Wildly, in C# you can do either and it has different results. I believe a bare throw doesn’t append to the stack trace, it keeps the original trace intact, while throw e updates the stack trace (stored on the exception object) with the catch and rethrow.

In C#, you can only throw objects whose class derives from Exception.

This is incorrect. The C# is valid. Throw in a catch statement simply rethrows the caught exception. Source: I’ve been writing C# for 20 years, also the docs.

I won’t act like MS absolutely didn’t steal core concepts and syntax from Java, but I’ve always thought C# was much more thoughtfully designed. Anders Hejlsberg is a good language designer, TypeScript is also a really excellent language.

PETA isn’t going to like all those für loops

At least the names are extremely self-documenting. Some of those German variable names are long enough they might even be self-aware!

People say this, but I’ve been on Lemmy and Mastodon for about 1.5 years and Lemmy feels a lot more engaging than Masto. My posts there get one or two likes and boosts, while posts and comments here regularly get dozens if not hundreds of upvotes. I think Blue Sky is eating their lunch right now.

If you’re on Mastodon I highly recommend giving Mekka Okereke a follow. His longer posts on racism in the USA were very eye opening. I’ve lived through most of what he discusses and some of it even surprised me.

If you have any issue or complaint about the USA, racism is almost certainly at the root of it. No public transit? Because it disproportionately hurts Black people. Bad public schools? Hurting Black people. No social safety nets, rampant health industry abuse, pollution, crumbling infrastructure, and on and on it will astound you how many bad things in America are bad just to spite Black people and regardless of the universal harm they do.

There’s a break-up song on Chvrch’s debut album called Tether. One line, frequently repeated, goes “I’m feeling capable of… seeing the end.” A fine lyric, very breakup, much hopeful.

Except, I can’t tell when listening that she isn’t saying “I feel incapable of…” I don’t know if it’s intentional but I think the ambiguity really elevates the song from semi-empowering breakup song to powerfully-relatable song about the chaos of seeing a relationship end; simultaneously believing you can get through it while also having no idea how you’ll ever get through it.

It’s just fun wordplay too: feeling capable/feel incapable. Makes me want to use that structure more in my own writing.

I’m being sarcastic but not by much. Nordic countries do have much better digital id systems and the EU overall looks to be following their model.

https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/

https://www.openbankingexcellence.org/blog/eid-and-the-eu-digital-identity-frameworka-scandinavian-perspective/

He’s complaining that a number isn’t unique and is being poorly used, but the number isn’t supposed to be unique and he’s complaining that it’s not being used in a way that experts are specifically warned not to use it in.

But on a second, stupider layer, this is the system those numbers originate from. So however they use them is how they’re supposed to be used.

But then, back above that first stupid layer, on an even more basic and surface level degree of stupid, the government definitely uses SQL databases. It uses just… so many of them.

It’s wild too. I’ve been in the hospital a lot lately and in addition to a bar-code wristband, every healthcare worker, before doing anything with me (the patient) will ask my full name and either birthday or address and then double-check it against the wrist band. This is to make sure, at every step, that they didn’t accidentally swap in some other patient with the same name. (Not so uncommon, lots of men have their father’s name.)

Meanwhile in like Iceland, everyone gets assigned a personal GPG key at birth so you can just present you public cert as identification, not to mention send private messages and secure your state-assigned crypto-wallet. Not saying such a system is without flaw but it seems a lot better than what we’re doing!

This is a good summary. I had to go pull up wikipedia on it since I roughly knew that social security was a national insurance/pension kind of system but am actually hazy on details.

The major issue with it as id (aside from DBA’s gripes about it) is that credit agencies and banks started to rely on it for credit scores and loans. You see, the US has a social scoring system (what we always accuse China of) but the only thing it tracks is how reliable you are about paying off debts. So with your home address, name, and SSN, basically anyone can take out loans or credit cards in your name. This will then damage your credit score, making it harder to get loans, buy a home, rent property, or even get a job.

That’s why Americans are always concerned about having our identity stolen: because you don’t need a lot of info to financially ruin someone’s life.

I’m hardly the king of databases, but always using a surrogate key (either an auto-incremented integet or a random uuid) has done me pretty well over the years. I had to engineer a combination of sequential timestamp with a hash extension as a key for one legacy system (keys had to be unique but mostly sequential), and an append-only log store would have been a better choice than an RDBMS, but sometimes you make it work with what you have.

Natural keys are almost always a bad idea though. SSNs aren’t natural, which is one pitfall: implicitly relying on someone else’s data practices by assuming their keys are natural. But also, nature is usually both more unique than you want (every snowflake is technically unique) and less than you’d hoped (all living things share quite a lot of DNA). Which means you end up relying on how good your taxonomy is for uniqueness. As opposed to surrogate keys, which you can assure the uniqueness of, by definition, for your needs.

I’m sure folks on here know this, but you know, there’s also that 10K a day that don’t so…

What makes this especially funny, to me, is that SSN is the literal text book example (when I was in school anyway) of a “natural” key that you absolutely should never use as a primary key. It is often the representative example of the kinds of data that seems like it’d make a good key but will absolutely fuck you over if you do.

SSN is not unique to a person. They get reused after death, and a person can have more than one in their lifetime (if your id is stolen and you arduously go about getting a new one). Edit: (See responses) It seems I’m misinformed about SSNs, apologies. I have heard from numerous sources that they are not unique to a person, but the specifics of how it happens are unknown to me.

And they’re protected information due to all the financials that rely on them, so you don’t really want to store them at all (unless you’re the SSA, who would have guessed that’d ever come up though!?)

It’s so stupid that it would be hilarious if people weren’t dying.

I can’t browse lemmy or play phone games while I read docs, but I can while I wait for the program to compile, load itself into a docker container, deploy to the test server, load my browser, and then fail to have fixed that bug I was looking at. Oh well, let me change one character and try again, it only takes about 15 minutes per attempt.

The new Prince of Persia is the worst for this! There’s no auto-cloud save, so you have to manually manage uploading and downloading to the one cloud save slot between your three on-device slots.

And no matter what, no matter how long it’s been, it asks about it, like: “Your last save was 0 minutes ago, as you sure you want to exit?”

“Yeah, yeah, ung, that’s what daddy likes, mmmmmmmmmm”

“Oh great, I’m glad you’re enjoying the album!”

Great reference, going to be stuck in my head all day.

I got an RK recently and have been very happy with it. Multiple connection options (wired, usb, or 2.4ghz), nice white and green colors, switches and caps all feel very good for such a budget model. Only thing I dislike is they made it full size but inexplicably decided no one needs an “End” key anymore. Its an Fn-layer button (on Page Down?!), along with Pause, PrtSc, and ScrLk. Admittedly I never need those other keys but I use End failry often and it’s an odd choice, especially since they kept the numpad.

At one point recently I bought a two pack of USB Blu-ray burner drives for $25. Optical media is so dirt cheap now that the readers are BOGO. Gave one to my partner, the other is still serving my physical media needs very well.