msluyter · HackerTrans

msluyter

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Submissions

I Recommend My Clients Not Use KSQL and Kafka Streams

jesse-anderson.com

17 pointsby msluyter7년 전2 comments

A Model of Technological Unemployment

danielsusskind.com

1 pointsby msluyter9년 전0 comments

What personality makes a programmer?

digest.bps.org.uk

2 pointsby msluyter11년 전0 comments

The Optimal Office

theatlantic.com

2 pointsby msluyter12년 전0 comments

Welcome, Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us?

motherjones.com

4 pointsby msluyter13년 전0 comments

Developers are key to winning the tech wars

washingtonpost.com

2 pointsby msluyter14년 전0 comments

Matt Glassman on the anti-SOPA outages

mattglassman.com

2 pointsby msluyter15년 전0 comments

Exodus Recession: the virtual economy causes recession?

terranova.blogs.com

1 pointsby msluyter16년 전0 comments

Tyler Cowen reviews past NYTimes' Year in Ideas issues

nytimes.com

1 pointsby msluyter16년 전0 comments

Intelligent Individuals Don’t Make Groups Smarter

wired.com

7 pointsby msluyter16년 전1 comments

Robots and the Future of Unemployment

business.theatlantic.com

16 pointsby msluyter17년 전26 comments

comments

3개월 전discuss

Somewhat related. I've also been generating lots of markdown files, which I've occasionally wanted to print out (so I can rest my eyes, or just read them somewhere other than my desk.) First class (free) printing support for rendered markdown seems like a lacuna in the overall ecosystem. I'm currently using the "print" plugin for VS Code, which opens rendered markdown in a browser window, which I print from there. Curious if anyone knows of better options?

6개월 전discuss

Really cool deck! Anyone out there play Mu? It's an _excellent_ trick taking card game. One of the few (complex, trick-taking... I'm not counting stuff like Uno in this genre) card games that I know of that works really well with 5 or 6 players. This deck _almost_ would work for Mu, but it'd need different point values. (I keep having to rebuy new Mu games when the deck wears out so I've been contemplating other possibilities.)

9개월 전discuss

A third problem is that, depending on the project, one's recollection might be pretty fuzzy. A fourth is that, while you might be a great programmer, perhaps you've never had the opportunity to do the work of the design or greenfield development, meaning, you may not have a ton of insight into the design work that went into the project. E.g., perhaps you mostly do maintenance work on a large number of projects, so your overall knowledge of each is fairly shallow.

10개월 전discuss

Perhaps the joke is that the valence of going backward or forward isn't equivalent. IIRC, some studies show that people will generally accept smaller gains to avoid the possibility of loss. Eg, loss has a greater (negative) emotional impact than equivalent (positive) gains.

10개월 전discuss

Random family seating anecdote. A couple of years ago, we were on vacation and my wife had to go home early to tend for a sick pet. My daughter and I also re-arranged our flight to get home early, and ended up in like the D boarding group (on Southwest). So we're getting on the plane and we're almost dead last, and there are very few seats left together anywhere. My 6 yr old daughter was not really emotionally equipped to sit alone at that point.

We get about 2/3 of the down and there's now nothing, so I say -- with some desperation -- "If someone would be willing to switch seats so my daughter and I can sit together I'll give you $20." A guy says "I don't want the money but I'll switch."

Which sort of shows that if you're not a jerk, and you ask nicely, often people will go out of their way to help you.

Families who seem to expect other passengers to move, especially when there's assigned seating, are another story, and deserve the condemnation they get, IMHO.

Is anyone arguing "all fringe ideas must be false" or, conversely, "widely accepted ideas are true?" That's basically just argumentum ad populum, and I don't think that's the argument of the paper. Rather, it's that those with fringe ideas tend to be over-confident in their beliefs.

IME, a scientific/empirical mindset tends to lead one to a state of epistemological modesty, in which few things are unassailably true, and beliefs are provisional until disproven. One crucial feature of that mindset is the notion of falsifiability. Knowing if/how ideas may be falsified helps one avoid leaping down conspiracy rabbit holes. <- (A likely unfalsifiable statement!)

"Step out" is how to get out of the lower level frameworks, and or "step over" to avoid diving into them in the first place. I can't speak for other IDEs, but all of the JetBrains products have these.

This was my question. There's a weird sort of self-cannibalism that this hints at. The LLM is only as good as it is because it's been able to train on existing SO answers. But if over time, SO content production declines, then the LLM results will be less reliable. It seems that a new equilibrium could be one in which -- for newer questions/concerns -- both SO and LLMs will be worse than they are now.

Saying this as a rather old person myself...

I have a theory that, wrt knowledge, the relative advantage of age has been at least partially eroded by rapid technological advancement. In traditional/tribal societies, prior to the 20th century, wisdom actually accumulated with age, because the pace of change was slower. Wisdom & knowledge could be passed on from generation to generation.

Now, wisdom and knowledge become obsolete quickly. Many things you knew 20 years ago are outdated. The ICE engine you learned how to fix as a kid is now computer controlled, or has been replaced by batteries. Your optimistic/open/friendly mindset now makes you easy pickings for online scammers. Hell, even your family's secret cherished muffin recipe is spurned by your grandchildren because it has gluten or they're vegan or keto or whatever.

All this is just a take, but when I look at voting patterns in particular, I find myself pessimistic that the elderly are wiser than average.

2년 전discuss

| Private schools are outrageously expensive.

Yes, and... In states where property taxes fund schools, there are basically two ways to pay for a good school: a) go to a private school, b) live in a school zone with high real estate values. At various points my wife and I calculated that 8 years at ~25k/yr tuition would work out to about the same as the ~200k house price delta we'd have to pay to move to a better school zone.

And I suppose option #3 is rationing, which is how some schools do it (our daughter is in a gifted academy where admission is limited via lottery.)

2년 전discuss

You're not alone. Type "best ev that's" into Google and the first autocomplete will be "best ev that's not a Tesla."

2년 전discuss

Majesty! That was it, thanks!

2년 전discuss

I've often speculated about a radical interpretation of this idea, inspired by a old video game (whose name I forget). In the game, you rule a kingdom, but unlike, say, Civilization, you don't directly manage things. You set goals and create quests, like "slay this monster and get some reward." And the quests would inspire heroes to join your kingdom, and things would grow from there. Iirc, you create incentives around your economy as well.

Imagine if there were product goals ("implement feature X") with some reward [1] attached and you could leave it up to teams or individuals to claim that goal if they desired. You could choose the goals you wanted to claim, recruit coworkers to help you, (eg, self form teams). PMs/Management would basically be in charge of allocating rewards for the goals.

I imagine it'd be a terrible system in practice for a number of reasons, but I enjoy thinking about ways you could attempt to make it workable. For example,

[1] rewards -- I don't think you could tie rewards directly to people's paychecks. Do that too much and I think you'd create perverse incentives. But perhaps things like swag, gifts, time off, or just bragging rights, honor, and glory might work.

[2] coordination -- a danger would people redundantly working on the same goal. You'd need a way to prevent that.

[3] other perverse incentives -- you might get an overabundance of folks choosing the "fun" goals, for example. (After all, engineers may be more motivated by that than other things.) Here I imagine the rewards for unsexy things would need to rise over time if nobody opted for them. Or, you make first dibs on some other "fun" goal the prize for achieving a less fun goal.

2년 전discuss

At some point Threads started to suppress (or at least, not boost?) political content or news. Which sort of crippled it as a "current events + hot takes" Twitter/X competitor. Bluesky doesn't appear to have this limitation (though perhaps for some this is a feature).

2년 전discuss

Orlando resident here. Disagree with "great climate" and "affordable living."

I honestly don't understand those who say Florida has great weather. We have basically two seasons:

Wet season: Hot and humid. Being outside after ~10am feels like being in a sauna. It rains nearly every afternoon. Usable daylight hours for outdoor activities, when you subtract the hottest part of the day and the rain time is like 3-4 hours.

Dry season: Mild & less humid. Less rain.

The problem is that wet season is like 6-8 months out of the year! I wouldn't call any place that's this miserable for this much of the year a place with "great climate."

Yesterday, I took off work and went to Bok Tower Gardens with my family (neat place, btw). It was insanely hot and humid, and I was pretty miserable.

Prior to living in Orlando I lived in Austin, TX, which is also hot but felt more comfortable because it's so much drier. And perhaps I'm bitter and making an unfair comparison, but Orlando, at least, is a cultural wasteland compared to Austin. And although real estate was luckily much less expensive when we moved here in 2021, prices have risen rapidly over the last few years and aren't quite the bargain they previously were. You can find cheap housing if you want to live in one of Orlando's many soulless exurbias, but if you want to live close to downtown or in Winter Park, prices are on par with Austin.

2년 전discuss

It definitely appears much worse for girls, but afaict, depression has risen in boys as well, just by not as much. See graphs here: [1]

So if social medial is harmful in general, I don't view prohibiting it a "punishment" for boys; perhaps like less of a benefit? Regarding your second point, I imagine the data would provide some clues. If the kids that are now teens were always more depressed, I'd imagine that we'd see more pre-teen depression ~3-8 years ago. I haven't looked into it closely.

And I grant that social science statistics are often problematic -- I imagine it'll take a while to really know what's going on.

[1] https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa...

2년 전discuss

I think the empirical evidence is fairly clear, actually.[1][2]

Having struggled with various forms of screen addiction myself, I find it sort of odd that a lot of people are so laissez faire about giving children the most addictive device ever created.[3] Whether or not this law is a good idea, I think it's incumbent on parents to monitor and limit screen time and access to social media. Which is difficult! When my wife and I are tired, setting my daughter down in front of an ipad is the easiest way to get a break.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23522...

[2] https://jeanmtwenge.substack.com/p/yes-its-the-phones-and-so...

[3] Sure, it's not technically "the device," itself, but rather what it makes possible.

2년 전discuss

I remember being astounded by Johnny Mnemonic when in came out in Omni Magazine, of all places.

(Incidentally, for those old enough to have encountered that magazine, you can see it online at: https://archive.org/details/omni-archive/). I have a ton of nostalgia for Omni. It reflected the techno-optimism of the era and along with G.E.B., was a profound influence on in my life, ultimately leading me into CS.)

2년 전discuss

I worked on a fairly complex invoicing system and couple of things not (directly) mentioned:

  * Forward billing vs billing in arrears. We had to treat different customers differently. 
  * Tiered billing -- e.g., if a customer used > X amount of services, they got a discount.
  * Special rules around when billing starts for new customers (e.g., no bill for the first month).

There are probably more I've forgotten. We billed by data usage, mostly, and I used to say that their bill was the integral of the customer's usage graph over a month -- which was true -- but that explanation didn't gain much traction with the accounting folks.

2년 전discuss

It allows you to separate certain essentials (getting possibly important notifications, calls) from temptations that you want to avoid (twitter/X, instagram, tic tok, etc...)