redsymbol

It currently only supports Python 3.11. That is a big reason.

There is another big difference: natural languages have ambiguity baked in. If a programming language has any ambiguity in how it can be parsed, that is rightly considered a major bug. But it's almost a feature of natural languages, allowing poetry, innuendo, and other nuanced forms of communication.

I used to regularly go to my local Taco Bell, but stopped going after they rolled this out. Not mad at them or anything, it was just sometimes a frustrating experience, and overall I was not sure how I felt about it: it's more impersonal, I wondered if it meant less jobs available in my local community, etc. So without making a conscious decision, I just stopped going.

I wonder how this has affected sales and net profit at their locations using AI in this way.

There may be something I do not understand about LLMs. But it seems it is more correct to say LLMs are chaotic - in the mathematical sense of sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

The only actual nondeterminism is deliberately injected. E.g. the temperature parameter. Without that, it is deterministic but chaotic. This is the case both in training LLMs, and in using the trained models.

If I missed something, someone point it out please.

Zoom has been driving me nuts with this lately. I have to reauth with OTP 3 times a day, while logging in on the same computer on the same LAN with the same browser. I spend over $1500 a year with Zoom, and this issue is seriously making me think about how I can migrate to something else.

Different business models have different capitalization requirements; some (e.g. a grocery store chain) are nearly impossible to rapidly scale without massive outside investment.

If a business model has (a) a high enough gross margin, and (b) good-enough intrinsic economies of scale, then by the time it reaches several $100k in revenue, there is a good chance it will be crystal clear how to scale up 7 and then 8 figures. And you will be sitting on a big enough pile of cash that there is no need to take outside funding to implement that. Many B2B SaaS business models in particular can find themselves in this excellent situation.

You can still take outside funding; after all, a growing business at that point is attractive to outside investors. But then it becomes a choice about growth rate in exchange for keeping equity and strategic control. I decided in my case it was completely unnecessary, so I am not doing it.

"Which one is easy?"

None of them.

I am sure you are an industrious hard worker. And to do this successfully, you need to expand your determination, resourcefulness, and sheer visceral grit far beyond what you have ever done before.

It is not easy. AND, you can do it, if you decide to.

Allow me to advise you: for each of these three options, write out all steps in the process of building an MVP through that method. As much detail as you can. Get to the point where you can imagine being successful using ANY of them. Then you will have clarity to choose.

And then: follow it to the end, regardless of what it asks of you. Then you will change your HN username. You will see yourself as a true entrepreneur; not because you want to be one, but because you KNOW you are.

Best of luck building your MVP. Keep at it, and you will be successful.

(Source: I am an entrepreneur who bootstrapped my company to 6-figs revenue while retaining 100% equity, expecting to break 7-figs in 2022, and believe I will reach 8 figs by 2023 or earlier.)

Those people having children now are creating remarkable wealth for themselves in the future.

Yes. Ars the publication is great, consistently producing excellent content. But somehow its community has become disturbing.

(Not just for this article or topic; pick any not-purely-technical Ars article, and you'll find upvoted comments like on this one.)

I am speaking more generally than this specific article or topic.

Yep. I have loved Ars for years. But its community has taken a dark turn.

Would not characterize it this way. I mainly use Zapier for marketing automation tasks, as do quite a few other people - regardless of whether that is what it is "aimed" at, marketing is a major use case for zapier in practice.

Pushing something into a spreadsheet is certainly a widely used zapier idiom. In 2021, it is capable of far more complex tasks, though.

Thanks, this is the exact kind of intel I was looking for. Especially that they have a API connector and REST API - I was betting they DID have that, as it's a moderately easy thing for them to ad that makes custom extensions possible.

(With Zapier, I have used their so-called "Webhook" connector for that - set up an endpoint on my webapp that accepts a POST with a JSON payload, then make a zap that send data there in response to some trigger.)

This would be my concern also, same as with other tools like repl.it, etc. But it could still be useful for a prototyping phase. (Potentially. I have not used it.)

Some people here are giving examples of using Bubble a few years ago, and found it too limited to be useful. Have any developers here used it recently?

When I first looked at Zapier about 2.5 years ago, as a developer I found it limiting and just not useful compared to writing custom webhooks that I sometimes glued together with cron jobs, etc. But since late last year, Zapier has matured so much I am able to use it for almost every integration I need. It has probably saved me ~100 hours of development time in the past year alone.

I wonder if Bubble might have passed a similar threshold of utility, so that it is useful even to people who DO have good coding skills.

First, don't assume something is a shortcoming in their mind unless they indicate it. Odds are HIGH you are being nitpicky about things that are just not a big deal to them.

Second, develop a more positive focus.

More specifically: get out of your head about some ideal that may never be real. Look at the product in terms of what it can actually do, NOW, and the benefits people will get from it, NOW.

Focus on how it will help them, in its current form, and communicate that.

When you do this, it is easy to be up front about what it will NOT do. In fact, in most of my sales calls, there is at least one point where the prospect expresses an expectation that it will do something for them that it doesn't. I immediately, directly, almost forcefully call that out. "Let me clarify, it will not do X. That is not what it is for. It will instead do Y for you, which lets you do Z." (This is just me being my normal, brutally-honest self, but from a sales-tactic perspective it builds credibility and trust.)

Focus on how the product can benefit them, in your thinking and your communication, and then it's easy to be up front about the rest. Otherwise you can never help people who need what you are selling more than they need that money.

I am a career software engineer who successfully learned how to sell. Specifically, high-ticket ($3k-5k) B2C sales. Starting from having absolutely no sales skills in December 2019, I managed to reach a close rate of close to near 50% for well-qualified leads by early this year.

There is a great deal of advice already in this thread. If you have any specific questions, ask and I will answer if I can.

This is exactly what we do. It is like having a locally run staging environment, and is really great. Can exactly test things like http server configuration, cron jobs, multiple nodes (vagrant vms) coordinating with each other, etc.

Reading some of your replies, you are good at coming up with reasons you cannot be successful.

A friendly suggestion: this attitude may be holding you back more than you realized before now.

What to do instead, is repeatedly ask yourself: "how can I do this?"

Apply this to many specific areas:

- How can I change my CV so it comes across differently?

- How can I begin a small startup without money or other resources?

- How can I move towards my goal without any new degree?

- How is my training in veterinary medicine an asset?

- How can I do medical ML for veterinary medicine?

- Et cetera...

You have a choice now to dig into your heels and say to yourself reasons why none of what I say above will work, and why your situation is truly and utterly hopeless.

OR you can say different things to yourself, maybe get a different result.

You might be surprised at how many clients continue to approach you even as your rates increase. In fact, there have been many examples in which people in your situation got MORE offers for work as they increased their rates - apparently it can make you appear higher quality ("they must be great if they charge this much!")

That may or may not happen in your case, but it is worth testing - especially because that higher income will make it MUCH MUCH easier to grow your team.

Best of luck!

If you are getting more job requests than you can handle, have you considered just raising your rates? Increase it by 10% every few weeks, for example, until you are not having to turn away good jobs. You can always decrease again if you overshoot.

Important to realize glyph's twitter followers are not representative of all Python users.

In general, people who follow him are going to be more "into" Python than someone who just uses it to get their job done, and thus more likely to use optional tooling with a large overhead like mypy.

That will skew the results in favor of mypy in this poll. Though the poll getting on the HN front page will balance that somewhat.

A good solution might be an "exponential back-off" temporary ban.

In this, an open-source project adopts a policy that the mental health and wellbeing of its developers is a priority, and in particular abusive language from end users is not accepted. Specifically, if a user communicates with such negativity (e.g. commenting this way on a github issue), two things happen:

1) That comment is deleted

2) That user is prohibited from posting on this project's issues for 30 days.

That's for the first offense. If, after 30 days, the user does something like this again, they are temporarily banned for 60 days. And then 120.

You get the idea.

If you don't like 30 days as a base, then it can be 24 hours, or 90 days, or whatever the project decides is appropriate. Regardless of these or other parameters, this strikes a balance between accepting needed feedback from the community, and "canceling" someone from contributing useful feedback in the future.

In fact, I bet you this will have a role in conditioning certain people to communicate in more nurturing and kind ways. A permaban would likely NOT do that, but a short temporary ban that increases on repeat offenses probably will.

I am not sure if Github supports this already, or provides some mechanism that could be used by the project maintainers to manually implement it...

But if you are developing on any platform where end users sometimes communicate toxically with volunteer developers just trying to make the world a better place, maybe this idea is worth considering.

You are thinking about it wrong.

This is not just "a good read". And what is my favorite part does not matter.

Because you don't even know how to ask the right questions yet. Think back before you learned anything about coding; back then, how could you have asked anything but naive questions about how you built Hacky? You're in that situation now, with marketing.

Read this book with the intention of letting it rewire your fundamental assumptions about what marketing is and how it works. If you do that, you will finish a very different person than when you started.

Before you do anything else, read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1484825985

Don't rush through it. Read slowly, if needed, to get full understanding.

Source: I'm a software engineer whose marketing skills have so far generated multiple 6 figures in pretax profit, closing on 7.

Aaaand now I feel the sudden urge to get away from this screen and go walk through some trees. I'll see ya all later.

All the time.

The old joke is about us looking at code we wrote six months ago, and being horrified at what we see. And I've had more than my share of that.

But what's ALSO happened, many times, is I look at old code I wrote... and I'm IMPRESSED. Just blown away by the beautiful elegance and power of the abstractions I came up with, the sheer intelligence of the approach, the insight and lucidity oozing from the code.

"Wow, I wrote THAT?!" Because I was deep in a coding trance when I wrote it. So deep "in the zone", that when I come out, it's not easy to recapture where I was. Not even the next day, and certainly not months later.

Interesting how it works!

It's interesting how his personality traits affect the discourse around this. Like this quote from the close of the article:

“I’m disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” [Wolfram] grumbles. “I deserve better.”

And maybe that's actually true. Of course, many will find this manner of speech pushes our buttons; coming across as arrogant, megalomaniacal, almost anti-scientific-process.

But that has NOTHING do to with whether this theory is correct or not. When the most obnoxious person you can imagine says 2 + 2 = 4, that doesn't change the fact that 2 + 2 actually does equal 4.

(Of course, if they claim 2 + 2 = 5, their being obnoxious doesn't make that true either.)

Powerful Python | Global | REMOTE | https://powerfulpython.com

Python Developers: Do you have a PASSION for teaching? For pushing others to their greatest potential?

Powerful Python teaches IT professionals how to successfully write high-quality software in Python.

Our vision is "The Python 1%"... helping our clients reach the top 1% level of developers on the PLANET, with the most important language in the history.

We do not teach beginners; our students are already in the workforce. Our "secret" is

1) World-class communication skills

2) Applied cognitive psychology

3) Relentless devotion to excellence in software engineering

We'll train you in #1 and #2. You bring #3.

Requirements:

1) Fluent written & spoken English. You don't have to be a native, but you must be close.

2) Experience writing complex software systems in real-world production environments, under budget and/or time pressure.

3) Experience teaching or public speaking

We're a distributed company based in the USA with global ambitions. Roles:

1) Half-time mentor/trainer

2) Staff developer + trainer. Just like #1, except you're also working half time developing software for Powerful Python

For #1, we expect that you are regularly writing significant code. We don't need people who don't practice what they're teaching.

This is NOT for everyone. Is it for you?

If so, send CV/resume to service@powerfulpython.com with the subject "Python Trainer - <your name>".

As an entrepreneur, with a company that relies on paid advertising, this is a FANTASTIC time. Our cost per lead has cut in half. And I just hired three people last week, to capitalize on the higher lead flow.

I'm sure it depends on the business sector. But for any company that can operate in this environment, this is the time to spend MORE on ads, not less.