. Not enough people who use Excel really know how to use it.

Regardless, Excel mangling files via type inference is an Excel problem. It's not the fault of the file formats Excel reads in.

Like, specifying date as a type for a field in JSON isn't going to ensure that people format it correctly and uniformly. You still have parsing issues, except now you're duplicating the ignored schema for every data point. The benefit you get for all of that overhead is more useful for network issues than ensuring a file is well formed before sending it. The people who send garbage will be more likely to send garbage when the format isn't tabular.

There are types and there is a spec WHEN YOU DEFINE IT.

You define a spec. You deal with garbage that doesn't match the spec. You adjust your tools if the garbage-sending account is big. You warn or fire them if they're small. You shit-talk the garbage senders after hours to blow off steam. That's what ETL is.

DSVs aren't the problem. Or maybe they are for you because you're unable to address problems in your process, so you need a heavy unreadable format that enforces things that could be handled elsewhere.

It proves something, but not much. Those models with those inputs (mostly HN articles) were benign or even a net positive for society.

Other models with different training (upstream of the blogging user), or with different inputs (maybe it finds a different article posted to HN or another site that proves foundational to its evolving perspective), could end up behaving differently.

Regarding recursive CTEs, you might be interested in how DuckDb evolved them with USING KEY: https://duckdb.org/2025/05/23/using-key

There's been some research about sprint interval training (SIT), which seems to be popular these days, but low heart rate training (LHRT) is also popular.

Seems like your training was closer to LHRT, but after pushing yourself upfront, not as a sprint, but still initially unsustainably fast.

I'm a little over 40, male, out of shape, and I've been just running at 5mph. Much slower than your 7.5mph, but I can keep it up for 5k. (Side note: It's funny and annoying that treadmills in the US are almost entirely imperial even though most popular races are metric.) My plan was to slowly increase my speed, but now I'm considering your plan. It makes sense. It's easy to manage. It gets good results.

They're not walling off features or asking for money, so I'm not sure if it's owned by another company or a FOSS project or something else. I did a quick search but it didn't turn up anything about their business structure.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487735

Points: 1

# Comments: 7

I get the point you're making, but the way you introduced it isn't conducive to productive conversation.

There are examples of foundations or other similar entities paying developers, like Linux, SQLite, even Zig.

Maybe the difference is some projects rely on core contributors more because external contributions are more restricted in some way.

But sure, the entire open source model doesn't work, lol