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gibrown

398 karma · joined December 6, 2012

Data Wrangler at Automattic

greg.blog

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gibrown··on Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash
> The work was being done, for free, by passionate people.

The person leading it stepped down. Matt then stopped the initiative presumably because it didn't seem worth picking someone new.

gibrown··on A $1k Wheelchair
Ya, I was expecting to see something not very impressive at that link, but was pleasantly surprised. My chair is about $7k and while this one doesn't look like it would work for me, it is definitely much better than the cheap hospital chairs.
gibrown··on WP Engine sent “cease and desist” letter to Automattic
No need to wonder: https://automattic.com/board/
gibrown··on WP21
This isn't true at all. The vacation policy is "Our time off policy is short: take the time that you need" and "There is no minimum or maximum, but we encourage you to take at least 25 days of time off per year".
gibrown··on Want to get started with LLMs? Here's what you need to know
Appreciate that you wrote this up. As someone just wrapping up a sabbatical where I have ignored a lot of what is going on this looks helpful. Thanks!
gibrown··on Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
A bot scraping content will tend to go deep into the archives and hit all content systematically. Caching isn't as effective if you hit everything whereas real users will tend to hit the same content over and over again.

It can add nontrivial load.

gibrown··on RedPajama: Reproduction of LLaMA with friendly license
Ya seems like it’s this and that’s an awesome name!
gibrown··on Grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump
Sounds like there are 34 counts of falsifying business records so it is probably more than just that one payoff.
gibrown··on Ask HN: Math books that made you significantly better at math?
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz

Chaos theory and deterministic systems are a fascinating vantage point for thinking about the dynamics of large computer systems. Thinking of them as stochastic systems is sometimes useful, but most of the systems are actually just operating in unstable periodic processes which are much closer to being a chaotic system rather than a stochastic system. This influences how I think about testing and debugging large distributed systems.

I will say, I'm not sure I could have learned it well without a class and a good professor. The author has a number of books though and is a professor at Cornell.

gibrown··on GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing
And there is a list right?

https://github.com/search?q=license%3Acc0-1.0&type=Repositor...

All repos with a particular license.

gibrown··on Exoskeletons qualify for direct disability compensation in Germany
I think you are seriously overestimating the utility of these right now. It is not just about cost, they are more limited than wheelchairs in many ways.
gibrown··on I tricked myself into working out 3 times per week
This is basically https://www.beeminder.com/

(Started by friends)

gibrown··on Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?
In my experience (11 years fully remote/distributed growing from 90 to 2000 employees) my first impression is it sounds like you’re doing too much synchronous. Async is so efficient.

My team’s current systems: - Most deep discussions happen on blog posts including project status. We use (and built) https://wordpress.com/p2/. We don’t use email. - Start of week everyone prompted to post what they did last week and what they plan to do this week. Also have a kinda fun ice breaker question that is easy (e.g avoid asking about favorites) and sometimes generates discussion. Last week was “Pick an olympic sport to represent your life.” - Daily Slack prompt to give folks a place to report on yesterday/today. The most important thing is how people feel though. “Pick a red/yellow/green emoji for your status” and “What feels risky or a blocker?”. Create space for feelings. - weekly team meeting is then about discussions and never about status. How do we solve X? How do we feel about Y? - debugging and such does occur in Slack but longer discussions are on blog posts/comments and so can be long. - I do 1-1s weekly for new folks and bi-weekly for longer term folks. Encourage sync 1-1s between the team also.

A lot of the prompts can be automated. I dont consider them mandatory, if you get them right then folks will be happy to do them because they feel the utility of them.

https://ma.tt/2020/04/five-levels-of-autonomy/ Is a good read too.

Iterating is very important though (which you are doing yay!), I’ve tried lots of different cadences/systems but the above is the core of what my team has used for 3-4 years now and I’m pretty happy with it. I still try to make sure we reconsider if we want to experiment with something new every few months. Partly why I wrote this long comment is I’m thinking if there is anything to tweak.

gibrown··on Wikipedia RFC to stop accepting cryptocurrencies passes by majority vote
Agree that this is an interesting line of discussion. I think you missed a few options of why USD are more democratic. You can also: - run for office - organize people politically

The open source point is important, but any individual crypto seems very hard to change once it is in place. Feels like it assumes you can predict how it will be used and what the consequences will be. The law isn’t easy to change but there is a clearly defined abs democratic process for doing so (assuming you are in a democracy).

gibrown··on DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
> they are explicitly adding bias here.

All search engines are explicitly biased. That is the point, they generate a ranking of results. Heck even how you tokenize text is an explicit bias of what you match against.

gibrown··on DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
It seems more naive to think search algorithms are ever "unbiased". The whole point is to find something by ranking them and applying a bias.
gibrown··on DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
I kinda doubt the US govt cares about DDG.

Also, the US/UK gov is not an entirely unreasonable starting point for a list. There are also lots of academic researchers, media, etc. Better to apply some standards than none at all. I'm sure whatever list they have is not perfect, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have one.

gibrown··on DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
The people writing the search algorithms decide, just like they decide what a "good" algorithm is.
gibrown··on DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”
Exactly. Every search algorithm requires making judgements about how and what to rank. Explicitly marking sites as "disinformation"/"spam"/"seo" is exactly a part of building a good global web search.
gibrown··on Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy
> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?

Martin Luther King.

gibrown··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2021)
Tumblr/Automattic (Tumblr, WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce) | Search Engineer | Full Time | REMOTE (Planet Earth) We're a distributed company with employees in 80+ countries. Tumblr launched in 2007 with the belief that people need a place to say what they want, be who they want, and connect over what they love. We continue to build out Tumblr as a platform for free expression, individuality, and human connection.

Help us improve our search and recommendations systems to make the web a better place.

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/search-engineer-tumblr-c...

Read about our hiring process (https://automattic.com/work-with-us/how-we-hire-developers/) and the trial project (https://automattic.com/what-to-expect-during-a-trial/)

gibrown··on GoDaddy is cutting off Texas Right to Life’s abortion ‘whistleblowing’ website
Everything you just said also applies to amputating a limb. Or cutting out a cyst. Those seem like much closer analogies than a person in a coma.
gibrown··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2021)
Tumblr/Automattic (Tumblr, WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce) | Search Engineer | Full Time | REMOTE (Planet Earth) We're a distributed company with employees in 80+ countries. Tumblr launched in 2007 with the belief that people need a place to say what they want, be who they want, and connect over what they love. We continue to build out Tumblr as a platform for free expression, individuality, and human connection.

Help us improve our search and recommendations systems to make the web a better place.

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/search-engineer-tumblr-c...

Read about our hiring process (https://automattic.com/work-with-us/how-we-hire-developers/) and the trial project (https://automattic.com/what-to-expect-during-a-trial/)

gibrown··on Moderna Is About to Begin Trials for HIV Vaccine
> Not sure exactly what you mean with social conservatism

"This is also why social conservatives don't like it when scientific progress makes sex safer or better. Sex outside of their ideal scenario (in marriage, at the husband's wish, for reproduction) should be punished, and steps to mitigate that punishment (STD prevention, pregnancy prevention) should be discouraged or lambasted as immoral."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/16/conser...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/why-the-pol...

gibrown··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2021)
Tumblr/Automattic (Tumblr, WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce) | Search Engineer | Full Time | REMOTE (Planet Earth) We're a distributed company with employees in 80+ countries. Tumblr launched in 2007 with the belief that people need a place to say what they want, be who they want, and connect over what they love. We continue to build out Tumblr as a platform for free expression, individuality, and human connection.

Help us improve our search and recommendations systems to make the web a better place.

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/search-engineer-tumblr-c...

Read about our hiring process (https://automattic.com/work-with-us/how-we-hire-developers/) and the trial project (https://automattic.com/what-to-expect-during-a-trial/)

gibrown··on A 3°C world has no safe place
It is already happening. Just searching a bit…

Katrina displaced 1-1.5m immediately and about 200k never returned.

The upper estimates for 2050 is 1.2 billion displaced world wide.

gibrown··on ‘Everyone is dying’: Myanmar on the brink of decimation
Entirely speculation, but one reason I can imagine is that if everyone is sick at the same time then even basic nursing is not possible, and often just getting fluids into someone makes a giant difference. Has there been a place/time during the pandemic where millions got infected at once in a high density, poorer country?
gibrown··on TFTC (TIE Fighter Total Conversion) v1.0
omg omg omg

I played this so much on my pentium 100mhz as a teen. I think I broke multiple joysticks dodging xwings. My biggest concern is that it won’t live up to the memories I still have. I think I need to buy a joystick. I have much more disposable income and a lot less time… my six year old isn’t too young to join the Empire right?

gibrown··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2021)
Tumblr/Automattic (Tumblr, WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce) | Search Engineer | Full Time | REMOTE (Planet Earth)

We're a distributed company with employees in 80+ countries. Tumblr launched in 2007 with the belief that people need a place to say what they want, be who they want, and connect over what they love. We continue to build out Tumblr as a platform for free expression, individuality, and human connection.

Help us improve our search and recommendations systems to make the web a better place.

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/search-engineer-tumblr-c...

Read about our hiring process (https://automattic.com/work-with-us/how-we-hire-developers/) and the trial project (https://automattic.com/what-to-expect-during-a-trial/)

gibrown··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)
Tumblr/Automattic (Tumblr, WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce) | Search Engineer | Full Time | REMOTE (Planet Earth) We're a distributed company with employees in 80+ countries. Tumblr launched in 2007 with the belief that people need a place to say what they want, be who they want, and connect over what they love. We continue to build out Tumblr as a platform for free expression, individuality, and human connection.

Help us improve our search and recommendations systems to make the web a better place.

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/search-engineer-tumblr-c...

Read about our hiring process (https://automattic.com/work-with-us/how-we-hire-developers/) and the trial project (https://automattic.com/what-to-expect-during-a-trial/)

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