wenc

49 ms·

451.
by wenc 2y ago
I paid for Kagi and used it for 3 months because the only way you could evaluate search is through “vibes”. I’m glad it benefits others but for me it was not much different from Google (with ad block). In two ways it was an inconvenience co
452.
by wenc 2y ago
Just to follow up, what is your method for finding those tabs again? Imagine a scenario where you have 200 tabs open. Unlike bookmarks, they aren’t categorized into folders. I imagine one can keyword search all open tabs, but that’s kinda l
453.
by wenc 2y ago
Question: do people who open tons of tabs ever middle-click to open a bunch of tabs to follow a rabbit hole? If so, how do you keep track of which tabs you've already seen? Example: When I read a Wiki page, I middle-click on links to o
454.
by wenc 2y ago
Weather forecasting is a science problem. Flight codes -- and making sure they don't break systems -- is a software engineering problem. Different skillsets. I know folks who work at national labs. They have neither the skillset nor th
455.
by wenc 2y ago
For the general public yes. But for researchers, it's super useful to know. I spent 2 years of my Ph.D. pursuing a dead-end research direction. If only someone would have told me, "yeah, we tried that and it didn't really wor
456.
by wenc 2y ago
I just realized all the data tools I use are animals. Pandas Polars (polar bear) DuckDB Python
457.
by wenc 2y ago
Also a tip: for interactive queries, do not store Parquet in S3. S3 is high-throughput but also high-latency storage. It's good for bulk reads, but not random reads, and querying Parquet involves random reads. Parquet on S3 is ok for b
458.
by wenc 2y ago
Yes Wes McKinney was involved in both Pandas and Parquet and Arrow.
459.
by wenc 2y ago
Not real time, just historical. (I don’t see why it can’t be used for real time though... but haven’t thought through the caveats) Also, not sure what you mean by Parquet is not good at appending? On the contrary, Parquet is designed for an
460.
by wenc 2y ago
The article calls out Python and DuckDB as possible successors. I remember being very impressed by Kdb+ (went to their meetups in Chicago). Large queries ran almost instantaneously. The APL like syntax was like a magic incantation that only
461.
by wenc 2y ago
> The new format would ideally have types, the files would be sharded and have metadata to quickly scan them, and the tooling should be able to make simple joins, ideally automatically based on the metadata since most of the times there
462.
by wenc 2y ago
I haven't thought about sqlite as a data interchange format, but I was looking at deploying sqlite as a data lake format some time ago, and found it wanting. 1. Dynamically typed (with type affinity) [1]. This causes problems with ther
463.
by wenc 2y ago
There are folks who still directly query CSV formats in a data lake using a query engine like Athena or Spark or Redshift Spectrum — which ends up being much slower and consuming more resources than is necessary due to full table scans. CSV
464.
by wenc 2y ago
Most people are moving away from CSV for big datasets, except in exceptional cases involving linear reads (append only ETL). CSV has one big upside which is human readability. But so many downsides: poor random access, no typing, no compres
465.
by wenc 2y ago
I’m in my 40s and have been eating Big Mac’s for more than 20 years and my baseline was not when I was a kid but from just 10 years ago. Big Macs have gotten perceptibly smaller while Whoppers have stayed the same. Maybe the weight is still
466.
by wenc 2y ago
A Big Mac in the US today is also much smaller than what it once was. It’s a Small Mac these days. A Burger King Whopper today is the size of a Big Mac of years gone by. The King still does burgers better than the clown.
467.
by wenc 2y ago
I don’t think FF is irrelevant (the data is questionable). But supposing that it is, what specially do you think FF double down on with respect to catching up with Chrome? Would love to hear what you think the gaps are.
468.
by wenc 2y ago
FF is more than that. It has multi account containers, which lets you work with isolated browser sessions — super useful when you have to login to multiple accounts. I switched form Chrome to Firefox some time back and have no regrets. I wa
469.
by wenc 2y ago
It’s hard to generalize. Americans from different parts of the country have different relationships with frugality and entitlement. Lower income people in high COL places like NY typically know how to survive through frugality. They’re more
470.
by wenc 2y ago
One problem I’ve encountered is the inverse mapping is not necessarily locality preserving. Hilbert maps (x,y) -> h such that nearby h correspond to nearby x,y. But the inverse isn’t true: similar x,y don’t always have similar h. This is
471.
by wenc 2y ago
Space filling curves like Hilbert sound esoteric but they’re actually useful in for high performance database indexing. DuckDB has a Hilbert index. https://github.com/rustyconover/duckdb-lindel-extension It’s not just
472.
by wenc 2y ago
The common refrain is that "time in the market always beats timing the market". The implicit assumption in that refrain is that, despite periodic dips, the U.S. stock market always goes up over time. This has been true since the G
473.
by wenc 2y ago
Green hydrogen (from renewables) is not the cheapest option to my knowledge. In fact it is not yet cost-competitive. The electrolysis process is not still efficient today (but improving) and does not yet have scale, and the cost is several
474.
by wenc 2y ago
VS Code is the emacs that emacs never was. It has great extensions, lets you work on remote machines as if they were local, and supports language servers, notebook interfaces, and all manners of code intelligence.
475.
by wenc 2y ago
It really depends on your work. If you're doing mundane work, keeping notes is just busywork and doesn't really have a payoff. But if you're constantly trying to solve novel problems, and have episodic ideas that are half-ba
476.
by wenc 2y ago
It’s in the linked article.
477.
by wenc 2y ago
That’s an apples to oranges comparison (comparing a desktop PC with devices). Desktops last forever. You should be comparing to a 10 year old Dell laptop running latest Windows or a Samsung Galaxy S3 running the latest android. Windows PCs
478.
by wenc 2y ago
That simulator hits home. The discouragement and anguish was real. I finished my Ph.D. in 6 years rather than the usual 4 1/2 because ideas just didn't work out. My topic was much harder than those of my peers. That said, I felt t
479.
by wenc 2y ago
I used to use Jupyter and Jupyter Lab, but by far the most able Jupyter interface today is actually VS Code (I use this every day). The interface is sleek, the language server and debugger are built in (so completions, variable renaming, st
480.
by wenc 2y ago
Swiss farmers are highly subsidized and there are high tariffs for imports. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Switzerland#Agricul... This follows from Swiss neutrality -- you have to protect your domestic food s

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