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bthomas

328 karma · joined November 14, 2011

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bthomas··on Yandex open sourced it's BI tool DataLens
Not sure why the downvotes - very useful context and phrased correctly as a question.
bthomas··on LLM Agent Paper List
Does anybody know a good forum for discussing AI agent design? I have a bunch of questions, but too specific for the general LLM application communities.
bthomas··on RAG is more than just embedding search
Neat! Do you happen to have the analogous similarity queries with a default embedding? Curious to see them side by side.

(I know I can reproduce myself and I appreciate all the code you posted there - thought I'd ask first!)

bthomas··on Show HN: Svelvet – A component library for building interactive flow diagrams
> schema driven custom views for json data structures

Is there a React library that does this well?

bthomas··on Super-Structured Data: Rethinking the Schema
I didn't follow this part:

> EdgeDB is essentially a new data silo whose type system cannot be used to serialize data external to the system.

I think this implies that serializing external data to zson is easier than writing an INSERT into edgedb, but not sure why that would be.

bthomas··on Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates
The % of the population over 65 is around 50% higher in Florida too. It's complicated!
bthomas··on Ask HN: My startup has more annual subscribers than monthly. What to make of it?
Are the numbers current subscribers or new subscriptions?

Hard to speculate without comparing churn.

bthomas··on Building a personal data warehouse in Snowflake for fun and no profit
Off topic: what do you use for CMS? I like how the code blocks and graphs are integrated. Great post!
bthomas··on Introduction to Apache Airflow
I recently went through the airflow docs for the first time - agree. But this comment thread has much more helpful than any of the docs!
bthomas··on Cambridge research team estimates 12% of England has been infected already
That's not the 80/20 rule. There must be empirical estimates of that number.
bthomas··on U.S. to let airlines limit service animals on planes
The problem is they all magically arrived at an exorbitant price that seems to reflect monopoly pricing. Also fees have standardized recently.
bthomas··on U.S. to let airlines limit service animals on planes
Yes there is rampant ESA abuse, but note the airlines all charge $175 each way for a pet. Isn’t that obvious collusion?

It’s $350 to take my small dog to LA for the weekend when the round trip ticket for a human is $100. She is great on planes and has never had even a minor incident.

bthomas··on “Startup Robs Every Customer They Have for Thousands of Dollars Overnight”
What’s the rationale for not naming them here?
bthomas··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2016)
Thistle - Berkeley CA ONSITE - https://angel.co/thistle-1/jobs/97516-software-engineer

Thistle delivers delicious, organic and healthy meals as a subscription - "put your diet on autopilot".

Looking for python engineers (senior and junior) that are passionate about healthy food. Work includes:

- Building our consumer website, with a focus helping customers understand all the nutrition and health benefits in their meals.

- Ops infrastructure for designing, preparing and delivering 1000s of meals in a day.

- Testing new user acquisition and engagement strategies

Stack is Python/Django, but if you're a fast learner we will be just as interested in what you like to eat for lunch.

Interview: quick phone screen, then visit HQ to try the food and discuss our codebase.

bthomas··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2016)
Thistle - Berkeley CA ONSITE - https://angel.co/thistle-1/jobs/97516-software-engineer

Thistle delivers delicious, organic and healthy meals - the ease of Munchery/Sprig with the subscription model of Blue Apron.

Looking for full stack engineers (senior and junior) that are passionate about healthy food. Work includes:

- Building our consumer website, with a focus helping customers understand all the nutrition and health benefits in their meals.

- Infrastructure for designing, preparing and delivering 1000s of meals.

- Testing new user acquisition and engagement strategies

Stack is Python/Django, but if you're a fast learner we will be just as interested in what you like to eat for lunch.

Interview: quick phone screen, then visit HQ to try the food and discuss our codebae. No brainteasers.

We also have nothing to do with Ayesha Curry, fortunately.

bthomas··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2016)
Thistle - SF - https://angel.co/thistle-1/jobs/97516-software-engineer

Thistle offers a subscription for delicious, organic and healthy meals - the ease of Munchery/Sprig with the business model of Blue Apron

Looking for full stack engineers (senior and junior) that are passionate about healthy food. Work includes: - Building our consumer website, with a focus helping customers understand all the nutrition and health benefits in their meals. - Infrastructure for designing, preparing and delivering 1000s of meals. - Testing new user acquisition and engagement strategies

Stack is Python/Django, but if you're a fast learner we will be just as interested in what you like to eat for lunch.

bthomas··on The Best Books I Read in 2015
Conversely, the list of most saved stories seems more useful than most upvoted.
bthomas··on I'm Begging for Work
If the OP sends this thread to the CEO and asks for severance - or he'll update the post to identify the CEO+company - is that extortion?

Certainly not endorsing, just curious.

bthomas··on Apple ResearchKit on GitHub
Is there anything about App Store guidelines? Curious if Apple is going to require any kind of IRB approval first.
bthomas··on Ask HN: What are you doing to improve your health?
It's really hard to approach fitness as yet another obligation, unless you happen to have a laid back lifestyle. My advice: find some kind of exercise that you enjoy, don't stress about whether it's the optimal program. Use the time as a mental break from your day at the computer, or to get some energy in the morning or to unwind after work. Don't focus on results at first - then, after it becomes a habit, you can optimize.
bthomas··on Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?
Don't change anything, but look for silver linings. That drive is hard to find and makes you sound like an ideal person to work with - feel free to get in touch if you're interested.
bthomas··on So Your Company Has Been Found Using Alex’s Photographs Without Permission
Naive question: how does the legal system determine appropriate damages for this kind of infringement? Can ImageRights just name a number, or is there some kind of precedent?

Using a $500 photo intuitively seems worse than using a $5 photo. But if the offender had no intent - ie. a grandmother that didn't know you can't just copy anything from Google Images - would be bizarre to have punitive damages be a multiplier of the original license cost.

bthomas··on So Your Company Has Been Found Using Alex’s Photographs Without Permission
This assumes all violators are doing it willfully. I imagine most restaurant owners that make a Squarespace site in an afternoon have no idea you can't just copy something from Google Images.
bthomas··on So Your Company Has Been Found Using Alex’s Photographs Without Permission
I think is this the right thing to do? is a valid question - obviously it's independent of any legal damages.
bthomas··on So Your Company Has Been Found Using Alex’s Photographs Without Permission
How much are the infringement letters demanding? $200 for a $100 photo is totally reasonable; $1000 and he has no moral argument.
bthomas··on YC Open-Source Sales Agreement
This is great, but would be much more helpful as an annotated doc that explained why the various phrasings were chosen, as well as what was left out and why.

What's the best platform for that? It can't be Word comments...

bthomas··on Automatic REST API for Any Postgres Database
Something like this that that could operate efficiently on 100M+ rows would be hugely valuable in biology
bthomas··on Nashville police chief shares message, responds to questions
But you don't need to be a fucking lawyer to...?
bthomas··on The Search for Exceptional Genomes
The article refers to Google sequencing healthy genomes, and I think I recently read something about Google running a longitudinal health study on employees (a la the Framingham Heart Study) - anyone here familiar with what they are doing?
bthomas··on JavaScript for OS X Automation
Not sure if this is what OP was getting at, but it's possible that the attack vector will baloon if more 3rd party apps are pressured to provide logical scripting interfaces
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