Is there really a market for these kinds of relational tables?
I created a system to support my custom object store where the metadata tags are stored within key-value stores. I can use them to create relational tables and query them just like conventional row stores used by many popular database engines.
My 'columnar store database' can handle many thousands of columns within a single table. So far, I have only tested it out to 10,000 columns, but it should handle many more.
I can get sub-second query times against it running on a single desktop. I haven't promoted this feature since everyone I have talked to about it, never had a compelling use for it.
A concrete case where this comes up is multi-omics research. A single study routinely combines ~20k gene expression values, 100k–1M SNPs, thousands of proteins and metabolites, plus clinical metadata — all per patient.
Today, this data is almost never stored in relational tables. It lives in files and in-memory matrices, and a large part of the work is repeatedly rebuilding wide matrices just to explore subsets of features or cohorts.
In that context, a “wide table” isn’t about transactions or joins — it’s about having a persistent, queryable representation of a matrix that already exists conceptually. Integration becomes “load patients”, and exploration becomes SELECT statements.
I’m not claiming this fits every workload, but based on how much time is currently spent on data reshaping in multi-omics, I’m confident there is a real need for this kind of model.
Interesting. Are you willing to try out some 'experimental' software?
As I indicated in my previous post, I have a unique kind of data management system that I have built over the years as a hobby project.
It was originally designed to be a replacement for conventional file systems. It is an object store where you could store millions or billions of files in a single container and attach metadata tags to each one. Searches for data could be based on these tags. I had to design a whole new kind of metadata manager to handle these tags.
Since thousands or millions of different kinds of tags could be defined, each with thousands or millions of unique values within them; the whole system started to look like a very wide, sparse relational table.
I found that I could use the individual 'columnar stores' that I built, to also build conventional database tables. I was actually surprised at how well it worked when I started benchmarking it against popular database engines.
I would test my code by downloading and importing various public datasets and then doing analytics against that data. My system does both analytic and transactional operations pretty well.
Most of the datasets only had a few dozen columns and many had millions of rows; but I didn't find any with over a thousand columns.
As I said before, I had previously only tested it out to 10,000 columns. But since reading your original question, I started to play with large numbers of columns.
After tweaking the code, I got it to create tables with up to a million columns and add some random test data to them. A 'SELECT *' query against such a table can take a long time, but doing some queries where only a few dozen of the columns were returned, worked very fast.
How many patients were represented in your dataset? I assume that most rows did not have a value in every column.
Once upon a time, you could enjoy the works of a creative person at face value; mainly because you didn't know much of anything about their personal life.
That seems to have all changed in this age of the Internet; where every aspect of your life is exposed for all the world to judge (at least if you are famous). All your words (written or spoken) are presented as proof positive that you and your works are not to be tolerated; even if they are from your teenage years.
It seems like you cannot say anything these days without offending a large number of people; some of whom will try to lead a boycott against you.
I generally like to enjoy a good book, movie, blog, or comic strip without letting politics get in the way.
Scott Adams intentionally made it his entire online persona. Im all for letting people be people, but if you’re literally going to do everything in your power to prevent me from ignoring it…
> Once upon a time, you could enjoy the works of a creative person at face value; mainly because you didn't know much of anything about their personal life.
This is a strawman and absolutely not backed by historical evidence.
Look into the lives of Caravaggio, Milton, Voltaire, Wilde, Verlaine, Goya, Balzac, Courbet, Rimbaud, Schubert, Manet, Wagner, Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy... and see how their personal lives and/or political views/positions negatively affected their standing despite the huge recognition their creative work had.
> Once upon a time, you could enjoy the works of a creative person at face value; mainly because you didn't know much of anything about their personal life.
> I generally like to enjoy a good book, movie, blog, or comic strip without letting politics get in the way.
It's certainly easier once they're dead. I can't speak for everyone, but part of the issue is that we don't want to financially support anyone who is doing bad stuff, so once they're dead I don't have to worry about funding them.
Hyperbolic example; suppose David Duke wrote a fantasy novel. Let's even assume that this fantasy novel had nothing to do with race or politics and was purely just about elves and gnomes and shit. Let's also assume that the novel is "good" by any objective measure you're like to use.
I would still not want to buy it, because I would be afraid that my money is going to something I don't agree with. David Duke is a known racist, neo-Nazi, and former leader of the KKK, and if I were to give him cash then it's likely that some percentage of this will end up towards a cause that I think is very actively harmful.
Now, if you go too deep with this, then of course you can't ever consume anything; virtually every piece of media involves multiple people, often dozens or even hundreds, many of which are perfectly fine people and some of which are assholes, so unless you want to go live in a Unabomber shack then everything devolves into my favorite Sonic quote [1].
So you draw a line somewhere, and I think people more or less have drawn the line at "authorship".
When I was single with no kids, I felt pretty comfortable leaving a good job to join a startup. I took a 50% pay cut to join when the risk seemed high, but the reward also seemed high.
It paid off for me, but who knows if I would have taken that leap later in life.
Although almost every company issues a 'we care about your privacy' statement, but there is often very little 'money where your mouth is' resources to back that up.
This is why I am almost always very reluctant to give out any information that is not absolutely necessary to provide me the service that I need. If they don't know it, they can't leak it.
Every company wants you to fill out their standard form that tries to get you to volunteer way more info than they really need.
So the law requires a fridge be provided, but doesn't state what kind. So now renters can expect to move into an apartment with a tiny, old fridge that does not suit their needs. Then they have to find a different fridge that will hold more than a half gallon of milk, as well as find a place to store the provided, unusable fridge until they move out.
Uniquely you are allowed, as a renter, to turn down the refrigerator and bring your own if you agree at the signing of the lease. The landlord can't make this a condition but can accept it as a modification.
The bill is very poorly written and under specified. The only restriction is that the unit itself not be under any manufacturer recall.
First versions of laws expected to meet significant resistance usually are. So you make v1 as vague as possible to get it passed, then once everyone is used to it and agrees it needs fixing, pass the v2 law you actually wanted to pass originally.
A thing I've experienced is people buying a bigger fridge, and then just leaving it when they move out because they're moving to a place with a fridge that is fine (for example, moving in with someone who has a nice fridge). Everyone walks away from that basically fine.
There is no actual argument here that wouldn't apply exactly the same to the stove and the toilet. If an apartment has a shitty fridge, it simply is a less attractive, less valuable property. If you want full control over such details, you can buy instead of rent, or you can buy your own frdge and keep the original in a storage unit until you move. If that sounds stupid, I agree that would be stupid.
Yeah, it seems like mandating transparency here would be better. I've never moved into an apartment that didn't have a fridge, but if the landlord wasn't providing one before, I can't imagine they'll spend on a nice one now.
I mean, if the lack of a refrigerator is a uniquely Los Angeles thing, it seems like you could just predict what will happen based on what happens in _every other city_....
they could do like germany where most apartment/flat kitchens are bare --the renter needs to bring their own appliances and furnishings. this means fewer appliances and kitchen stuff gets mistreated by the renters since they own them. kinda sucks to move apartments though.
as to why... german renter/lessee culture prefers having their own stuff to give it a more homey feel, i guess.
It hugely sucks because things like fridges and stoves often need to fit the dedicated space in a kitchen exactly. The chances that your previous apartment and new apartment fit the same size appliances is virtually nil.
This is why it makes sense for them to just be part of the apartment.
I don't know what you mean by "mistreatment" -- anything in an apartment can be mistreated I suppose, it's not specific to appliances. If you damage anything, that comes out of your deposit. But I'm not really sure what there is specifically to damage about fridges and stoves? They get dirty and you can clean them. They don't generally require any super-special treatment.
The medieval French word (and English borrow-word) was immeubles - immovables. While it's not clear what these were to me, there is a distinction between buying furniture (meh, it's your stuff) and buying immeubles (which meant you were staying longterm).
As a non-German living in Germany, the German insistence on you buying your kitchen in a rental is really really stupid, and serves no purpose. Besides the schemes listed here, where the landlord tries to sell you the previous kitchen at full price, the old renter will do it too. If they're having you take over their contract, they have some choice in who the renter is, and will often condition their acceptance of your rental offer on taking their kitchen at full price or more. If you don't want it, someone else desperate will take it. There's also a robust marketplace of second hand kitchen appliances on FB marketplace, where the tenants tried to do the same thing or just generally got stuck with taking their kitchen, and now are trying to unload appliances that don't fit the new place. In Germany, its not just fridges. It's also the stove/oven combo sometimes, the dishwasher, and the lights and lightbulbs. It's a horrible inefficient system that just makes renting a nightmare, and keeps everyone in place because of the enormous hassle of moving (the standard 90 day notice period doesn't help either. Trying to line up a new lease and old one ending without significant overlap is also next to impossible. The German rental market is broken).
There is a scheme that is sometimes used by landlords in Germany in which an apartment is only rented out if the tenant agrees, before the rental contract is signed, to buy a fully fitted kitchen that is already installed — and usually at a price that is far from cheap. Otherwise, the prospective tenant does not get the lease. Given the current shortage of affordable housing in Germany, this puts the prospective tenant under considerable pressure to buy the kitchen from the landlord.
The landlord is fully aware that when the tenant eventually moves out, the landlord can require the tenant to take the kitchen with them — after all, it is the tenant’s property, not the landlord’s. The landlord can therefore demand that the outgoing tenant removes the kitchen. This again puts the tenant under pressure, because fully fitted kitchens very rarely fit into a new apartment.
At that point, the landlord can make an offer to buy the kitchen back from the departing tenant so that it can remain in place — but the purchase price is then only a fraction of what the tenant originally had to pay the landlord when moving in.
In this way, the landlord can indirectly force one tenant after another to buy the kitchen and later sell it back.
I've lived in Germany for four decades with plenty of moving around, and have yet to move into a place where a kitchen was not either provided or left there from the previous tenant (sometimes with a more symbolic compensation; it's not worth to rip it out since it often only fits that particular place anyway so there is pressure to give it away cheaply).
That's your story. Here's mine. My daughter moved out of an apartment in Hamburg. The fridges, washing machines, beds or whatever I can understand. They are designed to be installed after the building is complete.
What blew me away was being forced to remove the ceiling lights, and leaving the live wires dangling down. Don't underestimate the difficulty of doing this for someone who has to do it after working hours. You switch off the power of course, which leaves you in total darkness. Naturally I had not thought of that little complication beforehand.
I think that copyright should be abolished. But this does not mean you can't make money off software. For example, game studios could still charge for online play on their servers (an ongoing service), even if they can't legally prevent people from sharing copies of the game files, in this model. Similarly, theaters could still charge for movies, but what they would be selling is not a "right to see the movie" per se but the theater experience.
It may be hard to imagine, I don't think things would be massively different overall.
If the game is reasonably priced, people may still buy it out of convenience. For example, I'd rather pay $5 for a single player game on Steam and get out-of-the-box support for Linux through Proton than download a possibly malware-ridden copy in the high seas and then spent time figuring out how to run it. It's the same reason people still buy hard copies when every conceivable book is on Anna's Archive.
So your fist attempt was an online coding course where you would train users and they agreed that once they got a job, they would pay you a portion of their salary. But no one would honor their agreement once they were trained and employed.
As much as people want to believe that there is a tried and true formula for success, there isn't one. Many self-help books and videos want their customers to believe there is one, but if you get 100 determined and talented individuals to try their formula; you may get 100 different outcomes.
There are certainly traits and tactics that can enhance your chances for a good outcome, but nothing is guaranteed. Every story of success or failure is just another anecdote.
What if AI can greatly reduce the amount of money (i.e. tax receipts) that the government needs to function properly? What if AI can quickly determine who really qualifies for government assistance, and cuts off all the fraudsters without needing an army of bureaucrats?
We could even cut out a ton of middle-men and return congress to a part-time job. One can only dream, right?
> What if AI can quickly determine who really qualifies for government assistance, and cuts off all the fraudsters without needing an army of bureaucrats?
I created a system to support my custom object store where the metadata tags are stored within key-value stores. I can use them to create relational tables and query them just like conventional row stores used by many popular database engines.
My 'columnar store database' can handle many thousands of columns within a single table. So far, I have only tested it out to 10,000 columns, but it should handle many more.
I can get sub-second query times against it running on a single desktop. I haven't promoted this feature since everyone I have talked to about it, never had a compelling use for it.
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