billwashere's comments

On: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

[billwashere]

Completed books:

Project Hail Marry by Andy Weir

Dungeon Crawler Carl (Books 1-7) by Matt Dinniman

I'm currently reading:

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

[flopsamjetsam → billwashere]

> Project Hail Marry by Andy Weir

The only Andy Weir book I've read. Loved it.

On: Flameshot – Open-source screenshot software

[billwashere]

For the last 10(ish) years I've been using Greenshot [1]. I haven't found any issues with it but it is only available on Windows and Mac.

[1] https://getgreenshot.org/

[winrid → billwashere]

Greenshot is great! I use it on Windows, and ksnip on everything else atm as it has similar draw arrows/annotation features.

[ASalazarMX → winrid]

If ksnip is cross-platform, may I ask why don't you use it everywhere, if it's so similar to Greenshot?

BTW I've never heard of Ksnip before. I gotta try it.

[winrid → ASalazarMX]

I haven't used Greenshot in a couple months, but I think I remember it being better than ksnip, will have to look again.

On: What happens in the brain to cause depression?

[billwashere]

I've been reading Brain Energy by Dr. Chris Palmer that makes a compelling argument that all mental illnesses are metabolic disorders of the brain

https://brainenergy.com/

On: URLhaus: A database of malicious URLs used for malware distribution

[billwashere]

See this post on why.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40097818

On: The Curse of Monkey Island

[billwashere]

Never heard of exoscummvm but https://www.scummvm.org/ is the original site. I spent a lot of time playing Monkey Island the ds version of scummvm.

On: Winlator: Android app that lets you to run Windows apps with Wine

[billwashere]

You can using wsl [1] or without [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20632942

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38909304

On: San Francisco’s rent prices have never returned to pre-2020 levels

[billwashere]

https://archive.is/G4q37

On: Don't use DISTINCT as a "join-fixer"

[billwashere]

select distinct customer_id, max(order_id) over (partition by customer_id order by created_date desc) FROM orders

http://sqlfiddle.com/#!15/51df39/2

[dent9876543 → billwashere]

Hmm… my hunch is that this doesn’t do what you think it does.

I expect the order by in the window function is effectively lost because max operated over the whole window. (And you happen to get the most recent, because in many implementations, order_id will be a sequence.)

But I might be wrong. And I might only now be learning that order by with max() and over substitutes how the “value” of the order_id is understood.

[withinboredom → dent9876543]

You aren't wrong.

http://sqlfiddle.com/#!15/7eb3a/7

Here's a pretty simple/normalish way to handle the edge cases. This one (without distinct) is far more consistent (wall-clock-wise, doesn't depend on caches): http://sqlfiddle.com/#!15/7eb3a/9

Note that order 2 is after order 4 in the example schema.

[withinboredom → withinboredom]

If you just need customer id and order id (and nothing from the original orders table), you can simplify it further http://sqlfiddle.com/#!15/7eb3a/10

[billwashere → dent9876543]

Oops, you are right

[williamdclt → billwashere]

Im very ignorant of partition by, but it doesn’t look like it works? http://sqlfiddle.com/#!15/696cb/1

[withinboredom → williamdclt]

It doesn't. http://sqlfiddle.com/#!15/7eb3a/7 is a proper implementation using windowing functions to get the first something.

On: Ask HN: EU Bank with Good API?

[billwashere]

You could try Modern Treasury and outsource the API requirements.

https://www.moderntreasury.com/products/payments

On: Software horror show: SAP Concur

[billwashere]

Depends on the industry,Oracle Netsuite is similar to SAP. A lot of construction/professional services use Deltek Vantagepoint. Also Mircosoft Dynamics comes to mind.

[hef19898 → billwashere]

Yeah, it really depends on the exact use case. And the availability of functional consultants with relevant industry expertise. SAP isn't great t project management, even if make-to-order works just fine, but that is still a manufacturing environment. SAP is also somewhat lacking in terms of logistics and warehousing (at least it was last time I checked / worked with SAP in that field 5 or so years ago).

MS Dynamics seems to have some good ideas when it comes to field services (I never worked with that, so). INFOR is rather good when it comes to project management and project driven manufacturing and planning. So, pick your poison, because no system will satisfy all you wishes, but the decent ones will satisfy almost all your needs, one way or another.

One of the big benefits of picking SAP is the huge pool of people with relevant experience, from developers over users (from simple employees over key users to super key users) all the way to those "controversial" consultants. And that across almost all industries, countries, regions and functions.