Hacker News: swasheck

New comment by swasheck in "Distributed DuckDB Instance"

swasheck — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:32:21 +0000

i think "SELECT * FROM my_df" is a convenience from the python module and how tightly integrated it is, but i can’t get this to replicate using the cli or dbeaver or datagrip.

and yes, being able to layer analytical sql on top of your csv/json/parquet/gpx/arrow (but not xml?) is the massive appeal of duckdb for a variety of reasons. it’s a paradigm shift for me as an old timer but it’s also suited my needs quite well over the past few years

New comment by swasheck in "I went to America's worst national parks so you don't have to"

swasheck — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:38:56 +0000

must be a seasonal thing. i’ve never seen nobody but have also never seen disney.

New comment by swasheck in "I went to America's worst national parks so you don't have to"

swasheck — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:20:59 +0000

whether or not you agree with the author's conclusions, most of his rationale behind them is spot on. yeah GC is majestic and amazing from the bottom up, and if you find the hidden gems within the park then you are golden. but the average experience is a solid “meh.”

was disappointed to see the great sand dunes omitted from the list of the worst. people obsess over those and every time i’ve gone it’s been a unquestionably miserable experience, not to mention a general letdown

New comment by swasheck in "Show HN: I built a social media management tool in 3 weeks with Claude and Codex"

swasheck — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:55:18 +0000

i think we need to encode (or refine) what we mean by “vibe code.” my original impression was that it was used to describe the process whereby someone with an idea but lacking development/engineering skills leveraged llm via an agent to create the mechanics to bring their idea to fruition. anymore it seems like if it has the hint of AI then it’s “vibe coded.”

ironically, i didn’t read the article because i come to comments now to see if its been identified as AI slop, so i don’t know which area this falls into

New comment by swasheck in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

swasheck — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:24:01 +0000

ok. thanks for the correction. that’s good information that helps me overcome some of the FUD i’ve received

New comment by swasheck in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

swasheck — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:47:30 +0000

negligence (especially via ignorance) is a thing. a hobbyist wanting to celebrate their first batch with their buddies can poison them with some smeared hearts. but i get what you’re saying.

New comment by swasheck in "Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th"

swasheck — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:32:50 +0000

it has been my go-to provider for things but i noticed extraordinarily high usage rate last month on a little side project i started so that i could learn about things that are interesting to me while helping my day to day responsibilities (creating an iceberg data lake from my existing parquet files). i used my month’s worth of corporate subscription allocated tokens in 3 days. never seen that before so now i’m a lot more apprehensive about getting into the weeds with claude but i’m also so much less impressed with the other available models for work in this domain.

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

swasheck — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:11:11 +0000

i appreciate the way you took the feedback. i saw the domain name and immediately knew the content and context. the article did not disappoint. i come from a heavy mssql background with some postgres sprinkled in, but my current company is migrating our mssql fleet to pg and it’s nice to have a technical foundation and article to be able to truly understand and pass the differences and similarities then how the two platforms handle workload. Traditionally it’s just been multiple sides, mercilessly criticizing each other for their deficiencies, but each platform has its own strengths and its own gaps. I’m excited to be a part of this migration, and I appreciate technical articles such as this that help me articulate the broader challenges to both our executive level levels, and our developers.

edit: syntax. voice to text was liberal with the comma abuse

New comment by swasheck in "Rank the 50 best Apple products"

swasheck — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:09:58 +0000

HyperCard was a revelation to me in high school. it piqued such an interest in technology for me that i fully pivoted from exploring civil engineering to computer sciences.

New comment by swasheck in "Migrating to the EU"

swasheck — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:47:09 +0000

> happy to stop the freebies we give other nations.

but indignant when other nations return in kind.

New comment by swasheck in "Waymo Safety Impact"

swasheck — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:28:50 +0000

one of the things that i noticed in a recent trip to austin is that the waymo vehicles were far more assertive and quick than the human drivers so maybe that has been addressed.

New comment by swasheck in "Badreads"

swasheck — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:17:01 +0000

so happy to see Sapiens in there. what an obtuse read. here's a fun "if books could kill" episode on this work of pseudoscience https://podbay.fm/p/if-books-could-kill/e/1763632800

New comment by swasheck in "The 49MB web page"

swasheck — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:54:54 +0000

this isn't purely laundering blame. it is frustrating for the infrastructure/operations side is that the dev teams routinely kick the can down to them instead of documenting the performance/reliability weak points. in this case, when someone complains about the performance of the site, both dev and qa should have documented artifacts that explain this potential. as an infrastructure and reliability person, i am happy to support this effort with my own analysis. i am less inclined to support the dev team that just says, "hey, i delivered what they asked for, it's up to you to make it functional."

> From the perspective of the devs, they expect that the infrastructure can handle what the business wanted. If you have a problem you really should punch up, not down.

this belittles the intelligence of the dev team. they should know better. it's like validating saying "i really thought i could pour vodka in the fuel tank of this porsche and everything would function correctly. must be porsche's fault."

New comment by swasheck in "C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper"

swasheck — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:13:51 +0000

thanks. now i see the point that the poster was making.

New comment by swasheck in "Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job"

swasheck — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:13:17 +0000

yeah. ignorantia juris non excusat applies to both the speed limit and passive data theft

New comment by swasheck in "PgAdmin 4 9.13 with AI Assistant Panel"

swasheck — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:50:01 +0000

i want to love datagrip but it big, slow, memory-hungry, and presents an unfamiliar paradigm to me over against most tools i've used for admin tasks. other than this last issue, do you have any suggestions for streamlining the experience?

New comment by swasheck in "C# strings silently kill your SQL Server indexes in Dapper"

swasheck — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 03:14:46 +0000

the data types were introduced with SQL Server 7 (1998) so i’m not sure it’s accurate to state that it’s considered as the new thing.

New comment by swasheck in "Happy Map"

swasheck — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:23:26 +0000

i love this blend of storytelling and sharing.

New comment by swasheck in "100M-Row Challenge with PHP"

swasheck — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:11:09 +0000

in all my years doing database tuning/admin/reliability/etc, performance have overwhelmingly been in the bad query/bad data pattern categories. the data platform is rarely the issue

New comment by swasheck in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

swasheck — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:19:46 +0000

i wanted to hate apple so much at the advent of the smartphone era, so when i made the switch from flip to smart, i went with a samsung and gingerbread and it was such a universally awful experience compared to the iphone mobiles my employer issued (before BYOD). i gutted it out through the life of the contract and switched to iphone for my personal as well and have been quite happy up until ios 18. if there is no appreciable change in the next version, i plan to export my curated music library/playlists and walk away from my "sign in with apple id" accounts and set up new ones. liquid glass is just that painful and hostile of a user experience.