Hacker News: stubish

New comment by stubish in "Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything"

stubish — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 01:36:20 +0000

It is too intimidating to change for one. Most users I deal with are terrified and bewildered by settings and can't even take the few steps to install an adblocker (and they want the adblocker!)

And from the article: "Technician's know how to get around this, but not everyone using a computer is a technician."

To use an alternative, you need to know someone with the knowledge and ability and able to request their time. Backing up data, burning USB sticks, installing, setup new backup solution, resyncing bookmarks, creating shortcuts to their email, replacements for the apps they use... all the details takes a lot of time, and it is ongoing work. Someone has to become 'the technician' and provide support. Otherwise, people have no option except to keep bumbling along with the default or somehow become 'the technician' themselves without any guide but web forums and ChatGPT.

New comment by stubish in "Do we fear the serializable isolation level more than we fear subtle bugs (2024)"

stubish — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 04:57:45 +0000

The isolation level that the DB engine defaults to doesn't matter. That is for backwards compatibility with the 90s. What matters is what isolation level the connection library you are using defaults to. Unfortunately, that too is often backwards compatible with the 90s (aka ODBC).

New comment by stubish in "Do we fear the serializable isolation level more than we fear subtle bugs (2024)"

stubish — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:32:20 +0000

I'd say I had worse problems than many due to mixing long and short transactions on the same db. Which is something you need to avoid anyway if possible. The main webapp I dealt with also handled retries automatically, so we could do schema migrations live (with carefully crafted DML and other backend systems shutdown). I think we kept the webapp read committed (PostgreSQL backend), because that system didn't need the consistency guarantees.

Personally, I don't think databases or database libraries should specify a default isolation level at all, and that it needs to be explicitly specified. But legacy code and backwards compatibility and new user experience and all that. I think most of the issues I pointed out come down to needing to be aware of the consequences of your choices, or not even being aware that a choice has been made that can be very hard to change retroactively.

New comment by stubish in "Do we fear the serializable isolation level more than we fear subtle bugs (2024)"

stubish — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:06:08 +0000

And this is why most of the popular database libraries default to 'read committed'. Any higher and your library and scripts became DB specific rather than working with most of the engines supporting ODBC (although even that was tricky, given the different SQL dialects out there).

New comment by stubish in "Do we fear the serializable isolation level more than we fear subtle bugs (2024)"

stubish — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:29:45 +0000

Too many people discovered databases with MySQL back in the day and didn't even know transactions were possible. And now 25 years later one of those people is likely a senior dev and 'the db guy' on a team of people who learn SQL by example. Or now never learnt it, relying on an LLM trained on decades of dodgy PHP code.

New comment by stubish in "Do we fear the serializable isolation level more than we fear subtle bugs (2024)"

stubish — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:14:11 +0000

The article doesn't mention the biggest problem with serializable isolation. At every commit, you need handle the possibility of a serialization exception and retry the transaction. Traditionally devs and frameworks don't, so your application works fine during development and staging but starts failing under load. It makes commit failures normal, rather than an 'oh shit' problem because your disk has filled or someone has tripped over a network cable.

And how do you retry transactions? Then you hit another issue when using multiple datastores, where you need to learn about two-phase commit and the joys of manually keeping datastores in sync that don't support it (eg. filesystems).

And the locks, if you dare run batch updates along with web requests. The long running transactions lock everything they read, blocking short transactions. Because that is exactly what you asked for. Again, you will miss this during development and only notice under load.

So sure, you might avoid some data consistency issues if your data model and update patterns hit the edge cases. In practice, the reason details about serializable are not well known is the cases are rare. Using it gives you safety (maybe that rare case is your case!), but everything needs to be carefully designed around it.

New comment by stubish in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

stubish — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:45:52 +0000

This seems a sensible thing to do. If you change the rules on how things end up on your index, you force everyone using that index to reevaluate it. Your index is now perceived as more volatile (and probably is), and all the finance people need to reevaluate the risk of their index funds and decide if it is now 'growth', 'high growth' or whatever bucket it belongs in based on the new risk profile. And then all the portfolios need to be rebalanced. Which all takes time, more time than was being proposed. The sensible thing to do is to create a new index with the new rules.

New comment by stubish in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

stubish — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:31:52 +0000

What was the common misconception?

New comment by stubish in "Nvidia RTX Spark"

stubish — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 02:46:03 +0000

... after you watch these ads, or pay for our premium subscription. After all, those games aren't going to host themselves and your license doesn't allow an alternative.

New comment by stubish in "New solar desalination breakthrough makes fresh water without toxic brine"

stubish — Sun, 31 May 2026 23:39:16 +0000

That is assuming your boiler uses resistive heating to generate heat and not heat pumps to move heat.

New comment by stubish in "IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses"

stubish — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:29:20 +0000

FDA certification would only be needed to ensure US insurance companies foot some of the bill, surely? It would mean a larger market, but the USA isn't the only market for prescription lenses.

New comment by stubish in "The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'"

stubish — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:49:40 +0000

It adds costs if you built it that way. I don't think many games are built that way. Developers need to be able to test their games in isolation, and it takes effort to remove that scaffolding from release versions (so people can't use it and bypass your monetization).

The real reasons to not just toss your backend over to the community and make it their problem are business reasons like 'it will dilute our brand' or 'it is a violation of licensed IP'. Or embarrassing reasons like 'we have lost the source code' or 'we can no longer build new executables'.

New comment by stubish in "Preservatives linked to high blood pressure and heart disease in new study"

stubish — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:25:52 +0000

Some vitamins, including vitamin C, cause various problems in high doses. Is the amount used as a preservative enough to count as a 'megadose' of vitamin C?

New comment by stubish in "Preservatives linked to high blood pressure and heart disease in new study"

stubish — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:17:10 +0000

Interesting but still needs research. Correlation, not causation of course. And citric acid... surely the amount used as a preservative would be dwarfed by other sources. Might be worth taking with a pinch of salt (a preservative they did not link to any problems!)

New comment by stubish in "Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence"

stubish — Wed, 27 May 2026 01:17:48 +0000

These people committed crimes, such as the catch all 'securities fraud'. Polymarket is unregulated and lots of ways to commit ethical fraud without committing legal fraud.

New comment by stubish in "Self-Driving bus in Sweden crashes with tram on first day of passenger service"

stubish — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:01:27 +0000

At least over here if you rear end someone you are legally responsible. Vehicles can stop suddenly for all sorts of reasons, even good ones. Slamming on your brakes doesn't cause a rear end collision; tailgating or distraction causes rear end collisions.

New comment by stubish in "Self-Driving bus in Sweden crashes with tram on first day of passenger service"

stubish — Tue, 26 May 2026 07:26:44 +0000

Rather disingenuous to say the bus crashed with a tram when it was crashed into by a tram. There might be a genuine concern here about buses and trams sharing dedicated paths or the lack of collision detection and automatic breaking on the trams, but nope, lets insinuate self driving was the problem.

New comment by stubish in "The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100"

stubish — Mon, 25 May 2026 05:21:10 +0000

Yeah, everyone is forced to accept their own individual risk in their super and other investments (as usual, favoring the wealthy with enough spare money, time and contacts to get proper financial advice). Better if that risk was born collectively. But government funded pensions are communist or something. At least most of the super funds I see are non-profits.

New comment by stubish in "The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100"

stubish — Mon, 25 May 2026 05:15:27 +0000

The term '666 schedule' got nixed by marketing.

New comment by stubish in "DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent"

stubish — Mon, 25 May 2026 04:58:07 +0000

That power is already being used, and excess exported to neighboring countries.