vtail

I’m using a 2020 MacBook Pro 16” with 32GB of RAM. I’m WFH, but don’t notice any slowdowns on any other task.

That’s a good question, even if I disagree slightly about the premise, as random large open-source products targeting consumers (as opposed to infrastructure projects like Linux kernel) can dramatically vary in quality.

My hypothesis: devs are much closer to users, as they are often users themselves, and have more freedom to work on fixing broken experiences, as opposed to just rolling new features.

People use to laugh at PMs (disclaimer: I’m a PM), but making right product decisions in a big Corp, with multiple parties to align with that had competing interests, is hard.

I’m sure Google has high quality engineers working more or less on every product. It’s just the solution space of products with big surface area and many interdependencies is really large. When you are more steps removed from your customers, and can’t move fast (comparing to a small nibble team), finding the optimum becomes a very non-trivial exercise.

Most successful products at big corps have laser-focused teams with highly influential leaders. Anything else results on mediocrity.

For as long a I am a “wanna-be founder”, I used to be afraid of working on ideas that compete with (parts of) Google business. That feeling is no more.

I use GSuite at work at a FAANG company, and Google slides with 50+ pages is so slow (multi-second pauses when changing slides) to be practically unusable. Finding documents in Google drive is hard to impossible, and good luck keeping track of comments or tasks assigned to you in multiple unrelated documents.

I’m sure at some level consolidating their offerings is a right product move, but I don’t think Basecamp or Calendly should be particularly concerned.

This is a very naive view. Black people are responsible for higher share of murders, for example, than their share of population. We should look at the frequency of interactions with the police, not at the population shares.

Malaria affects far smaller population size.

However, if you use a personal email, you can’t hide behind “I’m just doing my research”.

Not sure if it was just a temp measure during the pandemic, but last May I renewed my driving CA license completely online, and they mailed it to my home address; no visit to DMV was necessary.

Shouldn’t a proper sorting (based on activity, karma, number of answers) take care of this (= duplicate questions)?

And/or to have fewer people overall.

The error message in the commit that introduced that change uses the word “insane”. I hope they changed it to “mentally challenged”.

https://github.com/git/git/commit/cad88fdf8d1ebafb5d4d1b92eb...

You can run emulations. When I was at NVIDIA almost 10 years ago, they were number 1 user of electricity in Santa Clara, by a big margin, because of their server farm that was used to emulate chips.

Thank you! Very educational.

Where Would you suggest I can read about it more?

They did as you say (you are a PM, after all!), and next week they rolled out the "likelihood of engagement" model. An independent analysis by another team member, familiar with the old model, confirmed that it was still mostly driven by politics (there is nothing much going on in Elbonia, besides politics), but politics was neither the direct objective not an explicit factor in the model.

The observed behavior is the same: using the new model, most people are still shown highly polarized posts, as indicated by subjective assessment of user research professionals.

What should you do now?

Disclaimer: I started working at FB recently.

Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately).

One day, your brilliant data scientist trained a model that predicts which of the two Elbonian parties a user most likely support, as well as whether a comment/article discusses a political topic or not. Then a user researcher made a striking discovery: supporters of party A interact more strongly with posts about party B, and vice versa. A proposal is made to artificially reduce the prevalence of opposing party posts in someone's feed.

Would you support this proposal as a PM? Why or why not?

(Because a simple upvote wouldn't do this comment justice)

I think it's a really, really great response. YC community is indeed very special, and I am often surprised that over these years, it keep attracting high caliber people and has a high signal/noise ratio, while at the same time remains a pleasant community that favors civilized discussion.

Moderating is a thankless job, but please rest assured that many people here value your efforts, even if we don't verbalize this gratitude often.

Moscow and most of the other places in Russia are on a complete lockdown for more than a week now - much stricter that eg. NY or California. I’m not sure what do you mean by your comment.

What works for me is enjoying the process, not the end result, and making small incremental progress. I started blogging recently - just little pieces of code or analysis here and there - and found that a sense of making progress strongly motivates me to tackle harder problems, while sharing my progress along the way.

For me, it’s a combination of many many convenient built-in functions, and high level constructs for functional and rule-based programming. I recently played with the language to get functionality similar to what R’s dplyr provides - it can give a sense of what kind of advanced “meta-programming” is possible.

https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1901462

Thanks Steve for the answer! HN is an amazing place where a random comment asking a question about Rust can get an answer from a core developer. I hope we will always keep it that way.

Well, they clearly think their model works for them. If you think otherwise, it's on you to convince them that they should change their model, or start your own effort if you think it will benefit humanity. I don't think they necessarily need to "defend" their business choices.

Swift is a great example, but don't forget that is essentially funded by Apple. It would look very different if it would be a true community effort.

Rust I'm not very familiar with: how much of their funding is dependent on Mozilla, at least for the core developer(s)?

Also, a language + a standard library has a (much!) smaller surface comparing to Wolfram's vision.

Regarding your second point - I don't have a horse in that race, other than tremendously enjoying my personal license that I pay for out of my pocket; but I found their arguments[1] quite reasonable. I think there was an HN discussion about this some time ago.

[1] https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op...

While I don't disagree with your definition of reproducibility, I want to point out that very few papers would satisfy that criteria, regardless of their use of a closed- vs open-source software.

Here is a recent example: Imperial College COVID-19 response team published an article[1] where they modeled different effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as suppression and mitigation on the number of infected, deaths, etc. This is a very interesting result, but it's impossible to replicate their results in practice without contacting the authors, as their methodology is not enough to reproduce it.

While someone else[2] posted their own model that is very well documented and fully reproducible by anyone with a $230/year personal license.

While theoretically [1] is high science and [2] is not, in my own opinion [2] is better than [1]. I would love more science to be done and discussed that way. Ideally, using open-source software, but in practice, using Wolfram Language, in that case, is already good enough in my opinion.

PS. I'm not affiliated with Wolfram Research in any way.

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

[2] https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1901002

My advice is to find a good book that teaches the fundamentals. I'm currently reading "Power Programming with Mathematica: The Kernel" by David B. Wagner. It was published in 1996 and covers then-new version 3, but boy is it good (and still very relevant!).

A scanned PDF was made available for free with the permission of the publisher: https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/16485/are-yo...

Many people on this and similar threads rightly question whether results received with the help of a closed source software are reproducible. I think it's a fair question, but these discussions often miss a couple of important points.

First, there is a question of theoretical vs. practical reproducibility: true, in _theory_, an open-source codebase with many millions of lines of code of highly complex transformation can be checked for accuracy by anyone. In _practice_, only very few insiders will have both technical understanding and time to verify the correctness of this or that algorithm, and everyone else would need to rely on their expertise. That situation is no different from using a proprietary system if we trust their authors.

Second, while it might be shocking for someone, most of the science, outside of maybe math, it's not _practically_ reproducible. Most of the articles are behind paywalls, don't have enough data to replicate their results (even economists much more often than not won't include their raw data or algorithms or both). Also, no one who is trying to build a scientific career would try to replicate someone else's results, especially if it requires some costly equipment, reagents, etc. - the rewards in the scientific community are for novel results. Replication crisis[1] describes this pretty well.

Most of the software that runs LHC at CERN is probably not inspectable by a regular Joe the physicist, yet somehow the physicist community somehow trusts their results, etc.

In summary, while an open-source software of Mathematica quality would be awesome in theory, I highly doubt it would be practical for a long time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

It's hard to come up with a short answer to explain the greatness of the tightly integrated system with tons of functionality and highly sophisticated function/rule based programming style, but let me give you a quick taste of it: the following code

    CloudDeploy[
      FormFunction[{"a" -> "Number", "b" -> "Number", "c" ->    "Number"}, 
      Plot[#a x^2 + #b x + #c, {x, -10, 10}] &],
        Permissions -> "Public"]

will create and deploy a publicly accessible web form that asks for 3 coefficients and plots a parabola. How many lines of code / external libraries would you need to do the same thing in python?

https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/e0b275e6-49a2-4901-a806-e36...

I’m in the same boat: Wolfram Language has enlightened me (or you may say, corrupted me completely), so a prerequisite for any new computing device is that it can ran Mathematica.

Which is way I had to switch back from OpenBSD (which doesn’t run it) and Linux (which until today’s update, didn’t have HiDPI support) back to Mac OS.

According to this dashboard, there are 40k infected outside of China vs 80k inside, and the 40k number is still growing exponentially. It’s just a matter of days until we have more cases outside of China.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...