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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Mustard will make it better but you don’t need it.
    You won’t get as good an emulsion and it will separate faster. Once you pour it on some salad it will be pretty hard to notice that.

    If someone is at the point in their cooking journey where they’re asking how to make vinaigrette, I keep it as simple as possible. TBH even the pepper isn’t strictly necessary. Many people don’t have pepper grinders and preground pepper doesn’t add much flavor.

    Salt is the only one that I’d say is absolutely necessary.




  • Ikea really managed to pull off a magnificent marketing stunt.

    They have the same furniture quality that you can get off of Amazon, Wayfair, or Walmart but you have to go get it out of their warehouse and deal with the logistics of getting it to your house. But they hand out some meatballs and give everything funky Swedish names; so people get the impression that it’s a fancy European experience.

    China is the single largest manufacturer of Ikea products. I found that when I went directly to the source, I could get the same item cheaper or a better item at the same price. That deal is likely to die with the new tariff regime but that same regime will have similar impacts on Ikea.






  • Yeah. And the fix for that has nothing to do with “de-duping” as a database operation either.

    The main components would probably be:

    1. Decide on a new scheme (with more digits)
    2. Create a mapping from the old scheme to the new scheme. (that’s where existing duplicates would get removed)
    3. Let people use both during some transition period, after which the old one isn’t valid any more.
    4. Decide when you’re going to stop issuing old SSNs and only issue new ones to people born after some date.

    There’s a lot of complication in each of those steps but none of them are particularly dependant on “de-duped” databases.


  • It’s so basic that documentation is completely unnecessary.

    “De-duping” could mean multiple things, depending on what you mean by “duplicate”.

    It could mean that the entire row of some table is the same. But that has nothing to do with the kind of fraud he’s talking about. Two people with the same SSN but different names wouldn’t be duplicates by that definition, so “de-duping” wouldn’t remove it.

    It can also mean that a certain value shows up more than once (eg just the SSN). But that’s something you often want in database systems. A transaction log of SSN contributions would likely have that SSN repeated hundreds of times. It has nothing to do with fraud, it’s just how you record that the same account has multiple contributions.

    A database system as large as the SSA has needs to deal with all kinds of variations in data (misspellings, abbreviations, moves, siblings, common names, etc). Something as simplistic as “no dupes anywhere” would break immediately.