pfarrell

Don’t forget your investors and your board.

It was already tried in the US. The agreed upon results were that humans want alcohol and the downstream effects made society worse e.g. increase in alcohol consumption, empowering organized crime and corrupting the police.

“New Kids on the Blech” is spot on.

Thanks for sharing your work. I too have the problems you’re attempting to address. Makes me think of LabView (which I would recommend checking out for inspiration if you’re unaware of it).

Yeah, that original iPhone launch keynote is something I like to watch every so often. It really emphasized we’re only doing this because we see what’s wrong with smartphones and this is our vision. They didn’t go “we made the best stylus you can have”.

That’s what I was trying to express. We implemented the features that were unique and interesting too late. We should have led with them and build some compelling demos

Yeah that’s pretty much what happened. What I was thinking was we over estimated what the table stakes were. We were building a collaborative SQL editor aka notebooks. We spent way too much time getting it working with different dbs instead of focusing on a couple and building the things that actually made us stand out. A single customer wouldn’t really care about all the dbs we could talk to that were the one she was using.

I learned something similar founding a startup. If I could do it again, I would have aggressively avoided pursuing the table stakes feature in our space. Instead we should have done the minimal amount to be comfortable that our architecture could support the enterprisey things. We should have then concentrated everything on something that would set us apart, something we could demo and get a “wow… I see where this could go” instead of something like “oh this is just a clone of x”.

I’ve had this same thought but was unsure what the licensing for the data would be.

I have a daily updated dataset that has the HN data split out by months. I've published it on my web page, but it’s served from my home server so I don’t want to link to it directly. Each month is about 30mb of compressed csv. I’ve wanted to torrent it, but don’t know how to get enough seeders since each month will produce a new torrent file (unless I’m mistaken). If you’re interested, send me a message. My email is mrpatfarrell. Use gmail for the domain.

A few are dated but number 74 is one I think about a lot when programming.

  Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?

Important to remember this was written in the early ‘80’s at the end of Perlis’s long career. For most of these to stay relevant and humorous 50 years later is pretty impressive.

If you are distributing software to an audience who want to use your thing without having to build it, then something like this is much more appealing than virtualenv.

And not every optimization is worth the effort.

Let’s not forget sl

Makes me think about Dijkstra being horrified to learn that the US was sending astronauts into space using unproven computer code [0]. Eventually, we'll have programmers trusting the AI generated code as much as we trust compiler generated code. Sometimes I think this will be the evolution of programming (like binary to assembler to compiled to interpreted to generated)... Other times I think about how we've grown used to buggier and buggier code and yet we press on.

0: https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/translating-dijakstra.html

There’s a neat documentary from the late 1970’s, “Farewell etaoin shrdlu”. It’s about the final day the New York Times was printed using their linotype machines.

https://youtu.be/1MGjFKs9bnU

I went through it at the beginning of the year. In the end, a cold inbound from a recruiter for a leadership position that I wasn’t right for led to her referring me to another recruiter with something that was perfect. The point? Work every angle and treat looking for a job as your full time job.

You only have to find one gig, so don’t get sucked into self-pity endlessly focusing on everyone who’s having trouble, when it happens, have something constructive to divert you.

If you’re going for remote work, expect that the whole process will take longer and the same rules won’t apply. The candidate pool is vast and you need to stand out. You need to apply early, when the position is posted.

Realize your resume is likely being parsed by software before it’s even screened by HR. If you can get your resume directly to a hiring manager, do that. Otherwise consider feeding your resume through various parsers to see how it looks to algorithms. Cover letters that are written to the exact specs of the job as posted can’t hurt.

I look at videos like these as gateways to get someone excited about a subject, not as scholarly works. What you say is good to keep in mind on any video. You can’t get the full depth of anything complicated in 30 minutes, but it can make you want to learn more.

Veritasium has an excellent video explaining the proof and the historical context.

https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo

Without any context or followup, this seems like old news that doesn't need to be rehashed on the front page today. This event pre-dates the Microsoft purchase of Github.

I was wrong, there was a very light grey close button X at the top right, but I definitely got a timelagged interrupt to sign to read more modal on Firefox on Linux.

I was wrong, there was a very light grey close button X at the top right, but I definitely got a timelagged interrupt to sign to read more modal on Firefox on Linux.

And you have to sign up for a newsletter to read more than 20% of the article.

A friend of mine had some content reach the front page maybe 6 months ago. I don't know this for 100%, but I think for cool projects that dang thinks are of interest to the community, he will post them to the front page manually some time after the original post date when (speculation here) the front page needs some interesting content. When something like this happened to him, my friend's post date got reset, but the votes and comments it may have received while it was waiting remained. This might explain the instant votes mentioned.

Nice little project, I'm glad to have seen it. Music generation stuff is always of interest to me.

edit: Saw this on another thread. Seems to line up with what I was talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308

At the bottom, in the company contacts section...

  Oracle Corporation Mark Benioff: (415) 506-7000

Maybe I should take that guy out to lunch.

I considered buying a pinball machine in my 20's. An older, wiser guy I knew told me,

  "Do you like working on small gadgets and tinkering with lots of rubber bands and motors and solenoids?"  
  "Not really, but I love playing pinball."
  "Don't buy a pinball machine."  

Now that I've got a basement and am reasonably stable, the itch is coming back.

My takeaway is that Sussman is looking at his field after a lifetime of contribution. He's looking for signposts on where we can go next. He's not valuing one over the other, but looking at the brain and saying, "Here's something that exists that's operating on problems in a way we can't begin to approach using current software/hardware techniques". He sees some hints available to us in the noise reduction things he talks about at the end. In that way, the talk is more him challenging the audience to question our approaches and implied constraints rather than him trying to present us with an answer. It's one of my favorite videos (the way too loud HI at the beginning, notwithstanding).

It’s Hadoop all over again. Send the code to the data. To be clear, I think that’s an excellent idea and good to see it coming backs again.

William Gibson wrote about similar stuff in various stories in the collection “Burning Chrome” and in Neuromancer. IIRC, there was an elite hacker whose mind had been saved in ROM, the Dixie Construct, I think. It was helping with a job. It’s reward if they succeeded? It wanted to be erased. Not really a spoiler, just a detail that I was reminded of by this discussion.

As far as Joyce goes, I haven't read Ulysses. Dubliners, however was very approachable and enjoyable. It's is a collection of descriptive short stories of people in turn of the century Ireland. The final story, "The Dead" is haunting.