brad0

A book I just finished that explains this quite well is Thinking in Systems: A Primer.

It touches on systems, modeling, nonlinearilites, etc.

I saw someone suggest another book on economics. Are there any other books people recommend for systems and multi-order thinking?

AFAIK there’s not many products in this field. A type of personal database and editor to put thoughts together etc.

What are some other products that serve a similar niche? How do they differ from this?

I really like the idea of a learning sub space!

Once the learning scaffolding is modelled, you can use that to build on top of it.

I wonder if the neocortex is the thing that we use together with the learning scaffolding.

I have no ML experience so tell me if I’m wrong here.

The argument is that Transformers spend most of their compute finding this language subspace. Once the subspace is found, it’s very easy for it to add words/phrases/etc to the model.

What this is proposing is that we should try to find a better way to represent this subspace.

We have no idea how to represent it at the moment. But maybe transformers can help us with figuring that out.

Something I rarely see anyone do is use the Refactoring features in their IDE.

Most IDEs understand the AST of the code you’re working with. Knowing the AST allows it to restructure that tree, based on some simple commands.

One command is rename. You can rename variables, functions, classes, files, you name it. Your IDE should update all your code automatically.

Extract and Inline are two other useful commands.

Learn the keyboard shortcuts and you’ll feel like a wizard. It’s honestly close to magic.

Someone here said don’t name your variables x, or a, etc.

I argue that you do name them ambiguously to start.

Normally when you’re writing code you’re thinking about the right hand side of the statement. What is the next step in my code? But most of the time we write the left hand side first. If you’re focused on naming, you lose your flow. You’re switching contexts.

By choosing x or a as your variable name, it unblocks your flow to write the right hand side.

Once you’ve written the code, go through and rename your variables. Use your IDE refactoring features to make this easy and change it everywhere at once.

There was a ruling that said that recipes are not copyrightable. However, anything beyond the recipe ingredients and method is copyrightable.

Think images, videos, or that hunk of text detailing their experience as a 5 year old before a recipe.

Way back in the day I ran a public recipe scraping API. It had an option to scrape the image along with the recipe, but you had to set an explicit copyright flag to get them.

There was a HN post about it if you’re curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14794949

What’s the value of this over GitHub Pages?

Hardly at all these days. The quality of answers seems to have fallen off a cliff.

There’s another reason I use it less. Developer documentation has gotten so much better over the past 10 years.

There’s hardly a case where I have a question that isn’t answered by official docs any more.

I’m guessing at least part of this is due to open source documentation. A lot of new engineers want to get contributions in GitHub as part of their CV. It’s super easy to contribute to docs in our current model.

It’s an interesting dynamic.

My original thought was that it had to do with a DB query plan. ie: converting a SQL statement to a set of operations.

Reading through this, I came to the same conclusion. I am really confused as to what a plan is in this context.

My best guess is that it is similar to the DB query plans above. It sounds like given a set of composable higher-order functions and a problem, students can use those functions to solve the problem.

Maybe I’m wrong?

I think there’s two things here. The easier one to explain is the “omnichannel” bit.

It reminds me a lot of dev teams creating a microservice and giving it a code name. Imagine someone from business joining standup and hearing a bunch of microservice code names and acronyms. They would be really confused! Maybe the same thing is happening here to you?

The second thing you mentioned is their explanation about Robert Smith etc. You came out more confused after the explanation! To use the same standup example: the business person asks in your standup what does the “Odin” micro service do? It might be quite hard to explain what a single microservice does to someone without prior experience in that field.

Long story short: the best way you can get an understanding for what they’re talking about is to build a background in it. Feed your curiosity! Read a good intro book on business or economics to get a good foundation. See if you can setup some kind of regular 1:1 with a business person over lunch to learn more, etc.

Planet Money did a good episode on this:

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/06/1091287991/turkeys-runaway-in...

Basically, the president doesn’t trust interest rates because it means some people can’t pay back loans.

As the novelty of trolling these bills with PRs dies down, I can see this being really useful.

Imagine more bills getting collaboration from the public this way. Rather than calling/writing your local rep, you submit a PR/issue and get feedback quickly!

IMO this is a brilliant move.

Can someone tell me if my understanding is correct?

Soland offers a service to loan stablecoins out. To do this, you need to provide some amount of their solana coin as collateral. Additionally, because it’s a loan they expect their initial stablecoin back, plus a little bit extra.

So someone had a /lot/ of solana. They believed that they could make more money in some alternative coin, rather than keeping their existing solana. So they convert their solana into stablecoin using soland and buy some other coin using that stablecoin.

Since then, the crypto markets have lost a lot of value. The chance that the lender can pay the loan back is very low. Additionally, there’s a clause that says if the price of solana goes below some amount, the solana used as collateral will be sold.

Now, if the collateral is sold, it will introduce a huge supply of solana coin, which drives down the price. This feeds into the solana price dropping, which sells more collateral. A death spiral.

To avoid this, the DAO is taking over the account and selling the coins prematurely, before liquidation happens.

Is that right at all?

This sounds really interesting from a technical point of view!

What was your motivation in building it?

I'm a bit late, but what's the technical setup? I'm curious about the panel, controller and pump. What's the wattage and parts etc. What's the final cost?

Finally, what problem are you solving for?

There’s a bunch of interesting areas. The ones I’m focused on right now:

Incremental View Maintenance

Materialised Views

Multiple indexed databases that allow for row, column, and search accesses very fast

Real-time replication

Turns out I had to post here before my google-fu finally worked.

The company was called Kimono Labs: http://www.kimonolabs.com/ They sold to Palantir.

Looks like there's very little out there that exists these days. Here's a video of how it worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ_hSNj1gI0

Interesting project! I'm curious about how this compares to other tech:

- How is data stored internally?

- What are the tradeoffs with this implementation?

- Do you generate indexes on data as it comes in?

- How are nested keys handled?

- Are indexes eventually consistent?

I didn’t quite grok what the offer is. Is it for people who already have a degree and want to have their loan paid off? Or is it for people who want to get a degree?

> I have a sort of data representation in which I can note how things/concepts are linked, and also express doubt, references, references to references and so on, to allow expressive representations of thoughts including incompleteness or ambiguity.

Could you tell us more about this?

I'm working on a project that uses the Amazon Ion format to store binary data. I wanted to see the textual representation of the data when debugging, but there wasn't any existing tools.

I don't see EC2 in your architecture diagram. Where are you using EC2?

How are you structuring your dynamo tables? Is there one table that is used much more than another?

The only two places where the cold starts will hurt is the API key auth and the JWT auth/posting to kinesis. Plus if it's being called with any kind of decent frequency it won't matter.

It all depends on how much data they're processing. It looks to be mostly a pay-per-use model.

I'd say their big cost is Kinesis and potentially API Gateway. Lambda is great for this kind of workload (mostly).

It’s understandable that the benefits don’t immediately seem obvious. We have all been working with REST for such a long time that we forgot what didn’t make sense when we were learning REST.

A good way to think about GraphQL is it’s data centric as opposed to operation centric. The unit you work with is the object instead of the operation.

Object level querying instead of operation level querying

Object level auth instead of operation level auth

I’m not an expert but I don’t think clouds will affect it.

Do clouds prevent you from getting a GPS signal? (I know these satellites are LEO but I don’t think that should matter)

Notable is a great free markdown editor on GitHub. You can import regular markdown or Evernote files. All the files are stored in one directory and are grouped by tags. The tags can be hierarchical if you’re looking for that. Most of the time though the regular file search does great.

I find myself making so many small notes of how I did things at work or with AWS, zsh etc.

It’s a really powerful system while simple at the same time.

I feel like that top answer has a lot of things wrong with it.

The first AWS service was SQS in 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#History

The wiki also says that AWS changed direction after a paper was written about reworking the retail compute infrastructure. It had a small section saying that they could sell excess compute as part of the rework.

After that paper came out they relaunched AWS in 2006 with S3, SQS and EC2.

I’m confused. Did they just patent querying a graph?