languagehacker

For folks who don't want to read a tome like The High Cost of Free Parking, give Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar a shot. It's a lot of the same content, but punchier with a lot fewer facts and figures making much the same point.

For folks interested in finite-state transducers and other kinds of tooling available, check out XFST (Xerox Finite-State Transducer), which has been used in computational linguistics applications for a good 20 years now.

I remember a Finnish researcher from PARC coming to one of my classes at UT to show how you can use FSTs for handling Finnish morphology, which is, on its face, quite a feat.

Reminds me of yo

Wow, I really hated this article. Thanks for the bad opinion, Paul.

The advice seems reasonably good but I needed to bail on the post because of the cartoons. The anime crossed with precious moments style of illustration is just too creepy and inserts a lot of doubt to me personally on the authoritativeness of the author.

Importing * is universally discouraged by most Python linters and best practice docs. You can always "import helium as h" if you're looking to type less.

This looks largely like common workarounds that most people will write using Python-based browser automation. Most of the time, we accept that those capabilities aren't there by default because they are not explicit enough and can result in bugs and undefined behavior even when the elements that we expect to be on the page are actually there.

Given the adage "explicit is better than implicit", I worry that a layer like this might create more trouble than it's worth for the sake of readability. When we get into the nitty-gritty of browser automation, it might just make it harder to debug than going straight to Selenium or Playwright.

"McKinsey is a very different firm today than when these matters first took place"

No they are most certainly not. Corruption is in McKinsey's DNA. Outside of the specific harms that McKinsey has caused across the country and across the world, management consulting groups in general have been utilized to sidestep legal protections against corporations within a shared industry colluding against each other. Companies like McKinsey, Bain, Accenture, etc., have been instrumental in the rapid increase of executive compensation, flat comp for workers compared to inflation, intentionally unsafe practices and corner-cutting to save money, and just generally creating as many negative externalities as possible in the name of feeding the beast that Milton Friedman created with his rhetoric about the primacy of the shareholder.

A good read on this topic is "When McKinsey Comes to Town" by Forsyth and Bogdanich. There's a whole chapter dedicated to the South African bribery scandal. Sagar was not just a bad apple -- the company itself is the rot.

Someone recently asked me if they could use an old Stack Overflow post for something like this -- technical English language learning. Cool name for it.

Coming from the Poetry world, I'm loving ruff and uv. It's awesome having one single binary to handle linting for both convention and format, and uv itself is amazingly fast.

I do miss being able to shell into an env, but it hasn't been a big deal because you can still run `uv run -- code .` to launch VSCode with the right Python interpreter.

It's surprising to me that the future toolchain for Python productivity is Rust, but the results are awesome.

Oh man, good to see you on here, dude!

Yes, extracting the real human-readable text from a Wiki was a lot harder than you'd expect.

There was also a question of investment. I think even with some early successes quantified with A/B tests and things like that, there just wasn't the executive or product buy-in to broaden the investment.

The licensing on that stuff is complicated, and I haven't looked at it in a while. It does allow you to take your toys and leave, but for those that don't, it would be simple enough to prevent ethical AI scrapers from extracting that content. That's all I mean by data moat in this context.

Sure, but think about something as low stakes as, "Does such-and-such a character from my favorite TV show have any siblings" vs. "Is it safe to consume XYZ"

Even with the great structured and semi-structured data that Wikis can provide with this like infoboxes and other sort of templates, there were definitely limitations to the tech nearly ten years ago. My experience back then is one of the reasons I'm super skeptical of the long-term value of the AI / LLM trend we're going through right now.

Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the wall. Despite the tremendous amount of information they have at their disposal, they never really saw themselves (or positioned themselves) as more than a low market cap media company. I spent a lot of time in the mid-teens trying to encourage them to be early on AI/NLP kind of stuff and use that to drive new product development. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Imagine the data moat they could have built and monetized, and all without needing to degrade the customer experience.

"Should we just fire all the people on strike at the ports" is how container shipping started in the first place

> childless Google employee

yikes

There's some cognitive dissonance to me about using Ayn Rand's words about open-source efforts. What seems to be missing from both forms of discourse is this nagging term "public good". That is, if you're doing what you're doing to make the world a better place, you wouldn't be so incentivized to keep score about who's benefiting more.

I don't disagree with the author's ideas about how to create an incentive structure that finds alternate means of benefiting those who have gone out of their way to contribute. I just think framing it the way he did comes across as a little pecuniary.

Stuff like this and CCRU is some of my favorite literary junk food.

There's an Instagram account called @cyborg.asm that famously matches up quotes from this text with Hajime Sorayama illustrations. Gotta love a good gimmick.

Super interesting, though I doubt they'll pay a bounty on something they've already fixed.

I was hoping this would be about using the metrics GitHub easily provides to figure out if people are doing their job or not. If it's solely up to a manager to come through with review feedback at this minute level of detail, then it's time to hire more senior people.

I'm currently reading "When McKinsey Comes to Town" and just finished "The Man Who Broke Capitalism" about Jack Welch and GE.

Quite a few authors have pointed out that the "financialization" of American businesses, with a focus less on innovation or investing in their workforce and more on massaging their numbers to meet shareholder expectations, has created a lot of short-term enrichment for the super-wealthy while absolutely destroying the middle class as we know it. This seems like more fuel for that fire.

I share this doc with the most promising people I get to work with.

When I worked at Lookout, Jeff Hodges shared this essay as a presentation, and ended it with a corollary: don't pretend that engineering isn't political. People that think that the code speaks for itself are missing out on important aspects of how to influence the way things are built and how to truly get results.

Ten years later, and there are few people who still so concisely understand the intersection of engineering leadership and those table-stakes capabilities we normally associate with SRE / DevOps.

Good post-mortems should provide ammo and action items to review existing business processes. If you don't have an advocate in your engineering organization who is working across departments to improve these processes, that may be a sign of organizational immaturity or dysfunction. No organizational function happens in a vacuum, and in the right company, collaboration can help influence the things that engineering doesn't directly control.

I know that it's not a real post-mortem, but this is the opposite of what a good post-mortem looks like.

It includes:

* Blaming the tools (and the author)

* Not focusing on facts in the timeline

* Not considering improvements

But that doesn't make for engaging content, right?

> * At $TIME we observed HTTP POST calls failing

> * At $TIME customers reported inability to make changes to ticket prices and promo codes

> * $PERSON took the following steps to debug...

> * Root cause: an update to a vendor library resulted in cascading failures to the site

> * 5 whys (which might include lack of defensive programming, the use of a CDN without a fixed version, etc. etc.)

> * Next steps: pin the CDN version or pull the dependency into the build, etc.

Actually, that still looks like a pretty good story to me without any of the associated mania.

Good point! My POV assumed some amount of revenue generation.

Did this guy just write a blog post about how he completely rewrote a functional feature to save $800?

In all seriousness, the devil is in the details around this kind of stuff, but I do worry that doing something not even clever, but just nonstandard, introduces a larger maintenance effort than necessary.

Interesting problem, and an interesting solution, but I'd probably rather just throw money at it until it gets to a scale that merits further bot prevention measures.

We say that open source is "coding in public", but we often omit that it's also being a professional in public. Even if they were well intentioned, it doesn't sound like Tim's actions were too professional. That kind of behavior can be damaging for a professional community in a lot of ways. Outside of giving the impression that the community is not welcoming to individuals of all backgrounds, it can expose actual legal entities to actual risk.

This doesn't seem like a one-time mistake, but rather a pattern of behavior that was measured and then acted upon -- likely after a series of warnings that took place behind closed doors.

The suspension is really too bad for everyone involved in the Python community, but I hope it can be a lesson for folks who have a hard time separating how they present themselves personally vs. professionally. Let's also hope that this doesn't result in the collateral damage we saw after the whole Donglegate fiasco. I'd like to think after ten years of stuff like this we've gotten a little bit better.

Something about the tone of this book gives me the "time cube" vibe.

Nobody "just" refactors their monolithic code into a new architecture.

Any sufficiently advanced organization with a microservices architecture has a platform team helping to standardize applications and build out shared tooling that's already being used across multiple services.

It seems like there's plenty of room for an architecture like this, but that maybe it's closer to what already exists in practice at the places where it will work, and doesn't exist at organizations where it won't work for good reason.

This is interesting. I'm wondering what compelled the author to use the division magic method for arguments instead of the more intuitive and commonly used approach to passing parameters.

"Hoisted on the petard of the our own decadence" seems to be a valid interpretation only if you think that the last 200 or so years of family structures in capitalist, Western nations is the only valid way of raising children and maintaining family bonds. This sort of thing reeks of the kind of chauvinism you only get from the echo chambers reverberating within the hallowed halls of places like the author's alma maters.

A big subtext of this article is that individuals with low socioeconomic status are incapable of making good decisions and must be strictly governed, and that the upper middle class is just as guilty as the absent fathers for the erosion the nuclear family structure.

I find the argument that folks with disposable income set a poor example for those of lesser means to be specious, pernicious, and divisive. It's the kind of argumentation that sets lower middle class conservatives up against upper middle class liberals so that they're too busy fighting a culture war to consider what new atrocity billionaires are getting away with behind their backs.