sohamsankaran

Yep, it's pretty clear they use IBM db2 on z/OS internally for some applications. Here's an example job posting: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Aqb9oU...

I think there's a place for alternate representations like these outside of proofs that need to be exhaustively machine-checkable. I have, for what it's worth, had far better experiences with Coq and the like than with mathematics in general.

For me, each of those text based representations is more clear, despite their divergence, than the symbolic version.

I have a lot of frustration with this notion of the "visually evident formal properties of the integral" -- I think the existing visual-symbolic paradigm of mathematical notation is intuitive to some subset of people, but that subset does not encompass everyone who could do mathematics at a high level, excluding those for whom some alternate, in this case more text-based, representation is more tractable.

This is not even true across subfields in mathematics -- there's a lot of context-specific notational overloading, and there is often inconsistent notation even within a single long paper.

I would pay a fairly large chunk of my income to someone working on this kind of alternate representation of mathematics full-time. Email me at soham [at] soh.am if you're interested.

SQLite is incredible, especially for embedded applications. It's one of those perfectly-scoped tiny pieces of software that consistently makes my heart sing.

Incredible -- was this under-the-desk database fairly recent or quite a while ago? I'd love to hear the story if you or someone else familiar with it is willing to share.

Fascinating. Are they intending to use this for core transactional workloads? How do they intend to deal with Mongo's (many) known consistency issues?

I am not a fan of this buzzword (and indeed buzzwords in general, the comment above was intending to make fun of HSBC IT for even failing at the buzzword game), but the notion of NewSQL was roughly to keep the relational model and consistency guarantees of traditional SQL databases, but also have horizontal scalability in line with NoSQL databases. DBs like VoltDB and Spanner come to mind as examples -- here are two relevant blog posts from those teams:

VoltDB: https://www.voltdb.com/blog/2016/09/nosql-vs-newsql-whats-di...

Spanner: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/from-nosql-to-new...

My fear is that those IBM systems running Db2 or something were counted among the 65. While it seems obvious to us that they're better off without switching those, I know of several companies in financial services that should know better that trust MongoDB for their core transaction flow.

What's wild about this is that Mongo isn't even in fashion anymore! NoSQL has been supplanted by NewSQL, and relational dbs are in season again. Even if they were trying to follow the trend, they'd be a half-decade behind.

Jepsen's latest analysis of MongoDB -- https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-4.2.6 -- finds that it doesn't even preserve snapshot isolation when set at the highest consistency level. This seems like a pretty terrible decision.

I've never wanted to short a company more in my life.

It appears that the reddit r/programming mods removed the thread about this from the frontpage of their subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/gwyeai/wechat_...

1) Consider taking a year off before you start to build things on your own -- I regret not doing this, and I don't know anyone who took a gap year and regretted it. If you've already gotten admitted, you can probably defer, especially given COVID.

2) Start showing up to grad classes, research seminars, and lab meetings from day 1 -- the experience of understanding, analyzing, and critiquing cutting-edge research with the help of grad students and professors who know what they're talking about is the most valuable intellectual experience research universities have to offer, and you shouldn't wait till later in undergrad to start.

3) When you find people you want to spend time with, actively make time to do that. Organize events to bring your friends and other interesting people together in a low-pressure social environment.

4) Look for people to work with whom you trust implicitly to (a) have your back and (b) make progress even when you're asleep.

5) Learn how to write by writing a lot and posting it publicly -- college gives you a built-in audience and lots of sources of constructive feedback.

6) Ignore what people think of you to the extent possible, and take more social risks than you're comfortable with.

If I understand this correctly, if you 1) did a Triplebyte assessment, and 2) didn't do especially well, it would be possible to figure this out from your profile from the lack of badges.

This seems like the sort of information that people would want to keep private.

If anybody here knows Hiroshi Lockheimer (SVP platforms), please ping him about this.

What frustrates me most about Quadratic Voting, and in general a lot of ideas promoted by Glen Weyl and his coterie, is that arguments in its favour almost completely ignore the significant additional cognitive burden it places on the populace. American Voters barely understand the difference between the popular vote and the electoral college -- to ask them to view the results of QV votes as fair and legitimate would be a bridge too far. Hell, I know a fair bit of math and CS, and I would feel uncomfortable quickly deciding how to divide my votes across issues, let alone advising other people on what to do.

Start building the things that you want to build, and you'll learn what you need to along the way. This is the strategy that has brought me the most joy and, not coincidentally, it has also been the most effective by far.

How do these devices actually work?

Started a scripted podcast with my little brother about our misadventures trying to get our scripts produced in Bollywood (Indian film industry) and Hollywood. It's called The Content Podcast -- https://contentpod.substack.com/

This is really neat. Is any of your code that uses this open source?

Taking an SICP-like class in Racket and playing with recursive constructs for the first time was one of the highlights of my CS education. This language gave more unalloyed joy than anything else I've done as a programmer, though I've yet to build anything practically useful in it.

The snippets feature has always seemed somewhat shady to me -- in essence, it steals pageviews from the websites that did the hard work of sourcing the information.

I've contacted some of the authors behind them to ask if they'd be willing to open source -- I suspect if enough people email they will.

Run for office and swell the (paltry) ranks of technically literate legislators.

There is a fair amount of debate about this, with a number of high-quality studies such as (https://jasn.asnjournals.org/content/18/7/2198) coming to the conclusion that the additional risk is minimal even with low calcium consumption.

We use a Palak-based Saag that has a mix of other green leaves as well.

Our main differentiator is specifying the macronutrients and allowing you to pick between different macronutrient profiles. You're not likely to get that at your local Indian place.

I don't think you'll find Saag with the macronutrients specified at your local Indian restaurant, and you definitely won't find Saag Seitan with the amount of protein we're offering anywhere that I'm aware of. While we hope to bring costs down as we scale, it's currently not cheap to ensure the integrity of the nutritional portioning.

Saag is the generic term for a curry of leafy vegetables (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saag), and Palak means spinach. Saag Paneer and Palak Paneer are often used interchangeably in the US.

The quality of these dishes does vary widely from establishment to establishment, despite sharing the same basic construction.

If you want a more oil-based Saag, take a look at our Saag tofu, which is dairy-free.