elbasti

11 ms·

61.
by elbasti 2y ago
> Regardless of the above, ChatGPT made almost all NLP technologies across all companies obsolete. That would be a data point in favor of the amazon strategy, no? Prevented millions upon millions of being invested in developing losing
62.
by elbasti 2y ago
IMHO, it's because the single most important characteristic for software engineers, at the vast majority of companies, is that they ship features . And that's a skill that's incredibly hard to test for.
63.
by elbasti 2y ago
No congestion charge seems to be partly a handout to the wealthy: for a cost that's negligible to them, they get to pollute _public_ streets.
64.
by elbasti 2y ago
I used to have a smartphone and have basically gotten rid of it. I'll tell you the main difference between taking a train/bus/whatever with a phone vs a book: The book ends. You may be engrossed for a while, or a long while,
65.
by elbasti 2y ago
Every Tom7 video is a work of humbling genius that—just by virtue of knowing about them—makes me feel like I'm in some sort of secret club of people smarter than me.
66.
by elbasti 2y ago
"Let it crash" is about code such that, if it crashes , there is a supervisor architecture that can keep the crash isolated and has sane ways of restarting. This means you don't have to code defensively: if your code crashes
67.
by elbasti 2y ago
HN's convention is to keep the original title whenever possible. Since tweets have no title, I followed the convention used in poetry where a poem with no name is referred to by its first line. I guess technically then I should have ti
68.
A crazy experience losing Apple earbuds in a remote town in Chile(twitter.com)
151 points by elbasti 2y ago|84 comments
69.
by elbasti 2y ago
Strictly optional and without changing the language API, fwiw. So about as smooth/painless an experience as possible. Its addition into the next minor verision (1.17) will bring warnings that address some of the most common footguns in
70.
by elbasti 2y ago
The BEAM is pretty high level, and it's REALLY good at managing distributed compute at the thread or device level. If you have a parallelizeable workflow, it's very easy to make it (properly!) parallel locally, where by "prop
71.
by elbasti 2y ago
No. You're right about the company case: when you look at a company, you only care about its profit today (and in the future). You don't really care about how much money it spent to get here. But for purposes of global warming, yo
72.
by elbasti 2y ago
A good reminder to everyone that global CO2 emissions are higher than they have ever been [0]. Again: 2024 was the mos polluting year in history. A lot of feel-good articles and tweets will often talk about the plummeting costs of solar, or
73.
by elbasti 2y ago
Evaporative cooling is one of physics's great magic tricks. Basically, when we talk about a substance's temperature, that temperature is the average temperature of the system. Temperature is just "how quickly are the atoms&#x
74.
by elbasti 2y ago
Not a YC founder, but this is factually not true. YC allows Delaware, Cayman, Canada, and Singapore corporations [0]. Pre-empting the accusation that "cayman companies are about tax dodging": Cayman companies are a great fit for h
75.
by elbasti 3y ago
The problem you're describing is incredibly common—so much so that I'd say it's the vast majority of startups. Some details might be different but the overall shape is the same. There are a few principles that I think can be
76.
by elbasti 3y ago
Cool writeup. A little ironic, since Erlang's `digraphs` are also mutable!
77.
by elbasti 3y ago
Only if they don't decompose, and only while they are growing.
78.
by elbasti 3y ago
Unfortunately, you're both right. Decarbonization is the best thing to do by a large margin, both in a cost-benefit sense and in a net impact sense. It's stupid to burn coal to produce $X worth of electricity and then spend many
79.
by elbasti 3y ago
Endorse 100%. The lack of discussion about LiveView tradeoffs is one of the few things I actively dislike about the Elixir community: and I love elixir and reach for it for almost everything.
80.
by elbasti 3y ago
IMHO the beauty of "let it crash" is that you can code very tersely while maintaining data safety. In order for "let it crash" to work you need two things: 1. A tech stack that isolates crashes such that they do not affe
81.
by elbasti 3y ago
Right. They provide a convenience function that spins up a machine running postgres and adds the right environment variables to any machines you already have running. It's "just another machine," but that's not obvious w
82.
by elbasti 3y ago
What I really want to know is how fly.io has recruited such talent. @tptacek (who wrote this article), @chrismccord (creator of elixir Phoenix/Liveview), and others. Very impressive, but also slightly worrying since some parts of fly.i
83.
by elbasti 3y ago
I assume this comment is a reference to Purdue Pharma preemptively filing for bankrupcy after losing a bunch of lawsuits due to the (surely!) criminal way in which they--and the Sackler family that owns it--sold opiods. However, as much a
84.
by elbasti 3y ago
I recently decided to quit a startup I founded after raising about nine million dollars. Quitting meant admitting to professional investors, friends and angels that I had lost their money. It meant admitting to myself and our team that we h
85.
by elbasti 3y ago
Question: the outside circle is a tire made of rubber, which wears down at a known rate. Which tire wears down more: A tire that rolls around a circle of circumference D. A tire that rolls down a flat surface, total distance D?
86.
by elbasti 3y ago
But without coal you quickly run out of forest. I mean, England did, and they were coal rich!
87.
by elbasti 3y ago
I have no idea if a coin can last 100 million years under excellent conditions, but just to contextualize: The difference between a coin lasting a thousand (10^3) years and 100 million years (10^8) is five orders of magnitude . That's
88.
by elbasti 3y ago
The issue isn't electricity, it's energy . How do you run your first ironworks without coal? You can't really exploit hydro for electricity without industrialization, and you can't really have an industrial revolution w
89.
by elbasti 3y ago
The word "everything" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Of course we don't know everything, but we certainly know enough to warrant extreme pessimism. Namely: - we know a mechanism that causes global warming, which is
90.
by elbasti 3y ago
Unfortunately not really. For a while it was hoped that increased temp could result in more clouds (and so more reflected light), but it seems like it's actually the opposite: more temp, less clouds [0]. An increase in plant growth cou

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