Viewing profile — mjw_byrne

They're pretty different in British English, I struggled to figure it out until I started thinking about how it would sound with an American accent.

I've done a from-scratch billing system build. As well as the complexities in the article, some of the logic required can result in rather exotic SQL. Answering questions like "wha…

It's 40% above a threshold; the trouble is that the threshold is laughably tiny when you compare it to house prices. It's also relatively easily defeated by transferring assets to …

It's good for a delimiter to be uncommon in the data, so that you don't have to use your escaping mechanism too much. This is a different thing altogether from using "disallowed" c…

> I'm not clear why quotes prevent parallel processing? Because of the "non-local" effect of quotes, you can't just jump into the middle of a file and start reading it, because you…

I agree that it's best to pick "unlikely" delimiters so that you don't have to pepper your data with escape chars. But some people (plenty in this thread) really do think "pick a d…

Yep, we had a constant tug of war between techies who wanted to use open-source tools that actually work (Linux, Postgres, Python, Go etc.) and bigwigs who wanted impressive-soundi…

Right, but the original point I was responding to is that control characters are disallowed in the data and therefore don't need to be escaped. If you're going to have an escaping …

It is true for everything that uses quoting, I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

If you disallow control characters so that you can use them as delimiters, then CSV itself becomes a "binary" data format - or to put it another way, you lose the ability to nest C…

The idea that binary data doesn't go in CSVs is debatable; people do all sorts of weird stuff. Part of the robustness of a format is coping with abuse. But putting that aside, if t…

There's just no such thing as a delimiter which won't find its way into the data. Quoting and escaping really are the only robust way.

I used to be a data analyst at a Big 4 management consultancy, so I've seen an awful lot of this kind of thing. One thing I never understood is the inverse correlation between "cos…

I considered this but then went the other way - a \ before anything other than a \, newline or comma is treated as an error. This leaves room for adding features, e.g. \N to signif…

Exactly. "Use a delimiter that's not in the data" is not real serialisation, it's fingers-crossed-hope-for-the-best stuff. I have in the past does data extractions from systems whi…

CSV is ever so elegant but it has one fatal flaw - quoting has "non-local" effects, i.e. an extra or missing quote at byte 1 can change the meaning of a comma at byte 1000000. This…

As with GDPR, the spirit is admirable but the fundamental definitions have been hand-waved. So for the foreseeable future, the expensive lawyers you hire are going to answer the im…

"No one wants a preboot password though" - really? Doesn't strike me as particularly inconvenient, especially given the relative rarity of actual bootups these days. I've been usin…

Just adding another comment to say how brilliant this film is. So atmospheric, such great music, such a grand presentation of the wild west and it's demise. It makes other westerns…

The map iteration order change helps to avoid breaking changes in future, by preventing reliance on any specific ordering, but when the change was made it was breaking for anything…

NAL, but I think GDPR has exceptions for remote access, i.e. if a worker in India is viewing data held in the US, that is not necessarily formally considered a transfer from the US…

4. Stability and backwards-compatibility. I have never seen a Go version upgrade break anything. Meanwhile I have colleagues who do a thousand-yard-stare if you so much as mention …

That doesn't strike me as a problem. Definitions are often highly abstract and counterintuitive, with much study required to understand at an intuitive level what motivates them. R…

These statements always feel a bit circular to me. Sufficiently bad for what? Sufficiently bad to be indistinguishable from a cyberattack. So, "a software update bad enough to look…

Silly clickbait title, which the author even admits up front. UDP and TCP have different behaviour and different tradeoffs, you have to understand them before choosing one for your…