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Exuma

3,067 karma · joined January 6, 2015

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Exuma··on Ask HN: How often do you restart your computer?
2 times a month on osx. I do t even need to I just do it when updating. OSX super stable
Exuma··on Shopify Subdomain Takeovers
So how does it actually work? The article is so poorly written I don’t understand the exact mechanism that would allow this
Exuma··on Sora: Creating video from text
My dad is 80 and willingly loves to listen to me explain how neural networks work, then he also read about them, busy beaver functions, kafka, and all kinds of crazy shit I tell him abour. This is all in your mind. You are as young as your mind is.
Exuma··on SQL for data scientists in 100 queries
Fantastic summary, saving for just general tips when trying to show people SQL
Exuma··on Physical cash is dying–and you don't need to be a conspiracist to worry
A better question is do I make everyone else’s dollar worth more for the duration that I hold and don’t spend my dollars
Exuma··on Neovide – A simple, no-nonsense, cross-platform GUI for Neovim
That was a pseudo-background hack because of a neovim upstream issue I believe. Now it reflects the REAL background color
Exuma··on Neovide – A simple, no-nonsense, cross-platform GUI for Neovim
There has been a large amount of open source to improve window management, I'd say check again!
Exuma··on Neovide – A simple, no-nonsense, cross-platform GUI for Neovim
Neovide is SUPER awesome. I use it daily and I absolutely LOVE it
Exuma··on Ask HN: Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?
Imagine an idea more detached from reality than yours. Wow.
Exuma··on Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
It’s very obvious that’s what he means.
Exuma··on FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s
Got any undercover advice for Airlines or plane models to avoid? When you book at ticket is there anything you just won't fly knowing what you know?
Exuma··on A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages
You can’t leave us hanging like that … so what happened. What did you learn? Was it weird reading it? How do you see yourself?
Exuma··on Ruby 3.3
Just enabled YJIT this morning. Merry CHristmas!
Exuma··on Code Is Not Technical Debt
I think you're thinking I'm doubting some ability you have to go viral, I'm not even talking about that at all. I never was, I just brought it up because you made some point like "just be sure you go viral as well", and it was a curious (hilarious) thought that I owned one of the largest viral sites.

My original comment was really simply just about....... giving your writing the headline it deserves, one that highlights your unique perspective/life experience, one draws me in. Shows me some curious aspect about your perspective I can learn from

Thats' what I want to read, not another garbage in garbage out bullshit headline.

But do your thang

Exuma··on Code Is Not Technical Debt
Once again, this is a very unoriginal take.

i realize it's the internet, people lie, blah blah. But not everything out of the ordinary is a lie. Consider for a moment it's true.

The amount of people that just immediately reject something with the answer "prove it or you're lying", this in itself is such a basic idea, its surface level, 1 dimensional layer of thought. Try to read between the lines, because you are basically closing your mind off to thousands of potential factors, this complex web of cause and effect, and immediately rejecting some idea out of the gate simply because .... I don't name something?

At even the most simplest of levels, your method of thinking doesn't even work. I could just lie, I could say I owned X site, and X tool. I could literally google in 2-3 mins, find a random viral site from the time period I'm talking about, and then some tool similar to buzzsumo, and I could say "yes I built that"

IMO - Life is far better with an open mind by default, than a closed one

Just because I said your headline is unoriginal as shit doesn't mean you have to rubber band reflex the other direction that "I MUST BE A LIAR!!!" as the only explanation.

Exuma··on Code Is Not Technical Debt
I didn't stop when it became a thing, I stopped after running the site for over 5 years and algorithms changed and it became more of an adops arbitrage opportunity than actually "going viral." The occurance rate of true virility dropped orders of magnitude once everyone started leveraging the same headlines, etc.

I'll read your post

Exuma··on Code Is Not Technical Debt
No, I'll pass. But you're welcome to not believe me.
Exuma··on Code Is Not Technical Debt
Lol this is funny because many years ago I owned one of the largest viral sites that got billions of visits per year, and then sold it, before clickbait became popular, during its rise, and then during its fall.

In fact I've written tools in the past to analyze virility of headlines (around ~20,000 of them)

This is all beside the point... because my original comment wasn't about trying to go viral and get views.. that is easy. It was not being extremely fucking unoriginal.

Exuma··on Code Is Not Technical Debt
Yes, that is obviously true. Both points.

The problem lies in presenting your fact to other people.

Theres a very surface level way to do it which is "me fact. smash fact into ur hed. now ur fact. gronk smash"

Another is to actually attempt to be persuasive, to build curiosity, to let the reader step in for a moment into your mind, where they can pick up a gem they might not have in their own life experience, and directly apply it. What does this person know that i do not? what is he considering that i am not?

Its a subtle approach, that is nuanced.

It isnt extremely blunt, as if your only way to build curiosity is to state blunt facts as truths, hoping that people either agree and click to validate opinions, or disagree and generate a bunch of comments saying "youre wrong".

This in itself wouldn't be so bad, but its just legitimately the most NOT creative, MOST generic way to do it. It's the "salt" of headlines. If any person has any self respect for their writing I suspect they wouldn't want to serve the most important meal of their lifetime using the only ingredient as salt.

You can just look at the huge swaths, oceanic waves of generic "THIS IS A FACT" headlines. Its so fucking painful at this point, that I immediately reject them in the same way that I reject ads and news.

It has nothing to do with the person's actual opinion, it has nothing to do with even the fact that the headline is written as a fact (which in itself is a useful device sometimes), its that 10 million other headlines do it. It's like the lowest form of headline, and it is as unoriginal as it gets. and THAT is what painful, unoriginal people being unoriginal yet still doing it. Perhaps they do not care, I do not know.

There are absolutely better/more creative ways to build curiosity though.

A good example is viral youtube videos... I can't think of any viral youtube headlines that are written in this way. A good headline takes serious thought and creativity. Imagine if every youtube video was just stated as "Code is Not Technical debt", and the next video "code is technical debt" and the next video "code is life" and the next video "code is death"......... super yawn

Exuma··on Code Is Not Technical Debt
There is in fact, no problem at all
Exuma··on Code Is Not Technical Debt
When a headline is written as a fact, I see it as a fact.

I refuse to read uncreative factually written headlines as any other way, as its basically attempting to spoon feed the reader into some basic idea.

This is in a similar way to how CNN or popular news stations talk to you as if you are a 5th grader.

I read headlines as they're written, and creative headlines get my attention, and stupid headlines go into the waste bin of all the other stupid headlines stated as facts which are not facts.

Exuma··on Code Is Not Technical Debt
> is my mental model

Exact proof what what I'm saying. Your mental model isn't a "fact" it is a perception group of beliefs.

A red ball is red is a fact.

"all code is technical debt" is a stupidly worded headline as if its a fact, when it is absolutely nothing more than a useless opinion in a sea of a million contradicting other opinions that say the opposite.

Instead, a headline can be worded to not be stupid by not attempting to write it as a fact, but as the ACTUAL benefit, or ACTUAL point being made...

Your perspective is unique, special, in makes you different. Share THAT, emphasize THAT. dont water it down with stupid genericness.

The original title by Paul McMahon is equally as stupid as this one

Yet, people keep doing it, over, and over, ad nauseum. I think people just simply don't realize how unoriginal they are, its like do they have even a fraction of awareness to try to be different?

Your headline is how you captivate people, actually try to state the intent/purpose so it's useful, to get into the mind of the person reading.

Not to use a hammer trying to clean some fine china.

"Keeping my projects maintainable by thinking about them differently" or something, literally anything. I didnt look at your article except skimming, and this is an off the cuff idea in 1 second, but you get the idea. It's something that the reader sees as a benefit, or something nuanced that they can learn... some part of your perspective they can integrate... not some basic-level statement of fact they're going to immediately agree/disagree with... as if this is your only tool in your toolbox to get attention or build curiosity

Exuma··on Code Is Not Technical Debt
I often think how every headline on HN could be inverted into its 180 degree opposite and it would get as many upvotes.

I often also think its crazy how people are painfully unaware of this fact... I swear these have got to be the stupidest headlines, and yet people don't seem to ever have an original thought about it, just for a fraction of a moment..... a moment of awareness that shows them that their factually stated headline is actually 100% not a fact.

Exuma··on Transaction Isolation in Postgres
This is literally one of those topics I have to come back and read time and time and time again every time I need it like 2 times a year. Maybe this article will finally make it stick.
Exuma··on Bad NEWS, Emacs
Ah this is incredible, thank you. I didnt realize that about <c-r>... wow, that is crazy cool.

Next question, do you usually add stuff to buffers in alphabetical order... a,b,c or do you pick something easier within reach like a,s,d (or something else entirely)

Exuma··on Bad NEWS, Emacs
Ive used vim for 10+ years, and I have known about yanking to different registers, but usually I only use the main register 99.9999% of the time. can you explain your use cases for using multiple registers? I should start doing this perhaps, but I can't think of many times I want to copy more than one thing at once, maybe once a month? But I also could be not thinking of the right examples.
Exuma··on The challenges of supporting foreign key constraints
Awesome, thank you. That's kind of what I was thinking, I'm glad you confirmed it. How exactly did you sync or data from PG -> Clickhouse?

I was considering using something like Airbyte, but then I thought this may actually be complex if PG rows are updating/deleting it means I also need to sync single rows (or groups of rows) to clickhouse, and I wasn't sure how the support was for that.

Exuma··on The challenges of supporting foreign key constraints
Can someone help me with a suggestion?

Ive been researching databases now for several days straight, the choices are overwhelming but I've pretty much narrowed my use case down to an RDBMS system.

I need to essentially handle 100's of millions of "leads" (and 10s of millions per day) which can make up any number of user fields. over 1B total

I need to resolve duplicate leads either in realtime or near realtime. A duplication can occur across a combination of 1 or more fields, so basically OLTP type operations (select, update, delete on single rows)

I do need to run large OLAP queries as well across all data

I've looked at things like scylla and whatnot but they seem too heavy duty for my volume. it's not like i need to store trillions of messages like discord in some huge event log.

I was considering these 3 options...

1. planetscale

2. citus

3. cockroachdb

I havent really narrowed it down further than this, but i liked the idea of still having RDBMS features without needing to worry about storage and scaling with just sheer write volume.

It seemed i could then do my basic OLTP stuff that i need, and citus had a cool demo how some OLAP query on 1B rows ran in 20s with 10 nodes, and that also fits a reasonable time for queries (BI tools will be used for that)

Exuma··on LLM Visualization
This is really awesome but I at least wish there were a few added sentences around how I'm supposed to intuitively think about the purpose of why it's like that. For example, I see a T x C matrix of 6 x 48... but at this step, before it's fed into the net, what is this supposed to represent?
Exuma··on After Boeing declines to pay up, ransomware group leaks 45 GB of data
Very interesting.. so what makes Mirai so important as a base that they can't just rewrite it of sorts? Is it just a lot of work/boilerplate? Or would it be too time consuming to rewrite some base code so the fingerprint is different?
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