The key distinction here is that the temporary workers would presumably be people who are in federal custody and currently housed in ICE facilities. The temporary housing isn’t the issue.
No, that's what the headline implies, and the body of the article doesn't support at all. It's (currently, and with no indication of intent to change this) two separate branches of their business.
I think the terrifying part is just how fast software practitioners completely gave up trying to understand anything. As if these oracles actually know anything about our bespoke systems. It was almost overnight that SMEs were lost.
Just to clarify, I'm not advocating to introduce a new `unknown` keyword. I'm saying that the existing `null` in SQL was not named properly and that the name `unknown` would have been more fitting. SQL's `null` already has the semantics of `unknown` as explained in the part of the article that I quoted.
SQL NULL is not "exactly equivalent" to unknown. E.g. in an outer join, there's nothing unknown about the result that is missing a row from one side, yet SQL semantics is to fill it with nulls.
In practice, it behaves as "unknown" in some contexts, as "missing value" in other contexts, and sometimes it's just plain WTF like SUM() returning NULL rather than 0 if there are no rows.
The term "null" comes from C. A. R. Hoare, who has proposed in November 1965 various additions to the programming language ALGOL 60, including pointers (called references by Hoare, "pointer" comes from IBM PL/I, in July 1966), and including a special value "null" for references a.k.a. pointers, for denoting unknown or not applicable values.
C. A. R. Hoare, 1965-11:
"In order to enable references to represent partial functional relationships, i.e. ones which do not necessarily yield a value, a special reference value null is introduced.
This value fails to refer to a record, and any attempt to use it to refer to a record leads to an undefined result."
In his proposal, Hoare has followed the COBOL 60 terminology for some of the additions to ALGOL, i.e. "record" instead of the word "structure", introduced by IBM PL/I in 1964-12, and "record class" instead of "structure type", hence the "class" of SIMULA 67, from where the word "class" has spread into all OOP languages.
In Hoare's proposal, references a.k.a. pointers could point only to values belonging to user-defined types, i.e. records a.k.a. structures, not to primitive types.
I wouldn't necessarily define `null` as "unknown" -- it's just "no value" -- which is really the same thing and also somewhat equivalent to "unset". But null pointers aren't unset as pointers aren't initialized to null in C and you can explicitly set a pointer to null.
E.F. Codd added nulls to relational model in 1970 so that does pre-date C. The concept is even older than that I imagine.
In nth normal form, you can't have 'no value'. That would mean your model is wrong. In academic relational data books, null does mean "unknown". There is a value, we just don't know what it is (yet).
If there might actually not be such a value, you're supposed to change your schema to reflect that.
> There is a value, we just don't know what it is (yet).
In all my years, I've never used null for that. If I don't have a value yet then generally I'm not writing any part of the record. I only ever use nulls for the absence of a value. Creating a new table for every potential optional column is the "academic relational way" and also insane. :)
What happens if your data is produced by some automated process such as a sensor reading and occasionally the sensor fails to return a value? NULL seems exactly the appropriate value to use.
I'm still a bit confused. Suppose you have another table, call it temperatures with columns id and temperature, where every row contains only a valid temperature (no NULL records), and you have a main logging table with date and temperature_id so that you can join on temperature_id = temperatures.id. This seems to be what you mean, with a canonical measurement record table related via the temperature_id foreign key.
But then if your sensor fails to record a measurement don't you end up with NULL for that row's temperature_id?
Ah but then how do you record that the measurement actually happened but did not produce a value? I want a record of that failure.
I mean sure, you could do yet another table. But honestly that level of normalization is much more work than it's worth. Just because it's some academic definition doesn't make it right.
You'd also have to ask when NULL came into common use in C (to which I do not know the answer). AFAIK NULL was not considered to be standard until C89. As far as I'm aware, all C compilers implement it as a #define in a standard header somewhere; it's not actually part of the core language itself.
I wonder who first added that macro? Was it there from the beginning?
I think authentication is about proof of identity. Identity can mean a lot of things imo. Applications identify me all the time without me giving them any proof of who I am. This happens in meatspace all the time too. People project identity and we make assumptions about what we observe. We don’t necessarily ask them to verify this identify through mutually agreed upon terms.
Second the room treatment. It should likely be prioritized over everything. Specifically you should look into getting bass traps and a gobo or three. There’s budget stuff out there but sound is fickle. Control those reflections. Expensive mics still sound bad if a room sounds bad.
I’ve had limited success with the null object pattern but there is one case that it worked really well for me. I worked on a feature that was highly dynamic and users could compose reports selecting data points from tangentially related models. Null objects were a really helpful pattern because it was hard to anticipate how models would be composed and if a developer made a mistake it was hard to notice there was no effect. Our null objects would raise exceptions in development and explain what you need to change but wouldn’t prevent execution in production.
You could easily argue we should have just presented this exception to the user in all cases but this is where we landed. It’s probably the only case this pattern was beneficial for me.
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