pradn

8 ms·

61.
by pradn 1y ago
Every company gets a ton of hate on Hacker News. Don't let it bother you too much. But the specific concerns may be a directional signal.
62.
by pradn 1y ago
I'm hoping there will always be a good LLM option, for the following reasons: 1) The Pareto frontier of open LLMs will keep expanding. The breakneck pace of open research/development, combined with techniques like distillation wil
63.
by pradn 1y ago
It's premature in the sense that you need to care about it before you do profiling, which is the usual advice for perf improvements: "you don't know where the hotspots are, so write your code, profile it, and fix the slow bit
64.
by pradn 1y ago
> Typically, perf isn't a few bad decisions. It's a very large number of independently reasonable decisions that add up to a bad result. If the team loses that discipline for even one moment then it's very very difficult t
65.
by pradn 1y ago
I see a good number of these articles, each with their own typographic features. Is there a "gold standard" set of recommendations for making the most beautiful type, on the web?
66.
by pradn 2y ago
This is such a meme on Hacker News. How much evidence is there really for this? There might be some, but saying its the primary reason CEOs hire consultants is an even stronger claim that needs justification.
67.
by pradn 2y ago
SWE-years are actually used for two things: a) measuring ongoing cost and b) for calculating if an investment will pay off. There's a few benefits over just using a dollar figure. It's a unit that natural ties time to value . S
68.
by pradn 2y ago
There's definitely some nuance around how many resources to consume at the client vs the server. Video decoding and ML inference are probably at the extreme end of what you can make a client do. On the whole, since clients are so const
69.
by pradn 2y ago
Yes, a SWE-year is a common unit of cost. And there are internal calculators that tell you how much CPU, memory, network etc a SWE-year gets you. Same for other internal units, like the cost of a particular DB. This allows you to make time&
70.
by pradn 2y ago
It's the responsibility of leadership to set the correct goals and metrics. If leadership doesn't value maintenance, those they lead won't either. You can't blame people for playing to the tune of those above them.
71.
by pradn 2y ago
The list price of a house going up is a big part of it. But I don't think people actually have an idea of how much more a house of the same price costs when interest rates go from 2.5% to 7%. For a million dollar house, that's an
72.
by pradn 2y ago
There's a great paper that collects a long list of anecdotes about computational evolution. "The surprising creativity of digital evolution: A collection of anecdotes from the evolutionary computation and artificial life research
73.
by pradn 2y ago
> Teaching financial concepts in a classroom is like teaching swimming with PowerPoint slides. You can explain the theory of the butterfly stroke all day, but at some point you need to get in the water. And with money, the water is alway
74.
by pradn 2y ago
Ah, I see.
75.
by pradn 2y ago
Well, you do have to worry about customers using old client libraries / SDKs, even if your whole backend has migrated to a new API. Many customers don't like to upgrade unless they need to. It can be significant toil for them. So,
76.
by pradn 2y ago
There is some queasy feeling of fake-ness when auto-completing so much code. It feels like you're doing something wrong. But these are all based on my experience coding for half my life. AI-native devs will probably feel differently.
77.
by pradn 2y ago
What sort of ingredients keep well in this process? How about mushrooms and potatoes?
78.
by pradn 2y ago
I mean is "wait" even the ideal "think more please" phrase? Would you get better results with other phrases like "wait, a second", or "let's double-check everything"? Or domain-dependent, specifi
79.
by pradn 2y ago
Omg, another fan of "Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server"!! It's one of my favorite papers ever - so clever.
80.
by pradn 2y ago
I think you do point to a real issue. The "falsehoods programmers believe about X" genre can be either a) actual things a common programmer is likely to believe b) things a common programmer might not be be knowledgeable enough to
81.
by pradn 2y ago
That's a great one, thank you!
82.
by pradn 2y ago
An important design consideration for Hydro, it seems, is to be able to define a workflow in a higher level language and then be able to cut them into different binaries. Is that something Akka / RX offer? My quick thought is that they
83.
by pradn 2y ago
> these articles are annoying You’re being quite negative about a well-researched article full of info most have never seen. It’s not a crime to write up details that don’t generally affect most people. A more generous take would be that
84.
by pradn 2y ago
Brand - it's the most powerful first-mover advantage in this space. ChatGPT is still vastly more popular than other, similar chat bots.
85.
by pradn 2y ago
That's a good insight. I had always thought the key to good algorithm / data structure design was to use all the information present in the data set. For example, if you know a list is sorted, you can use binary sort. But perhaps
86.
by pradn 2y ago
> "de facto controlled by CCP" Where is the evidence for this?
87.
by pradn 2y ago
You're correct - that's a fair point.
88.
by pradn 2y ago
The key is that the probes a) are fast: they certainly incur the same network cost of a regular request. But more than that, all they do is read two counters, so they're super quick for backends to serve. b) cheap: they don't do n
89.
by pradn 2y ago
Optimizing tail latency isn't about saving fleet cost. It's about reducing the chance of one tail latency event ruining a page view, when a page view incurs dozens of backend requests. The more requests you have, the higher the ch
90.
by pradn 2y ago
It makes total sense for European farmers to cry foul if cheaper imports get to masquerade as the real thing. This has been a big sticking point for the EU-Mercosur deal that recently concluded.

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