solresol

This being HN, writing a piece of software to do something that hasn't been done before. That increases the total number of goods and services in the world.

Variations: synthesising a new chemical, teaching someone a new skill.

I can sort-of see a business model where they host SSH-based applications -- ideally with a Mosh option. As a user, I log in and get a menu of the different applications I am subscribed to that they host, or I can ssh-exec a particular application, perhaps with the option to reconnect to an application that I had open a moment ago. Perhaps being able to text-screen-share so that I can train someone else up would be good (for customer support).

I would expect that this kind of infrastructure would be cheap to support and cheap to run. All the infrastructure is already there in the Linux kernel (or any other Unix-like): just charge me based on my customer's pacct (process accounting) records.

There are a lot of CRUD apps that would be just as good in a TUI as a GUI, and there are a lot of businesses built on CRUD apps.

And any of his other examples would work with powers-of-p if p is prime.

Those infinite series aren't divergent if you are measuring their size p-adically.

Gouvea's book actually goes through the things that RobAlni has just discovered.

Location: Sydney, Australia (but I often work for startups in the USA west coast)

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: maybe

Technologies: Python, Haskell, Postgresql, Terraform, Spacy

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/gregb3677/public-resume/blob/main/greg-ba...

Email: gregb (at) ifost.org.au

Staff/Principal/Very Senior. Often I do part-time CTO work; otherwise I do natural language processing & data science, but I'm open to anything, especially if I can live mostly in Sydney while coming to the USA west coast periodically. Devops / data engineering / MLops / pre-sales support / leadership.

Or, flipping it around to problems I solve: dealing with lots of text; improving site and systems reliability, particular for machine learning; getting quality products shipping quickly; cost management on AWS; helping build a culture of data-driven decision making.

Started a Masters in Research at age 48. Exerted almost no effort and have ended up with 3 publishable papers and two other papers in progress. Ticked off my bucket list to get an Erdos number (already had a Bacon and Metallica number). Looking around for a PhD program next year.

I had tried to do a PhD when I was younger, but financially it was too hard. Now I'm senior enough that I can live off consulting gigs that aren't full time.

Your partner's support is the most important. Second most important is to have something that you want to research --- if you have spent most of your career doing software development, research that, because you already have some hypotheses about practices that work and don't work. In my case I had already worked out most of what I wanted to write about long before I started.

> the real-time typing feature was one of the main things that killed Wave

Nah. I was there. One thing killed Wave, and nothing else: not-invented-here syndrome from Mountain View executive team. It wouldn't have mattered whether Wave was perfect and bringing in a billion dollars a year; Lars wasn't in California, so whatever he was doing was going to get killed because he wasn't part of the in-crowd.

A better comparison would be with Greater Sydney (442 people per square kilometre).

I think it is a misunderstanding. The two places in the world where everyone agrees it is easiest to get medtech devices developed are Australia and Mexico.

(Source: was doing medtech development for a while in the early 2010s).

There are people who reject smartphones because of (addictiveness, non-mindfulness, invasiveness of privacy). Your movement aligns with that.

There are many, many people (myself included) who want to see black-box predictors banned unless they are doing something trivial and unimportant (and that's the goal of the GDPR and PIPL rules). So there's another group to align with, and this group has a lot of political clout at the moment.

Rejecting automated art is a slightly odd, but I presume there will be some group that would align with that too.

So it sounds like you can start building consensus with some other groups already, which is the kind of political power you will need in order to effect change.

Not the pp, but:

1. For many countries (e.g. Australia), quite successfully. We said no, and then we didn't.

2. We can replace physical activity (e.g. machinery instead of human motion), and that doesn't move human beings from the place of control and power. Likewise, we can replace certain kinds of thinking work (e.g. programming or medicine) and that in itself isn't a major problem (except for the out-of-work programmers or doctors).

But replacing all cognitive activity (which is what a hypothetical future AI would do), what are we --- as humans --- left with?

I think it's fabulous. Just signed up to be notified when it's ready. ;-)

Anyway, you now have my email.

Metformin is known to work (a little) and seems to have a longevity effect that no-one understands.

Orlistat works, as long as you can live your life near a toilet.

Semaglutide - looks very promising.

Gastric sleeving and other surgical intervensions are also known to work.

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Changes to oxygen levels due to altitude are still being researched. Higher altitudes in the USA and Europe correlate with lower levels of obesity at statistically significant levels; higher altitudes in Australia correlate with higher levels of obesity. No-one knows why.

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Most of the other advice in this thread has a very low probability of succeeding. There will be a lot of selection bias in this thread because the only people responding are the ones for whom it succeeded.

Most of the time for most people, interventions that focus on diet fail.

Interventions that focus on exercise average around 1-2 kg of weight loss in the general population. That said, if you aren't doing any exercise at the moment, then you can reduce your all-cause mortality pretty rapidly with a small amount of exercise (that would definitely fit into your lifestyle). Even if exercise doesn't help you lose weight, it improves your overall cardiac fitness, and that is probably the most important thing to work on.

You asked for weird tips... it seems that if you have the genetic factors that give you a higher predisposition towards obesity, then exercise will work better for you than average.

Can you output methanol? Maersk is commissioning some new ships that are methanol powered; if they succeed their requirements alone will probably exceed current worldwide methanol production 10x.

If there's an index and the query planner is choosing sequential scan, it's doing so because it thinks that the random access pattern for the indexed data is going to be slower than the sequential access for the whole dataset. It's almost definitely right.

So why generate the data? It will sort itself out when there's enough real data in there.

You can also: - disable "enable_seqscan" - increase "seq_page_cost" - decrease "random_page_cost"

Unfortunately not -- look at what is happening in NSW (Australia). >90% vaccination rate, and essentially exponential growth in cases and hospitalisation.

The only things that changed were: omicron instead of delta, and the dropping of restrictions with a new premier.

> introduce some form of government seizure over time

And if you don't want your property seized because it's valuable to you, maybe you could pay the government a percentage of the price of the land to prevent that from happening.

... which is interesting, because Australia already has a land value tax. All we need to do is increase it.

> What stops all of the landlords from just pricing the tax into rent?

Nothing stops them from doing that at all; in fact they should.

Total rent = (rent from the improved structure on the land) + (rent from land)

Landlords should be given the right to extract money from people because they have built a nice house for renters to live in. Where Georgism disagrees is that that landlords shouldn't be given the right to extract money from people simply because they own land there (the second part of the equation). Or to be more precise, a large chunk of the money extracted from land ownership gets taken from landlords so that they don't derive much value simply from owning land and doing nothing with it.

That incentivises landlords to increase the value of the building on the land (e.g. higher density housing, batteries and solar panels, longer-lasting structures) in order to increase the portion of the rent that the landlord gets to keep.

I disagree with your prescriptions for a solution, and the pushback on them will be fairly intense from economists, politicians and many others. I could go into detail about the policies, but there are problems with them.

And anyway, there is a much better way of achieving your goals that will get support from almost everyone, which doesn't involve pushing an angry agenda uphill against entrenched interests. Start pushing for Georgism. There's a large amount of theory supporting this, here's a starting point for reading:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-...

Now, the reason that we in Australia can push for Georgism is that we already have Georgist taxes (local council rates), it's just that they are too weak to have a major effect on the market.

At the same time, councils are underfunded. Since councils do a bunch of things that everyone connects to, likes and relates to (garbage collection, libraries, parks, local roads and footpaths, etc.), it's actually quite easy to create a slogan "let's fund councils properly" that everyone can get behind. If that just happens to end housing as a financial investment in Australia, oh well, that's just an odd unexpected consequence, isn't it?

In particular, you have a large number of councils that will thouroughly support your message, amplify whatever you have to say, and probably let you have access to facilities for free for events.

Your policy objectives are basically going to be: increase funding for councils by letting them increase rates by 20% per year, with a corresponding decrease in (say) stamp duty until state governments no longer need to subsidise local councils.

Even if Georgism is incorrect, we would start seeing rent and real estate prices start declining (because council rates will make holding property less valuable). Mission accomplished.

(The fun starts when councils are fully self-funded, and you keep pushing for 20% increases: then you can start funding state and federal government from Georgist taxes. If Georgism is correct, this should have a variety of very positive effects.)

It depends entirely on the jurisdiction. In Australia for example, any technology that is accepted by both parties can be used. I have signed contracts with GnuPG (a long time ago) for example. I have also sent documents to my Remarkable tablet, signed them there and sent them back without it ever being on paper.

Who is the "other party" to this contract? What forms of signature will they accept?

Quite a few companies. Many universities. Many schools. Many temples and religious communities.

I'm putting together devops content for the B2B arm of $FAMOUS_BOOTCAMP.

Here's my curriculum so far (based on AWS, though):

- Why DevOps (basically, a distilled version of "Accelerate")

- Terraform

- Ansible

- Docker

- Kubernetes

- ELK, Grafana, Prometheus

- Jenkins

- Automated testing

- MLops

- Secret management, databases, database upgrades

(The nature of the $FAMOUS_BOOTCAMP and the requirements from the initial customer makes it more about "here are the specific technologies you might use in your job today" and less about "here's the background principles").

Any suggestions or thoughts?

Actually, the article content doesn't seem to match the title.

The best predictor according to the article (50% of variance) is fluid intelligence. Language aptitude was a distant second place at 8% of variance explained, narrowly edging out memory for third place.

I don't think anyone is at all surprised by a result that says "being able to think logically in novel situations is a better predictor of whether you will be able to pick up programming quickly than all other predictors combined".

Nor am I particularly surprised to learn that the component of mathematical expertise that is not derived from fluid intelligence (e.g. ability to perform mental arithmetic, for example) isn't predictive of the ability to program.

They already go negative in Australia quite regularly, almost always because of solar.

Most of those cobol programs are doing something equivalent to a single SQL query.

And Cobol programs are _verbose_. Have a look at the examples on Rosetta code. C# (which isn't particularly concise) can do in 40 lines what Cobol needs 250+

Where we (modern programmers) would write a program with a large number of modules and imports, most Cobol programmers probably wouldn't. There is a lot of copying-and-pasting going on there.

That's an average program length of 3000 lines. Imagine your code base consisted of 112,500 files, each of about 500 lines (including HTML, CSS, SQL statements and "real" program code).

That's about what it is equivalent to.

Plugging that equivalent number into a Cocomo calculator, it says "20 years of 800+ programmers".

I might have misread some of the tables, but I think it was saying that with the proliants you get 10x the compute power of the mainframe, and it costs nearly 30% more when you do that.

It would be a risky flight for the drone, but that might get supplies to Pitcairn island, where it could be recharged and sent back. (Prevailing winds might be a problem though.)

I know the author and have worked with him. Even when a system he wrote over many months was dramatically outperformed by a naive machine learning approach that I coded up in an afternoon, it made no difference to his confidence that he was on the right path.

I am genuinely unsure whether this is a good or bad character trait.

I've been teaching courses of this nature for about 25 years now, but usually they have been for employees improving their own skills in an existing job. This is one of the first times I have been teaching a quick course where there is an "internship" at the end of it. I know I can drop content out (and how much time it will save); I also know how scared many of the students are.

Yes, I've seen this kind of course turn into a trainwreck before, and I'd like to see what I can do to turn it around.

Maybe a little pessimistic, but they won't be making significant contributions quickly, that's for sure.