blagie

70 ms·

781.
by blagie 4y ago
That's not always the right thing to do. I'm from a language where you'll never get it right, and most people are pragmatic and don't care about names being the way our mothers do. That's a very Western thing. Forci
782.
by blagie 4y ago
Great! Now do a JOIN in a database with Türkiye in one column and Turkiye in another. It's a problem with well-known solutions. That's not the same as a solved problem. It will be a solved problem when processing a log file in &#x
783.
by blagie 4y ago
Things like text search and exact string matching. As minor as it might sound, if 199/200 countries work in your system, capitalism dictates that below a certain business size, the logical thing is often to just ignore the one country
784.
by blagie 4y ago
It will become a non-issue once all keyboards have a "ü" button. :) Which might not actually be that long.
785.
by blagie 4y ago
I'm very well aware of that. Whenever I've been on the receiving end of a name change like that, I (and everyone I knew) found it obnoxious. However, cultures differ. Turkey has a long history with name changes, and has been rathe
786.
by blagie 4y ago
Off-topic: Do most people there prefer "Türkiye" or "Turkey?"
787.
by blagie 4y ago
Why showers? Showers are very water-inefficient. Sponge bath is definitely possible in the allotted amount of water.
788.
by blagie 4y ago
I've done a lot of work in nonprofits, education, and government domains, and this can be a bit cumbersome. My experience is that in most cases, this comes down to administrative or bureaucratic issues which make sense on an organizati
789.
by blagie 4y ago
There's sometimes more to the story. Another lesson from my career: No place is perfect. Don't make simplistic judgements.
790.
by blagie 4y ago
I don't care what they're getting as much as I care about what I'm getting. If I have a nice dual-monitor setup, in a business where everyone gets a 19" Dell, I will be more productive. That will lead to more promotions,
791.
by blagie 4y ago
"Very intermittent access" is the use-case for most things I build. There's a short tail -- I've built a platform you've heard of and, given this is HN, more likely than not, used. Then there's a long tail: - H
792.
by blagie 4y ago
Personally, for long-running things, metered cloud has two upsides: - IaaS, static hosting, etc. can maintain security updates on their end. My own VPS will eventually be broken into if I don't maintain security updates. - Many things
793.
by blagie 4y ago
I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: 1. There's an agility to being able to change things yourself, at 2am if necessary. That's very important to startups. 2. There's a d
794.
by blagie 4y ago
I really enjoyed writing low-level C code, maybe three decades ago. I grew out of it, eventually, but I remember the joy. Similar for assembly, actually. (And rereading, I don't mean "growing out" in a derogatory way -- I gro
795.
by blagie 4y ago
<-- This. Yes, "read in a buffer, cast that buffer to the protocol-specific struct, read the various fields from memory, etc" are all operations one should generally NOT do. This was instructive maybe three decades ago, when th
796.
by blagie 4y ago
It's a different parable. Everyone can afford a shovel. At one point in time, computers were limited to very wealthy folks, like Bill Gates. He learned to program by going to an exclusive private high school which had a computer, and l
797.
by blagie 4y ago
As an employee, part of the upside of a pay cut is that I'm not looking at successive rounds unless the business is still bleeding. As a business, it depends on the type of business, but pay cuts tend to be a more effective way to stem
798.
by blagie 4y ago
Let me explain the point: * There are hundreds of millions of people living for under $2/day. Coding was a pathway out of poverty. * There are billions of people with family incomes under $30/day. For those families, kids learning
799.
by blagie 4y ago
Having seen both, I'm much more likely to leave /after/ a layoff than after a 10% paycut. In abstract, if there were a way to rank employees by ROI and contribution perfectly fairly, I might not worry about layoffs personally
800.
by blagie 4y ago
I would like to see a thorough investigation BY African Americans rather than merely OF by African Americans. We have an unfortunate history where investigations OF African Americans BY white Americans led to not only incorrect but also ver
801.
by blagie 4y ago
> Said no modern, respectable, progressive, white, American scientist who has studied the phenomenon within the last thirty years. Fixed it for you. Here's the basic problem: - Most punishments for kids outside of mainstream cultura
802.
by blagie 4y ago
> Where on earth do you get that number from? Guestimate. You can tell me I pulled it out of my ass, and you'd be right. But it's that type of number. A better answer is looking at the size of Google when it was doing (approxim
803.
by blagie 4y ago
To be honest, I feel like Google and Meta both had far too many employees. "Too many cooks spoil the meal." "The Mythical Man-Month" etc. There was a crazy push for hiring and growth, which diluted the quality and increa
804.
by blagie 4y ago
No, you can get away with under $20k these days. The models can now distribute adequately well, so you can get away with a swarm of thirty two 12GB 3060 Ti cards. 32*$400 = $12,800. Add in computers to stick them in and interlink, and that&
805.
by blagie 4y ago
.... which is actually not of "almost no value." The value of smaller models is different. For example, I have anonymized data, with fields removed. The smaller models do fine for filling those fields in with plausible values. The
806.
by blagie 4y ago
You're wrong on many levels. The basic reason for binary is because it's generally faster, especially as you scale to smaller transistors with more noise.
807.
by blagie 4y ago
A few years back, Bill Gates bought every university graduate who wanted one a digital copy of the book Factfulness. It's like the insight from that stratification, over and over, in book-length format. It's really quite excellent
808.
by blagie 4y ago
It can be important. Obscure allergic reaction and obscure disease often look the same. You treat them opposite. The former, you want to suppress the immune system, and the latter, you don't. In obscure circumstances (e.g. a doctor is
809.
by blagie 4y ago
I can think of few better outcomes than someone "taking advantage of" 200,000 people living in Kibera slum in Nairobi by giving them $10/day desk jobs. Or some of the poorer rural populations. Or the hundreds of thousands som
810.
by blagie 4y ago
I would suspect that's only approximately true. OpenAI hired them because Kenya has hundreds of thousands of people who are fluent in English, but without the level of basic education or employability needed to earn more than $2/d

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