pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Don’t forget your investors and your board.

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

It was already tried in the US. The agreed upon results were that humans want alcohol and the downstream effects made society worse e.g. increase in alcohol consumption, empowering organized crime and corrupting the police.

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

“New Kids on the Blech” is spot on.

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Thanks for sharing your work. I too have the problems you’re attempting to address. Makes me think of LabView (which I would recommend checking out for inspiration if you’re unaware of it).

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Yeah, that original iPhone launch keynote is something I like to watch every so often. It really emphasized we’re only doing this because we see what’s wrong with smartphones and this is our vision. They didn’t go “we made the best stylus you can have”.

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

That’s what I was trying to express. We implemented the features that were unique and interesting too late. We should have led with them and build some compelling demos

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Yeah that’s pretty much what happened. What I was thinking was we over estimated what the table stakes were. We were building a collaborative SQL editor aka notebooks. We spent way too much time getting it working with different dbs instead of focusing on a couple and building the things that actually made us stand out. A single customer wouldn’t really care about all the dbs we could talk to that were the one she was using.

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I learned something similar founding a startup. If I could do it again, I would have aggressively avoided pursuing the table stakes feature in our space. Instead we should have done the minimal amount to be comfortable that our architecture could support the enterprisey things. We should have then concentrated everything on something that would set us apart, something we could demo and get a “wow… I see where this could go” instead of something like “oh this is just a clone of x”.

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I’ve had this same thought but was unsure what the licensing for the data would be.

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

I have a daily updated dataset that has the HN data split out by months. I've published it on my web page, but it’s served from my home server so I don’t want to link to it directly. Each month is about 30mb of compressed csv. I’ve wanted to torrent it, but don’t know how to get enough seeders since each month will produce a new torrent file (unless I’m mistaken). If you’re interested, send me a message. My email is mrpatfarrell. Use gmail for the domain.

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

A few are dated but number 74 is one I think about a lot when programming.

  Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?

Important to remember this was written in the early ‘80’s at the end of Perlis’s long career. For most of these to stay relevant and humorous 50 years later is pretty impressive.

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

If you are distributing software to an audience who want to use your thing without having to build it, then something like this is much more appealing than virtualenv.

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

And not every optimization is worth the effort.

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Let’s not forget sl

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

Makes me think about Dijkstra being horrified to learn that the US was sending astronauts into space using unproven computer code [0]. Eventually, we'll have programmers trusting the AI generated code as much as we trust compiler generated code. Sometimes I think this will be the evolution of programming (like binary to assembler to compiled to interpreted to generated)... Other times I think about how we've grown used to buggier and buggier code and yet we press on.

0: https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/translating-dijakstra.html

pfarrell

il y a 2 ansdiscuss

There’s a neat documentary from the late 1970’s, “Farewell etaoin shrdlu”. It’s about the final day the New York Times was printed using their linotype machines.

https://youtu.be/1MGjFKs9bnU

pfarrell

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

I went through it at the beginning of the year. In the end, a cold inbound from a recruiter for a leadership position that I wasn’t right for led to her referring me to another recruiter with something that was perfect. The point? Work every angle and treat looking for a job as your full time job.

You only have to find one gig, so don’t get sucked into self-pity endlessly focusing on everyone who’s having trouble, when it happens, have something constructive to divert you.

If you’re going for remote work, expect that the whole process will take longer and the same rules won’t apply. The candidate pool is vast and you need to stand out. You need to apply early, when the position is posted.

Realize your resume is likely being parsed by software before it’s even screened by HR. If you can get your resume directly to a hiring manager, do that. Otherwise consider feeding your resume through various parsers to see how it looks to algorithms. Cover letters that are written to the exact specs of the job as posted can’t hurt.

pfarrell

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

I look at videos like these as gateways to get someone excited about a subject, not as scholarly works. What you say is good to keep in mind on any video. You can’t get the full depth of anything complicated in 30 minutes, but it can make you want to learn more.

pfarrell

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Veritasium has an excellent video explaining the proof and the historical context.

https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo

pfarrell

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Without any context or followup, this seems like old news that doesn't need to be rehashed on the front page today. This event pre-dates the Microsoft purchase of Github.

Submissions

Found in the SQLite Docs: Sudoku Solver and Mandelbrot Set Approximation

Tabula, OCR for PDFs

Google Gay Marriage

What Worries Scientists

List of Colors

Ask HN: Help plan my Silicon Valley trip

Ask HN: Ensuring unique account logins across the globe

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