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dataduck

459 karma · joined April 21, 2011

CTO of a small fintech/edtech startup based in London.
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dataduck··on AI Coach designed to help you start your tasks
I got a client side error after answering the second set of onboarding questions:

69-b6a400bc9e4e65f8.js:1 TypeError: Object.hasOwn is not a function at nR (518-6b2228f0e91f38c5.js:1) at rk (fd9d1056-f2aa89c71393f8bf.js:1) at iB (fd9d1056-f2aa89c71393f8bf.js:1) at o4 (fd9d1056-f2aa89c71393f8bf.js:1) at fd9d1056-f2aa89c71393f8bf.js:1 at o3 (fd9d1056-f2aa89c71393f8bf.js:1) at oQ (fd9d1056-f2aa89c71393f8bf.js:1) at oj (fd9d1056-f2aa89c71393f8bf.js:1) at MessagePort.M (69-b6a400bc9e4e65f8.js:1) window.console.error @ 69-b6a400bc9e4e65f8.js:1

dataduck··on Return to office is 'dead,' Stanford economist says
No, it's akin to saying landlords care about the occupancy of their buildings and their tenants paying rent. Of course they do, and of course they're prepared to use media influence to try and make that happen.
dataduck··on Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
Not if you #believewomen...
dataduck··on Royal Mail issues Warhammer stamps celebrating 40 year anniversary
My personal fave is Blood Bowl. A really tightly designed game that plays in 150 minutes (and has turn timers so this is pretty reliable), works just fine if you don't know the lore (but will bring you in), and doesn't require buying additional models in the same way most of the others do. I think it got a reprint semi-recently too.
dataduck··on Royal Mail issues Warhammer stamps celebrating 40 year anniversary
I see where you're coming from, but...

A lot of the stuff the Imperium does is not just evil but also stupidly counterproductive. Planets starving due to rounding errors in the filing system is hard to take as an endorsement. And I couldn't disagree more with the Tau, if anything I wish they had made them more sinister. Having a whole faction of non-tragic good guys in the setting really spoils the vibe.

But the Orks - agree so hard. There's a quote in a Codex somewhere from an Eldar philosopher waxing on the point that the Orks are thriving and living their true lives, while the Eldar are decaying as a result of their own corruption and therefore the Orks are morally superior, and it rings quite true.

dataduck··on UN Human Rights Chief Urges UK to Reverse ‘Deeply Troubling’ Public Order Bill
Would it be fair to allow anti-monarchy protesters to protest only 100m from anyone celbrating the coronation?
dataduck··on Scientists have discovered the first virovore – an organism that eats viruses
I came across this recently and your post made me wonder what you'd think of it:

https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall...

I won't butcher the piece with a poor summary but it's a critical look at the peer review process.

dataduck··on Meatless meat is nothing new
It's possible that the supermarkets did some market research that misled them about how popular these products would be, but there is another option. Supermarkets can arrange all sorts of deals with suppliers. In some cases, the supplier will pay the supermarket to stock a new product, hoping that high margin sales or even just market penetration make it worth it.
dataduck··on U.K.'s online censorship bill causes more harm than it attempts to prevent
Speech can cause a physical reaction equivalent to violence? That sounds less like a rational claim and more like the...

> onion2k

Oh, I see what you did there.

Come on people, don't feed the trolls.

dataduck··on The Harry Potter fallacy
The most common form I've seen is often not malicious: "thing you actually said is a weak form of this argument, the strongest form is in fact mostly agreeing with me"
dataduck··on Ask HN: Recommendation for the mom of a near-college-aged “tech geared” student?
It's wonderful that you want to help your daughter through what is frequently a stressful and uncertain transition. I'm now working in machine learning, but I spent a lot of time working with students at exactly that level in the UK. I remember working with a student going into physics (first year undergrad), whose dad was trying to learn a bit of the lingo for fairly similar reasons. His son was responding badly to him - there was a lot of frustration and resentment on both sides - and he asked me for some help on being able to talk about quantum mechanics with his son, similar to the question in your OP.

What I said to him was: if you want to be able to talk to your son about quantum mechanics, you're going to have to learn to solve Schrodinger's equation in a one-dimensional potential well.

He kept on pressing about how he wanted to open up conversations about all the industrial applications of nanotubes, about quantum tunneling, quantum communications and cryptography, all kinds of things, but I kept giving the same answer - if you want your son to take what you have to say on QM seriously, learn to do the math. What he didn't do was to put in the 3+ years of studying wave mechanics and differential equations that I had implicitly recommended and continued to recommend. Eventually he got the message, accepted that his son shouldn't be listening to his opinions on the implications of QM on the wider world, and things calmed down between them.

The point I'm trying to make is that it is easy to think that you can run ahead of your daughter to be useful as a guide to her, as you probably always have done. Or that if you stay informed on the things that interest her, she'll want to have long conversations about them with you. But as she grows up, there will come a point where she's a specialist in her area and you just won't be able to keep up, and the only conversations that will work are ones where you're asking her to explain to you something you fundamentally do not understand. And there's no shame in that - I absolutely cannot keep up with the learning rate of people half my age and it's exceedingly rare to find someone who can. Your daughter is about the age where this change in dynamic should start to happen.

If you're going to talk with your daughter about technology, from now on, you must acknowledge that she is the master and you the apprentice. She'll be teaching you, which might be useful to her, but you're not going to be able to guide her on matters relating to tech any more than I could guide her on a career in medicine. Which is not nothing, but bear in mind your usefulness here is going to bracketed between the equivalent of "I hear NHS staff are pretty overworked these days" and "I know a great guy who's been a consultant for decades, do you want to meet him?" The latter, by the way is a seriously useful thing you could do, but requires acknowledging that she'll need actual guidance from an actual expert way sooner than it seems, and probably much sooner than you'll be able to speak pidgin-tech.

This isn't meant to put you off. Do read Paul Graham's excellent essays (http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html) - they're very accessible (apart from the programming textbooks!) and can give you real context as to the human elements of the decisions she'll be making. But, having seen this story play out before, I want to help you avoid the pitfalls. Remember, she'll meet many technical peers and mentors over her career, but she'll only ever have one mother.

dataduck··on Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
So long as everyone using the platform can modify their own list, no it's not the same problem at all. The question is: do I get to decide who I listen to, or do you?
dataduck··on The endgames of bad faith communication
Another lesson from Munich etc. is that it might be a good idea to go to violence pre-emptively when it becomes clear someone is communicating in bad faith.
dataduck··on The endgames of bad faith communication
It is, but sometimes it's difficult even when you're trying; and of course, not everybody is reasonable.
dataduck··on Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
That's especially fair, as there's a good-faith way of engaging with such things that they've avoided: "Could you expand on this please?"
dataduck··on Global music market grew by 18.5% in 2021, driven by paid subscription streaming
Does anyone know if this separates out listening figures for different content on popular streaming platforms? This growth lines up suspiciously with Joe Rogan moving to Spotify.
dataduck··on Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times
> For people to stop calling it "cancel culture" whenever they face reasonable consequences for actions they take that harm others would be a good start.

What about people facing unreasonable consequences for actions that don't harm others?

dataduck··on The case for induction cooking
> The smoking point is not a problem

Could not disagree more. Olive oil will be spewing smoke and changing flavour well before you get to a sensible temperature for shallow or stir frying. It is very tasty and apparently quite good for you, so it's a great choice for low-temperature cooking, but anywhere smoking point is important, olive oil is not what you're looking for.

dataduck··on Why not hire part-time developers?
As much as I would love to work part-time, there's a good reason for a company to avoid this: co-ordination costs scale quadratically. Yes, good management practices can help mitigate this, but I'm sure we're all aware of how adding extra people to a team doesn't scale its productivity proportionally, and I'm convinced this is at least part of the picture.

That said, if the co-ordination costs are not prohibitive and such an arrangement allows you to get better talent than you'd otherwise have access to, it might still be a good deal. For a small team that needs a small amount of high-level expertise, but doesn't have enough for such a person to do all day, this could be the best option.

dataduck··on We sound like idiots when we talk about technical debt
The issue is with non-technical people who see that the hacked together mess of a proof of concept "works" and insist that you can just build straight on top of that without any work to make it into an actual working codebase.
dataduck··on No Place to Hide – U.K. campaign against end-to-encryption encryption
Does anyone know of an organised resistance to this?
dataduck··on Activision Blizzard pushes out dozens of employees over workplace misconduct
> indie and solo developers flooding Steam with mostly low-quality games with a few gems...making it extremely difficult to get noticed

An aside: I know this is a common opinion but it doesn't really mesh with my experience as a player. Quite the opposite in fact - it's not the low-quality Steam games that make it difficult to get noticed, but the overwhelming number of real gems. There have been so many truly excellent indie games in recent years (Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, FTL, Factorio, Hades, Rimworld, Devil Daggers...) that I haven't gotten round to playing all the obvious must-play indie games I want to, let alone going looking for more. Either way, though, from an indie dev's perspective, it must be pretty difficult to get noticed.

dataduck··on Ted Nordhouse: How green activists mislead and hold back progress
Paywall averted, thanks! Mods, is there any way of getting this link into the top level post? I assume the paywall is the reason it's been flagged.
dataduck··on Sid Meier and the meaning of ‘Civilization’
I don't even think there needs to be more than one "technique" - think of all the authors that are worse without an editor. It's about not having any pushback, and missing your blind spots or getting high on your own supply.
dataduck··on Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable
Perhaps, but unfortunately #1 is more realistic.
dataduck··on How to Work Hard
Chris Williamson's video on this is really touching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbgkMhio3jY

dataduck··on How to Be a Stoic (2016)
That speaks volumes about the people who write the dictionaries.
dataduck··on Magic Wormhole: Get things from one computer to another, safely
I'm sure this is a noobish question, I don't deal with this sort of operation that often. Can anyone help me understand when you would use this or croc instead of scp?
dataduck··on Positions chess engines don't understand
Nice playlist! Have you written about your process anywhere? I'm sure there are a lot of people who would love to follow in your footsteps here.
dataduck··on Audacity: Actions we propose to take on PR 835
Subnautica had this in early access: a "feedback" function where you chose either a smiley or sad face, filled in a free text field, and one click sent it to the devs. From what I hear this worked pretty well.
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