jim

This is a classic piece, and I love the contradictions in the text. It encapsulates my feelings on good software and code that it almost becomes an art than a science.

PSA for Debian Testing users: read the wiki

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting

Control-F security returns 18 results. This is well known and there's even instructions on how to get faster updates in testing if you want.

My thought was that a lawsuit is more expensive than arbitration, but settling a class action lawsuit is cheaper than thousands of arbitrations.

Took me a sec.

Thanks for sharing. We use all pytest-style tests using pytest fixtures. I'll keep my eyes open for memory issues when we test upgrading to python 3.12+.

Very helpful info!

I'm most excited about the new REPL. I'm going to push for 3.13 upgrade as soon as we can (hipefully early next year). I've messed around with rc1 and the REPL is great.

Do you know why pytest was taking up so much RAM? We are also on 3.11 and I'm probably going to wait until 3.13 is useable for us.

EOL for 3.8 is coming up in a few short weeks!

So cool!! Mercury is definitely the most mysterious inner planet due to its difficulty to get a space probe there even though it's the closest planet.

The spacecraft will arrive next year, and I can't wait for all the Science it will uncover!

Haha, I've been waiting for the 4K/8K reference in this volume. Poor Anna.

TIL this exists

I also like the POSIX “seconds since 1970” standard, but I feel that should only be used in RAM when performing operations (time differences in timers etc.). It irks me when it’s used for serialising to text/JSON/XML/CSV.

I've seen bugs where programmers tried to represent date in epoch time in seconds or milliseconds in json. So something like "pay date" would be presented by a timestamp, and would get off-by-one errors because whatever time library the programmer was using would do time zone conversions on a timestamp then truncate the date portion.

If the programmer used ISO 8601 style formatting, I don't think they would have included the timepart and the bug could have been avoided.

Use dates when you need dates and timestamps when you need timestamps!

Do you use it? When?

Parquet is really used for big data batch data processing. It's columnar-based file format and is optimized for large, aggregation queries. It's non-human readable so you need a library like apache arrow to read/write to it.

I would use parquet in the following circumstances (or combination of circumstances):

• The data is very large
• I'm integrating this into an analytical query engine (Presto, etc.)
• I'm transporting data that needs to land in an analytical data warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, etc.)
• Consumed by data scientists, machine learning engineers, or other data engineers

Since the data is columnar-based, doing queries like select sum(sales) from revenue is much cheaper and faster if the underlying data is in parquet than csv.

The big advantage of csv is that it's more portable. csv as a data file format has been around forever, so it is used in a lot of places where parquet can't be used.