koliber

Most small companies don’t need AI to be more efficient. They need Excel.

I’ve already had two cases where a friend asked me to show them how AI can help them run their company better. In each case it turned out that they needed Excel. Specifically an excel export from one system, some bulk editing, and an excel import into another system.

(I understand the satire in this article but this is a serious post)

A long time ago a vast majority of people on earth were farmers. They used relatively simple tools like scathes.

Over a few centuries better tools and technology made it so that <5% of the population in rich countries are farmers. They use tools like million dollar harvesters.

Is it like CSS for HTML?

After looking at it for 1 minute, it seems that this is to markdown what CSS is to HTML.

How accurate is that?

There was a time when there were no separate names for blue and green in the Japanese language. Some languages right now have concepts of fundamental colors like navy blue and light blue, where English rolls it into a single "blue". Naming colors is highly cultural and changes over time. The idea that colors have boundaries is fascinating from both psychological as well as linguistic perspectives.

The framing seems stupid if you take the naive perspective that your language's way of dividing colors is the only valid one. Exercises like this and discussions that follow help expand perspectives.

Correct. Order-of-magnitude-wise, it's roughly the same as the alternatives.

In the context of writing a new service for a new company, you should not spend one second thinking about whether your technical choices will allow you to serve 100,000 requests per second, or 150,000 requests per second. If you are, you are focusing on the wrong thing. If you get to 1,000 requests per second with a real paying client base you already achieved more than most dream of.

On the other hand, if you are optimizing a mature distributed low-latency equity trading system that is consuming ten's of thousands of market data ticks per second, a 50% improvement in performance on a 20 machine cluster might turn into some real $$$ savings. But that's not what this article is about.

postgres is great and is also a good default choice. It needs a bit more setup than sqlite. Unless I need a capability that postgres provides, I go with sqlite. It just works.

Apple should build this, and start giving away free Macs subsidized by idle usage.

Communicating with an attorney is protected by privilege. In this case it seems they ruled that researching your case is not protected by privilege.

What about drafting communications with an attorney? Is a draft email that has not yet been sent protected? What about a Word doc containing a draft of an email? What about a Google search for “how do I spell amfeetamine?” that is part of your process of drafting your communication with your lawyer?

The reality is that things will be blazing fast in any language if you save things by PK in HashMaps.

Backups are super-simple as well.

I'm also a convert.

I love this article as it shows how fast computers really are.

There is one conclusion that I do not agree with. Near the end, the author lists cases where you will outgrow flat files. He then says that "None of these constraints apply to a lot of applications."

One of the constraints is "Multiple processes need to write at the same time." It turns out many early stage products need crons and message queues that execute on a separate worker. These multiple processes often need to write at the same time. You could finagle it so that the main server is the only one writing, but you'd introduce architectural complexity.

So while from the pure scale perspective I agree with the author, if you take a wider perspective, it's best to go with a database. And sqlite is a very sane choice.

If you need scale, cache the most often accessed data in memory and you have the best of both worlds.

My winning combo is sqlite + in-memory cache.

A while back, at a company I used to work at, we did intros of new hires. This was one of the questions. One person shared that they do composting and worm farming. That was memorable. Sharing here since it's about as interesting and niche as I can imagine.

Tyranny of majority is a thing. It's something mature democracies are aware of and have the ability to defend against.

We're in an interesting spot here and the tension is tangible.

I have a friend whose grandma wrote a book about their family. She printed 50 or so copies of it. Not a chart-topping best seller, but each one is a cherished collector's item.

Right now, my wife and I are sticking to annual photo albums. They're already fun to flip through and we're not even that old yet.

> human will instantly answer "I don't know" instead of yelling a random number.

Seems that you never worked with Accenture consultants?

haha. No, actual human here.

My point is that some people find this stuff valuable. You're not the target audience.

Most people don’t read Aristotle. If thousands of wannabe philosophers can paraphrase some of his ideas and make them accessible to the masses, that’s a net plus. If they can stroke their vanity along the way, even more people win.

It’s much better than writing bitter diatribes.

Never had a deepfake.

I am recruiting in Poland, they say that they're Polish, have very Polish names, but they are clearly not Polish and not in Poland.

It's easy enough to spot their resume's if you know what you're looking for. If you're interested, I can share, but email me (email is in my HN profile).

I’ve had the call terminate with such candidates after frankly stating that they are from North Korea and lying about everything. The person in front of the camera would try to maneuver out of it and then the call ended as if someone pulled the plug behind the scenes. I’ve built some pretty decent heuristics to identify them before wasting time on interviews.

Picking the starting point is very important. "optimization" is the process of going from that starting point to a more performant point.

If you don't know enough to pick good starting points you probably won't know enough to optimize well. So don't optimize prematurely.

If you are experienced enough to pick good starting points, still don't optimize prematurely.

If you see a bad starting point picked by someone else, by all means, point it out if it will be problematic now or in the foreseeable future, because that's a bug.

Most of the time things will work as they are supposed to and arbitrage will work as a damper. Every once in a while you'll get a self-reinforcing loop and then it will work as an a run-away amplifier.

Yeah, hiring at entry level is great, because there are so many things that you don't need to check. It's WYSYWIG - what you see is what you get.

That's why a screening is needed. If people lie, it won't make me lower my standards.

I'm dealing with this all the time in recruitment. It can be done. People lie all the time or don't read the requirements. You need a way for the ones who really do know how to do the thing you need to demonstrate it to you.

Have you ever been in a situation where you had to hire someone to help you with something? Would you really follow your own advice? Your advice does not make sense for carpenters, cooks, or drivers. Why should it make sense for programmers?

Sometimes you can pay someone who has done this before, and you're both happy. The person is happy that their experience helps them get a job. The company is happy that you get someone with the needed experience.

If I want to hire a driver, I can train someone who does not know how to drive, or hire someone who has experience as a driver. I can do either, but I'd prefer to do the latter in most cases.

I don't think I was clear.

There is a difference between knowing something, and believing it to be true.

I know that sometimes I feel good when I wake up. I know people say that drinking makes you feel not good when you wake up, sometimes.

It takes a bit of observation and some statistical sampling to connect those two together. Now I know it, and also believe it to be true.

Perhaps "aware" vs "aware that I am aware" was a bad way of phrasing it.

Being aware, and being aware that you are aware are very similar things that are subtly different.

I was aware that alcohol affects your next day, even a little. That's because people always say that alcohol is bad for you (surprise surprise). I heard this, so you could say that I was aware. I generally thought about this as "a hangover is bad for you." and was somewhat dismissive of the "even a single drink has a bad effect" mantra.

I did some experimenting, and slowly realized that even a single drink can indeed have an impact on the next day. It's not a hangover, but an impact that I could feel nonetheless. I needed to do some light stats and a lot more journaling to build this awareness. I am now aware that I am aware.

You seem exceptionally bright. Most people are not like this. This is why they are struggling.

It sounds like you have a job, right out of college, but you're griping about not getting promoted faster. People generally don't get promoted 9 months into a job.

I'm reading your post and I am genuinely impressed but what you claim to have done. At the same time I am confused about what you would like to achieve within the first year of your professional career. You seem to be doing quite well, even in this challenging environment.

It sucks from both sides.

I am on the interviewing and screening side and understand what you're saying. I also empathize with the people I routinely reject who don't understand why they were rejected. It's hard to see why you might not be a right fit for a role.

> it seems really unlikely to me anyone would want to do interviews without seriously intending to hire someone.

I keep seeing this accusation thrown around and like you, I have a hard time seeing this. On the flip side, looking at it from the eyes of many disenchanted candidates, I can see how a theory like this is appealing and self-reinforcing.

Be careful to make judgement calls like this.

I've been running the same job ad for 2 years now, as a recruiter for a big Canadian bank. I've been laughed at for having ridiculously unrealistic standards. I've been accused of running ghost ads.

I'm in the process of hiring the 13th person using this same job ad for new and existing teams that need a very particular type of engineer.