wenc

27 ms·

331.
by wenc 2y ago
Not sure if it's true anymore. It made the headlines in 2017 and sort of became a meme, but in practice, indiscriminately avoiding left turns in routing can lead to huge inefficiencies. In my city, trying to avoid one left turn may mea
332.
by wenc 2y ago
I appreciate this. Most software devs are used to working 1-dimensional collections like lists, or tree-like abstractions like dicts, or some combination of those. This is why most abstractions and complex data types are built on these. Obj
333.
by wenc 2y ago
It's the opposite; I prefer DuckDB and generally work with DuckDB's friendly SQL interface. SQL is declarative and is (for me) more intuitive than method-chaining -- especially for complex analytic operations that happen in one go
334.
by wenc 2y ago
A lot of aggregation, pivot and join logic, like: df = duckdb.query("from tbl1 join tbl2 using (id) where id is not null ").pl() The .pl() is a Arrow-based conversation from DuckDB to Polars. It's in-memory and I bel
335.
by wenc 2y ago
I converted to DuckDB and Polars. It’s worth it for the speed improvement. However there are subtle differences between Pandas and Polars behaviors so regression testing is your friend. It’s not 1:1 mapping.
336.
by wenc 2y ago
Props to Ritchie Vink for designing polars. But also props to Wes McKinney for giving us a dataframe library during a time when we had none. Java still doesn’t have a decent dataframe library so we mustn’t take these things for granted. The
337.
by wenc 2y ago
Yep that paper is from the same team that produced the paper I linked to. But yes the title is much more exciting - “grandmaster level chess without search”.
338.
by wenc 2y ago
A recent discovery showing that computer chess (which was traditionally based on searching a combinatorial space, i.e. NP-hard) that is instead now being solved with transformer models, is actually playing better at the ELO level. https:&#
339.
by wenc 2y ago
For me, len() is much less ambiguous. Also in Pandas if you try to check the truth value of a dataframe to see if it’s empty, it will fail. It will say “the truth value of a dataframe is ambiguous”. df.empty is less ambiguous but you have t
340.
by wenc 2y ago
In the market cap website, the other companies are in the Top 7. Netflix is 27.
341.
by wenc 2y ago
DOTT was great and yes also lots of American references like the George Washington story and the Pony Express. But in Asia we were immersed enough in American culture through books and Saturday morning cartoons that it didn’t feel that fore
342.
by wenc 2y ago
I don't know. My friends and I growing up in Asia played Police Quest I as 8 year olds. We learned about the Miranda rights, and the PR-24 nightstick. I remember the sobriety test part. We didn't know what a "field sobriety t
343.
by wenc 2y ago
That's a really interesting perspective. I grew up around when adventure games were popular, and I learned a lot about the grown-up world (and in fact, American world) through adventure games. Sam and Max had so much Americana that, pl
344.
by wenc 2y ago
ChatGPT does better -- it picks up context and produces more idiomatic output. Kagi translate does pick up context (for instance, "Anne is older than her sister Carmen" is a good test for languages that have different words for ol
345.
by wenc 2y ago
Under $100: - NEXUS ($50 for 5 years). Comes with TSA Pre and Global Entry. - ChatGPT $20/mth and Claude $20/mth. Completely changed how I ideate and work. - Cosori Air Fryer $70 + a stack of wax paper. Changes my food bill and he
346.
by wenc 2y ago
It's not so much about size but about usage pattern. If your workloads require fast writes and reads, SQLite will probably work fine. If you're looking to run analytic, columnar queries (which tend to involve a lot of aggregation
347.
by wenc 2y ago
Also, I learned that Hive-partitioned Parquet on S3 is much slower than on disk. S3 is high latency unless you use for S3 Express Zones (the low latency version). We used EFS (not EBS) and it was much faster.
348.
by wenc 2y ago
I'm hoping someone writes a Python LSP that understands DuckDB SQL. I use DuckDB and I typically write correct SQL, but having LSP assistance would greatly enhance my quality of life.
349.
by wenc 2y ago
Oh I didn't know that! Found the setting. Now I really don't need to touch the power button.
350.
by wenc 2y ago
I think I used it twice this year to turn it back on because of power outages. But yeah, I just sleep my Mac Mini. I have never needed to turn it off.
351.
by wenc 2y ago
I do use LLMs to bootsrap my unit testing (because there is a lot boilerplate in unit tests and mocks), but I tend to finish the unit tests myself. This gives me confidence that my tests are accurate to the best of my knowledge. Having good
352.
by wenc 2y ago
I couldn't see myself living in Northern Ontario either, but for some people, small town life is idyllic. There was even a popular Canadian sitcom portraying such a life ("Corner Gas", set in rural Saskatchewan). As a "c
353.
by wenc 2y ago
So if I’m hearing you right, it sounds like you’re looking for net loss to justify the statement that “good CEOs punish themselves”, a statement made by another HNer and not by Nadella himself? He did take a loss but not a net loss, so it d
354.
by wenc 2y ago
Yes, why would it not be? It’s still skin in the game. If we think it’s a symbolic gesture, which it may well be, it is still a gesture that most CEOs would not have made. Unlike most here, I don’t think with this he’s saying please punish
355.
by wenc 2y ago
Apple storage is indeed undersized. But most of us work around this with a $2.99/mth iCloud+ subscription which gets us 200GB storage on the cloud. Not a deal but a trivial enough cost to not worry about running out of storage. As a no
356.
by wenc 2y ago
I think reading is necessary but insufficient for wisdom. Reading lets you acquire the experiences that you personally cannot live out in your own life. It does provide leverage in that way. However syntopical reading isn’t sufficient to pr
357.
by wenc 2y ago
Right. I read a ton of business books in my day, many of them with great ideas, but when I came across Andy Grove’s High Output Management, it just hit different. Andy Grove being former CEO of Intel spoke from experience actually doing ha
358.
by wenc 2y ago
It sounds like the topic is perceived wisdom (“what makes a person seem wise?”) rather than actual (practical) wisdom which is good use of knowledge and experience to make good decisions. I say this because I know folks who seem wise (perce
359.
by wenc 2y ago
I don't have hearing loss, but I wear 2 pairs of AirPods Pro 2 over the course of a 10 hour day. The reason I have 2 pairs is because 1 pair only gets 5-6 hours of battery life, and I need to swap them while they recharge in the case.
360.
by wenc 2y ago
I’m not sure it exists. You can opt in on Kagi maps but not search.

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