clusterhacks

I'm excited to see the docs for Rama. But I am also a little scared of the comment " I came to suspect a new programming paradigm was needed" from Nathan.

It's not so much that I think the comment is wrong or anything, but rather that it seems so similar to what I have heard in the past from power-lisp (or Clojure in this case) super-smart engineers.

I feel like we have reached a point in software development where "better" paradigms don't necessarily gain much adoption. But if Rama wins in the marketplace, that will be interesting. And I am quite excited to see what a smart tech leader and good team have been able to grind out given a years-long timeframe in this programming platform space . . .

Good take.

We are questioning if it is even an average investment, especially the truly high-cost and selective private schools where tuition sits at $80,000+ contrasted with $30,000 at our state's well-known and respected flagship university. The extra $200,000 in costs is breathtaking to consider.

Yep, I attended a lower-ranked state school for an undergrad in CS and had a wonderful experience. Lots of positive interactions with faculty in CS and math. My undergrad school was also attended by a large population of highly motivated students for historical reasons. I stumbled into this school almost by accident and was really happy with my student peer group because most were quite ambitious.

I also then went to a well-known and ranked R1 university for grad school. I didn't enjoy it very much but also didn't match well with an advisor out of the gate. That colored my experience significantly and in hindsight was really mostly my fault.

Oddly enough, I returned to this school and work a somewhat hybrid staff/research software engineer job and have been here for more than a decade. Go figure.

Agreed re: "large enough to offer so many good options and departments." This is definitely a big pro in our opinion. It is definitely true that smaller schools are more limited in offerings than big schools. During visits, smaller schools seem to carefully point out some flexibility in putting together a more personal course-of-study to offset this . . .

I am beginning to believe that the root cause of tuition costs in the US exceeding inflation is based much more on FOMO on the benefits of college education rather than federal government guarantees on student loans.

My claim is that buyers (parents+children) of college degrees are maybe not behaving rationally with respect to cost.

High-cost schools position themselves as offering a "better" outcome or opportunity to students. I'm really conflicted about this viewpoint. I have two children in high school with one a rising senior. So my family is discussing colleges and college costs somewhat regularly. We have visited a small number of state schools and a small number of smaller private universities and colleges. The smaller schools do a VERY good job of selling extra opportunities easily available to students. My experience is that opportunities can be found by a motivated college student at any institution but the small private schools seem to make it almost hard for a student to NOT be involved in meaningful outside-of-the-classroom options.

I strongly suspect you are reading more into the review process than exists. There probably isn't any feedback worth having.

I bet the hiring company got a bunch of "fine" or "ok" project submissions from candidates and then made somewhat arbitrary choices on who they would move forward with.

It will get worse now that the NC Supreme Court has overturned its previous decision that partisan gerrymanders were illegal.

As a NC resident, I strongly expect that the current legislature will quickly draw districts to ensure their ability to maintain a super-majority in both houses of the state gov.

Bonkers real estate prices in NC are probably more about people cashing out of higher-price areas and coming here now rather than any future Apple development. I think the Apple (and Google) moves to NC have some impact it's just that NC is attracting a lot of movers from CA, NY, and FL already. Check out:

https://www.ncdemography.org/2023/02/08/where-are-north-caro....)

This says 366K people moved to NC in 2022. That's a lot of folks who come here and probably a bunch are trying to buy houses in the RTP area.

The funds are based on a percentage of employee withholdings (income tax) - if there are no employees, there are no funds to Apple:

"It is a performance-based economic development incentive program that provides annual grant disbursements for a period of up to 12 years, to new and expanding businesses based on a percentage of withholding taxes paid by new employees during each calendar year of a grant. This percentage ranges from 10% to 75% (80% for awards after October 1, 2015 in Tier 1 counties). "

You can find the specifics for the Job Development Investment Grant program annual report for 2021 - this is the one that has the Apple program details: https://www.johnlocke.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/2021-JD...

As far as I can tell, they are just proposing that most (75%) of the income taxes the new Apple employees would have paid to the state will instead go to Apple. If they never have any employees, Apple gets 75% of zero.

<edit for additional info>It appears that the Apple incentive is "transformative" a classification that means the amount can raise from 75% to 100% if Apple meets the hiring targets . . .

I have also been in this field for years and the allure of "open medical data" magically accelerating medical research very much does NOT feel true to me.

Skip the essay but at least give me three or four sentences why I should feel differently?

For all intents and purposes, once IRB approval for a study is obtained, medical records ARE ALREADY OPEN to researchers for the purpose of recruitment.

I believe open medical data would have absolutely zero effect on the amount of time spent on recruitment.

Source: Me. I work with clinical trials data management in a medical research institution pulling hospital-side clinical data and patient schedules into systems on the research-side specifically for the purpose of recruitment.

Some students cheat. As an adjunct instructor at the university level, I had similar experiences.

You have to both adjust your expectations and make a significant part of your grading use an in-person one-on-one oral exam or project walkthrough.

It is a huge commitment of time - most professors I know seem to have quietly accepted cheating will be be rewarded because they don't have enough time to verify student performance.

I found an 8-10 inch one in a wooded, non-garden area in a central NC backyard a couple years ago. Definitely here.

Are Clojure dev teams outside of Nubank currently using REBL excited about this?

As a small project Clojure dev (and admittedly a couple years out of daily Clojure use), these types of projects are hard for me to place in a day-to-day work context. The doc says that Morse is one tool that can "amplify the power of the programmer during interactive development".

I totally feel like Clojure REPL-based dev is better for me personally - the interactive feedback feels so natural and functional programming matches so well my preferred dev process. But it is more difficult for me to understand where this type of tooling fits in dev workflow. Is Morse an incremental improvement? Does it make more sense in significant Clojure dev shops with many programmers vs just me sitting around with an Emacs repl going?

I have been spectacularly unable to get any business people to learn SQL.

I even find that very few will bother with reporting tools (eg Tableau) for simple self-service.

Instead, the expectation is that there will be a programmer/DBA/report writer position dedicated to producing analytics "on-demand."

I remember SAS openings in the 2000/2001 recession - I had reliable information that every opening at SAS was getting around 1,000 applicants.

Keep in mind that SAS is privately held and seems to mostly ignore conditions that make publicly-traded companies go a little bonkers.

Fun! For reasons related to my username, I am about to dip back into the current state-of-the-art algos for highly dimensional data.

I need to dig deep into highly optimized and perhaps distributed algorithms in this space - gotta deal with billions of high dimensionality items. The end result is probably going to be almost a survey from standard distance-based algos like hierarchical clustering headed into louvain methods. Anything "special" or maybe uncommon you like for this type of thing?

Good book! I think the Driveline blog is a better source for folks working with youth athletes. The MVP Machine was a little bit more Moneyball than player development oriented . . .

Bauer. I had a bit of a meltdown about him - I was momentarily worried that his name alone would bring a huge negative reaction to people associated with Driveline training methods. That seems to have not come to pass.

I very much like the Driveline "Skills that Scale" training approach. I took several brand-new-to-softball middle schoolers into 50+ MPH bat speeds with overload/underload training and bat sensors. One great athlete hit 60+ in training in her very first year of playing the game. Course, she looks like a D1 athlete as well, so she may have gotten there just by putting a bat in her hand . . .

Driveline is the cutting edge of baseball/softball hitting and baseball pitching. As a tech person involved in coaching youth through middle school athletes, their blog (and youth coaching certification, which I completed) really gives a solid foundation in how to use bat speed sensors, radar guns, and more advanced tech in training. It's fun stuff for a data geek.

Mocap is a step beyond what I want to do with young athletes but having a data-driven approach is a coaches dream. Measure things that matter, build a constraint-based training environment, and let exterior outcomes shape players.

Accept that nothing you do will work short of legally assuming 100% control of her finances.

I had a grandmother do exactly the same thing in the 1980s and 1990s via phone scams. She died penniless, having dithered away $X00,000s in cash and retirement assets.

This behavior was extremely compulsive on her part and quite outside her ability to examine rationally or control - think gambling addiction rather than "stupid decisions."

I think it is extrememly unlikely that any intervention by you and your family will help. Your mom is not able to stop and will not stop.

I think FTX claimed 1.2 million users awhile back. Is there any insight into a true count of FTX users and maybe the average value of holdings they entered into FTX with?

I'm interested in understanding just how much actually flowed into FTX from users vs what (the probably fake?) value of their holdings were when FTX melted down.

There are great bits of discussion about SQLite being maintained and enhanced by a very small team - three people.

While I very much appreciate the safety of being a very small cog in a larger machine, I also wonder how my career might be more enjoyable and satisfying if I had chosen to limit my options to small teams where every single person on the team had a critical impact on the success of a project.

Human-curated content from trusted sources for top 1% information probably only available to subscribers will become more valuable and sought after. I suspect the days of generally trusting forums populated by anonymous users are done?

I would not be surprised if the quality of human writing actually goes up. I have this weird feeling that ChatGPT and similar tools will become almost equivalent to calculators for math? My experience as a writer is that sometimes just throwing down a first draft is the hardest step - I could see these tools really assisting in the writing process. Generate a draft, do some tweaking, ask for suggestions or improvements, repeat.

I don't know how I feel about code generated by these tools. Will there be a similar benefit compared to writing? At some level, we will need some deeper mastery of writing and coding to use these things well. Is there a complexity cliff that these tools will never be able to overcome?

A total lack of trust for general internet search results. So much content is already shallow copies of other content. I don't see how general internet search survives this.

This was very common in my extended family in rural North Carolina. Most of my cousins didn't attend college, partnered up quickly, and started families. Not always in that precise order . . .

Honestly, I think for them it just wasn't that odd in their community. I grew up in a more suburban area and the baby boom was definitely a few years later comparatively speaking.

I have several aunts and uncles who are great-grandparents and in the 60-70 year old range.

I work in this field at a large medical research institution. There is a significant amount of genomics analysis that occurs here on a day-to-day basis. The genomic processing pipeline work all falls directly into my group.

There is next to zero demand for tool development internally. I do it on the side of "normal" IT data management because I love high performance computing, algorithms, and multithreaded hackery. But even at my large, well-funded institution, there isn't a specific role where that is all that you do by design.

I do suck at marketing - meaning, despite having some success with big improvements in research tools that folks have definitely appreciated, no one comes to me asking for help with better engineering of genomic applications. Partly that is due to many researchers maybe only know R, so they will default to whatever packages are already available in Bioconductor, install those, and throw the resulting mash-up for their current research effort onto the compute cluster and simply wait for hours or days for the jobs to finish.

PIs are often insulated from software engineering problems too - if work is completed before the next bi-weekly meeting and update session, well, it must be ok.

Totally agree. I am extremely annoyed at the general article submitted versus the actual paper focus.

While I respect the need for these longterm survey data collection efforts, I am not sure I would frankly trust that survey to even accurately be able to tease out high-intensity vs low-intensity efforts from people participating in the study.

And the tie-in from the cohort survey results back into the motivation for the mouse study just isn't done at all. I mean out of their 148 patients with SEER scores, they make no mention at all at metastatic disease occurence or even attempt to tie that figure back to exercise intensity . . .

From the abstract:

  Epidemiologic data from a 20-year prospective study of a large human cohort of 
  initially cancer-free participants revealed that exercise prior to cancer 
  initiation had a modest impact on cancer incidence in low metastatic stages 
  but significantly reduced the likelihood of highly metastatic cancer.

Data was gathered from a large cohort via questionnaire. Looks like the study then used responses to classify high vs low intensity.

From the article:

  The total study population included 2,734 participants; 243 new cancer cases 
  were recorded during the 20-year follow-up period. 

It reads as if the study then had to reject data from 95 of the 243 patients due to not having a SEER score.

From skimming the article, I can't find any analysis of metastatic disease incidence in the remaining patients? Am I just missing it?

No better point re: living in fear and rumorville. Same experience for me in 2008. I also saw the same effect post dot-com bubble.

Layoffs in our industry are simply part of the long term game, part of a playbook that folks coming into it in the last decade or so probably haven't experienced. My eyes were opened in the dot-com crash - I saw too many extremely smart, hard-working, and accomplished developers get dropped and spend a year or more getting back into programming gigs.

I think I would pay good money to see this movie . . .

You had me at "decide to sing" = "doesn't need to talk to anyone who understands mathematics".

I admire a person so deranged they think Yngwie breaking the fourth wall is a "maybe".