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Question: but how many different numbers can you fit in 64 bits using your encoding (sorry I understand the general approach but I have no idea how that fast hierarchy works). I guess it's still 2^64 different numbers?

So basically you have a very low density of representable numbers (2^64 / w218), I wonder how quickly it grows as you use more and more 1-bits, and is there even a correlation between the bit pattern and the corresponding number value?


Fantastic. Each case is basically an SCP object.


"The Mom Test" book seems to be about this exactly: https://www.momtestbook.com/


> Overusing DISTINCT to “Fix” Duplicates

I wrote a small tutorial (~9000 words in two parts) on how to design complicated queries so that they don't need DISTINCT and are basically correct by construction.

https://kb.databasedesignbook.com/posts/systematic-design-of...


Nice articles in there. Bookmarked.

Edit: it’s also actually a book!


The secret sauce to Amazon's success is an obsessive compulsive focus on money.


This was not my experience, reflecting on about 10 years of service in AWS network engineering (both as an engineer and manager). I’m at Oracle now, which, by contrast, is orders of magnitude more focused on revenue/spend.


I left Amazon in 2012, so things may have changed since then. But in my days I was quite impressed that the goals executives were bonused on did not have the word revenue or profit. The goals were about adoption and customer satisfaction.


And the amazon today is literally unrecognizable to the amazon of 2012


I don’t think moving from Amazon to Oracle does you any favours in that department. Maybe the only switch you could make for a stronger money focus?


In my experience, Amazon genuinely is focused on the customer.


In what way?


What is "non-Unicode" text exactly?


Text that uses character sets other than Unicode.



“What [schools are] bad at is teaching people to win in adversarial environments. And they're also bad at the meta-game of reminding someone that knowing the basic mechanics of some process does not make them an expert, but does make them a mark. Said differently: if you know which hands win in poker, thinking that this means you know how to play the game makes you a mark, not an expert.”

https://capitalgains.thediff.co/p/teachingfinance

“And it's hard for a teacher to end a class by telling students that they got an A+ in financial literacy and are now equipped to get ripped off in entirely new ways by an entirely different set of adversaries. But it's also impossible to create a repeatable standardized test that accurately simulates such an adversarial environment, because any time everyone gets the same correct answer, that answer would need to become wrong.”


Funny that Nicolas Cage comes up in this context. Here is a trivia snippet from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23468450/trivia/:

> During an interview, Osgood Perkins recalled a story from production where he learned Nicolas Cage has a particular skill that he says no other actor possesses: the ability to recognize how high or low he is able to speak without messing up the audio. According to Perkins: "The sound guy came over to me one day...(he) comes up to me a couple of days into Nic being on set and he's like 'Oz, I've never seen anything like it. When Nic is mic'd, I'm watching the dials, when Nic goes big, he goes right to the line. Anything more, a decibel or two over that, and it would be hard to use. Then he goes down, he goes soft and his whispering and he's barely talking, he goes right to the line. Anything past that line, you wouldn't be able to use it. He knows where the lines are. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life'."

Maybe Cage can contribute to the sound design problem actually.


Thank you, the first three paragraphs with examples are very useful to think about.


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