d_burfoot

13 ms·

91.
by d_burfoot 2y ago
Reading great books has been one of the best experiences of my life. But even as an ardent bibliophile, I can't deny that the medium has several serious shortcomings. Books are often far too long. Their quality is uneven (anyone rememb
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
+1. America has immense sociopolitical inertia. It is absolutely incomparable to societies like 1930s Germany, 1910s Russia, or post-war China that gave rise to the brutal dictatorships of the 20th century. This a blessing if you are worrie
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
I'd be far more impressed if the CEO said "The AI deleted a quarter of our company's code".
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
Since other people are recommending home-brewed solutions, I will mention my platform WebWidgets.io, which allows you to create lightweight webapps using vanilla JS and sync the data to SQLite DBs. It would be very easy to create a simple c
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
One very important issue in OOP is packaging together variable names. You can see the issue by looking at this atrocious function signature from the Python Pandas library: > pandas.read_csv(filepath_or_buffer, *, sep=<no_default>,
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
- Passwords must be at least 8 characters long.... - Use libraries like zxcvbn to check for weak passwords. These rules might be good for high-security sites, but it's really annoying to me when I have to generate a length-15 string pa
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
> different values compared to the old American companies (oil, cigarettes, defense). To play devil's advocate a bit, I think those old industries started out just as idealistic as the tech sector. The oil companies pursued amazing
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
Well... they at least admit that their model is bad at this [0] > What are Language LFMs not good at today: - Zero-shot code tasks - Precise numerical calculations - Time-sensitive information - Counting r's in the word "Strawb
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
"[My parents and I] were enthralled by the same music, but it showed us different things. I listened to Slash’s flamboyant, searching guitar solo on “November Rain” and heard liberation, a suggestion that crazed, committed vision could
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
OAI's achievements are amazing. But here's a bit of a skeptical take: cheap human-style intelligence won't have a huge impact because such intelligence isn't really a bottleneck today. It's a cliche that the brighte
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
Someone should do a YouTube channel where they "sand" popular software products and point out these kinds of subtle UI bugs.
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
> These models have little to no built-in physics and learn to forecast purely from data. Astonishingly, this approach, done correctly, produces better forecasts than traditional simulations of the physics of our atmosphere. Haha. The ol
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
The widespread impact of the OF economy is obvious to many gym-goers. At my local gym you can see the usual assortment of bodybuilding guys (same as it's been for decades), and then you can see 2-3 girls who are clearly trying to make
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
The cruise industry is very fascinating to me. I think in the medium term we could see significant populations of people living long-term on cruise ships; it seems like the economic model is long-run more efficient (assuming the shipbuildin
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
Does anyone see signs of data center usage being affected by electricity costs? I imagine a relatively near future where your AWS bill changes depending on the time of day, and so companies shift their computational work from region to regi
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
The analogy to vertical farming is a tempting one, but ultimately misleading. There is a crucial difference between TI-produced natural gas and Saudi-produced gas: the former is carbon neutral, the latter isn't. For every molecule of C
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
World's greatest productivity hack: stop reading blog posts about productivity
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
It's worth remembering that the main reason this kind of data breach is a real problem is mostly due to the incompetence of the IRS. For any serious financial organization, knowing a person's SSN, name, address, etc doesn't
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
> Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed. I actually think the overall argument of the essay makes more sense
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
Hi, I built a low-code platform WebWidgets.io (WWIO) specifically for companies that are too unique for cookie-cutter SaaS products to work well, but not big enough to do their own development work. I've built several WWIO apps for sma
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
I would love to contribute to something like this for cattle ranching. Track your herd with a mapping app, analyze the cows' vital signs, estimate how much land you need for grazing, etc.
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
This is great news. Many people, even in developed countries, suffer a lack of quality dental care because of the cost. Once these devices become widespread, costs should start to drop significantly.
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
It's right for everyone to be questioning the foundations of our political order, because our political order isn't working great these days. My assessment is that the US is a structure built on several solid conceptual pillars, a
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
Ironically, the same author has a blog post deploring the evil of Too Much Technology: https://matt.sh/matt-curve
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
I think it's fine to have high-concept dependency management for the Serious Python Professionals, but what about for people who just want to put a project together and not have their life taken over by figuring out YAML syntax, new-ho
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
I have a client that runs a sports camp for kids. The kids get to request what sports they want to play, and what friends they want to be in class with. This creates a scheduling problem that's hard for a human, and previously they spe
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
> LZ is even better. Neither arithmetic nor Huffman will compress when the probability of all symbols is the same Comparing LZ to arithmetic encoding is a category error. LZ and Huffman are combined modeling+encoding methods, while arith
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
> It is not a country which should have any influence whatsoever outside its borders I wholly agree, as an American citizen
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
Page is down, I assume due to load from HN traffic. Maybe HN should implement some kind of custom CDN, but only for pages that hit the front page?
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by d_burfoot 2y ago
There's always been an economic contradiction in a common education. The skills that a typical high school education will teach you are not very valuable, because they are oversupplied. No one is going to pay you to solve AP calculus p

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