181–190 of 355 posts
I mean, in business contexts at least, Excel is what we end up using nearly all the time because it's ubiquitous. This doesn't mean there aren't issues with it; obviously it's nonFree, and it's notorious for making assumptions about data (see recent coverage of scientists literally renaming a gene (I think?) because Excel kept assuming it was a date or something). But Excel as a tool is on so many desktops that you c…
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You are limited to the basic types (int, floating point, string, and blob), however. I can somewhat get behind the opinionated argument for not needing more specific types like most common language types, but not the lack of a date type.
> but not the lack of a date type. i've also found this to be truly bizarre. even more bizarre than not actually respecting (via coercing or error) to the specified type...why even have types, then?
Seems like the problem here is there is several high quality and well-developed formats, but the author and the commenters here dismiss them because of the different trade-offs they make. csv -- Simple for simple use cases, text-based, however many edge cases, feature lacking etc xlsx -- Works in excel, ubiquitous format with a standard, however complicated and missing scientific features sqlite -- Designed for relat…
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It's it possible to diff a parquet file?
Is it possible to diff an image?
def parse(fileData): rows=[]
for line in fileData.splitlines(): for cell in line.split(","): rows.append(b64decode(cell) return rows
Tada!
Edit: I give up, can't figure out hn's code format syntax.
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What's the difference between quoted and escaped delimiters? (Keeping in mind that escaping sequences can themselves be escaped, ad infinitum. You can't simply seek to an escape sequence and depend algorithmically on a small, fixed lookbehind.)
I think the parent that if newlines were encoded as "\n" (with a backslash) then you could always split on (actual) newlines and process them in parallel without having to tokenize the quote first.
Seems like the problem here is there is several high quality and well-developed formats, but the author and the commenters here dismiss them because of the different trade-offs they make. csv -- Simple for simple use cases, text-based, however many edge cases, feature lacking etc xlsx -- Works in excel, ubiquitous format with a standard, however complicated and missing scientific features sqlite -- Designed for relat…
You don't believe the design space is exhaustively explored by the designs and protocols you mentioned, do you? there is always another local optimum to be found.