Hacker News: rowls66

New comment by rowls66 in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

rowls66 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:37:36 +0000

Or when IBM renamed everything Websphere.

New comment by rowls66 in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

rowls66 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:49:15 +0000

I have not had much experience with DB2, but given that the relational data model and normalization was invented at IBM (Codd) and IBM's implemenation of those concepts was DB2, DB2 performing poorly with a normalized data model seems strange.

My recollection was that DB2 did not support multi version concurrency control like Oracle and Postgres did. The result was a lot of lock contention with DB2 if you were not careful. MVCC was eventually added to DB2, but by then it was too late.

New comment by rowls66 in "US Job Market Visualizer"

rowls66 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:17:34 +0000

Maybe it’s because you are really a computer programmer. Computer programmer employment is expected to decline by 6%.

New comment by rowls66 in "10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13"

rowls66 — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:25:24 +0000

My initial reation was 'What is a CMS'? Naming your company or an initialism and never saying anywhere in the product description what the initials mean is not welcoming. Now I know that anyone who does not know that a CMS is a 'Content Management System' is probably not a likely customer, but you never know, and expanding the initials somewhere shold probably be possible.

New comment by rowls66 in "Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at SFO"

rowls66 — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:28:49 +0000

You don't have to tip an Uber or Lyft driver either.

New comment by rowls66 in "UTF-8 is a brilliant design"

rowls66 — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 19:44:30 +0000

I think more effort should have been made to live with 65,536 characters. My understanding is that codepoints beyond 65,536 are only used for languages that are no longer in use, and emojis. I think that adding emojis to unicode is going to be seen a big mistake. We already have enough network bandwith to just send raster graphics for images in most cases. Cluttering the unicode codespace with emojis is pointless.

New comment by rowls66 in "The startling rise of disability in America (2013)"

rowls66 — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 18:33:52 +0000

This article is nearly 15 years old (2013). According to center on budget and policy priorities, the number of SSDI beneficiaries has fallen from is peak in 2014. So this article was written about a trend that peaked a year after its publication and had reversed over the past 15 years. Odd that it would be reposted today.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-securit...

New comment by rowls66 in "Defold: cross-platform game engine"

rowls66 — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 12:19:52 +0000

Why would anyone buy their game engine when it is available for free? Seems like a solution for a problem that doesn't/won't exist.

New comment by rowls66 in "Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?"

rowls66 — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:07:38 +0000

Can a systems programming lanugage use garbage collection? I don't think so.

New comment by rowls66 in "What Was Chevron Deference? (2023)"

rowls66 — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 19:44:17 +0000

Seems to me that if Congress would prefer that any disputes arising from the implementation of their laws be handled by the admistrative agency charged with enforcing it, all they need to do is say so in the law. Not sure how the courts could get around that.

New comment by rowls66 in "Just Enough Software Architecture (2010)"

rowls66 — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 23:19:56 +0000

I found 'A Philosophy of Software Design' by John Ousterhout to be useful. It contains alot of solid easy to understand advice with many examples.

New comment by rowls66 in "Unit Tests Considered Harmful"

rowls66 — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 13:10:21 +0000

I think whats more harmful than unit tests are code coverage metrics for unit tests that devs feel compelled or are required to achieve. The easiest way to achieve code coverage goals for tests is to write lots of small tests that test individual methods, but test very little of the interaction between them.

I feel that the goal of unit testing should be to test the largest unit possible without requiring external dependencies. In the language of domain driven design, this means to test the domain model. If you can get extensive coverage of the domain model as a whole, system tests can be used to test the complete system.

Alas, I have seen very few software systems with high quality domain models. It is not an easy thing to achieve.

New comment by rowls66 in "Anatomy of a credit card rewards program"

rowls66 — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 01:01:52 +0000

You need to spend $16,666 just to cover the $500 annual fee. That’s a lot for many people especially when many low end retailers don’t accept AmEx. As already state rewards cards are a subsidy for the rich, or at least for people who spend a lot.

New comment by rowls66 in "Misunderstanding about the details of how Apply Pay works"

rowls66 — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 01:07:52 +0000

They can but they generally won’t. Use of the chip on the card shifts fraud liability from merchant to issuer. Burner card numbers are for card not present transactions.

New comment by rowls66 in "The United States has its first large offshore wind farm, with more to come"

rowls66 — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 23:45:15 +0000

NY state has plenty of room for onshore wind, just not in the places where most of the people are.

New comment by rowls66 in "Faults, errors, and failures"

rowls66 — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 22:46:35 +0000

Is it really that much different? You still need to handle a Left value, and a lot like handling an exception.

New comment by rowls66 in "Go: What we got right, what we got wrong"

rowls66 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 01:58:43 +0000

That’s not true. Java has 2 types of exceptions checked and unchecked. Checked exceptions are what this thread has been calling errors, and unchecked exceptions are what this thread has been calling exceptions. Maybe it was a mistake to call them both exceptions, but Java also has 2 types of errors.

New comment by rowls66 in "Go: What we got right, what we got wrong"

rowls66 — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 01:18:29 +0000

Here is an example. Go let’s structs be passed by value or by reference. The programmer needs to decide, and that adds complexity that is largely irrelevant for modeling complex business logic. Java does not provide a choice, which keeps it simple.

New comment by rowls66 in "PostgreSQL internals: Things to know about update statements"

rowls66 — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 20:40:33 +0000

Not sure what you mean by "the database holds locks for the minimum time needed." Locks are always held until the transaction commits.

New comment by rowls66 in "PostgreSQL internals: Things to know about update statements"

rowls66 — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 05:29:45 +0000

In the Lost Updates section, a more straight forward solution is to use the FOR UPDATE clause in the first select statement. This locks the record and prevents concurrent updates.