Scubabear68

I don’t think this is the case at all. The whole purpose of private forecasting is to judge how your efforts are doing with the electorate, and adjust your strategy, poll/assess again, rinse and repeat.

They don’t just forecast and shrug at the results.

Incredibly smart of him to hold the rights to his models personally, and only license them to 538 (and hence ABC/Disney).

I think this is a very pragmatic and common sense approach to getting the most out of a monolith.

Whether there is 1 binary or N binaries I think really depends on context of the code, and is more of an implementation detail than something vital.

I used C in the late 80s and 90s because it was the only viable option for many use cases. In the late 90s I got heavily involved in Java, and C usage dropped. Had some spikes of C++ work (which I despised), and then working in many different languages with no real work on C or C++ in at least 18 years or so.

What always killed me the most in C was the absolutely anemic standard library. OS’ had more libraries, but still very low level stuff.

Oh, yes, absolutely.

At one point Terradata claimed they had a tool that could auto convert to something else with 99% success rate, or something like that. The reality on our samples we tried was like 40%.

Plus, Pl/SQL code is often very “chatty” with the data, if you try to port it as is you will often suddenly see performance issues as you see the amount of data that has to be sent over the wire from the DB to your code tier.

I have worked with systems with nearly 100k lines code in Oracle stored procs, and another legendary place with around 4 million.

It was a nightmare. Deployments were very difficult, there was little tooling, reasoning about the system was difficult, and of course running so much code in Oracle required very expensive licenses.

And it is much harder to hire hard core PL/SQL devs over Java, C#, Python or whatever.

You really don’t want significant code in the DB. It can be useful for some cases, like automating audit tables, but that is about it.

And for triggers - I feel for anyone maintaining business logic located in triggers. What a debugging hell that can be.

It has always boggled my mind that military subs run around under the water largely blind, due to the fact that using active sonar would give their position away, and passives are going to miss many things like this.

The theory and the practice of CDS’ have always been wildly different.

In theory, a CDS is “insurance” if a bond issuer defaults.

In reality, CDS’ are used to go in and out of positions on companies because contracts are too difficult and expensive to cancel. The end result is big firms end up with huge, complicated CDS positions all over the place for 5-10 years until the contracts cancel.

A CDS on the United States is another stupid end result just like CDO2 vehicles were.

The CDS market is just so incredibly flawed when markets are stressed.

No, what I mean is your code scaling is now directly tied to how your DB scales. Your SP code can be impacting the rest of your DB, and vice-versa. I have seen large SP based systems to require Oracle boxes to be scaled up at enormous cost (hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of SP).

Not because of slow queries, but just the cost of executing the stored procs themselves.

Yep. Releasing, testing, debugging, etc are all more difficult in stored procs than in a “regular” language. Stored procs have other down sides:

  - often unique to that DB, so locks you in
  - Scaling that code is now tied to scaling your DB tier
  - Tooling is often very inadequate
  - Versioning and backwards compatibility of code can be a challenge

All true. But you have to factor in all the historical baggage, things like the weirdness of Files, introduction of references,etc.

It all just ends up feeling deeply weirds and unique compared to other languages. Hence the need to relearn it every time I touch it.

Years ago I coined the phrase “Perlaphobia”, the fear that Perl will come back into my life again and again, and every time it happens I have to relearn it all over again almost from scratch.

Still happens about every five years, although I am reaching for Python more and more in those situations.

What always kills me is the weirdness of the basic data structures, array/stack function calls, and the truly impressively weird ways Objects are done.

A good example of this is are mobile applications used in logistics for tracking movements within a terminal. Often the wifi environment is terrible and the operators will spend significant time not connected. They often have fat clients with local storage, and when the reconnect the sync bidirectionally - they upload whatever they have done since last connection, and they download changes others have made that may affect them in the meantime.

There were far fewer developers back then, so we are hard to find. But I am in that bracket, I started in the late 80’s. Very fortunate timing for me to literally grow up with technology.

Interesting that the primary way they are advertising to fund this is vis Apple Card’s rewards eg your cash back gets deposited in this savings account. So it is encouraging you to use your Apple Card more.

This is a great read of a humble start of history. The A..B concurrency printing, helping Linus out implementing Sprintf, learning assembly. Building it all towards a coherent system.

What was truly profound is how Linux and other open source systems and libraries completely cracked open systems software for the masses. Back in the early 90s, everything around Unix, operating systems, compilers, tools, everything was crazy expensive to buy. And all of a sudden here came this thundering herd of code that was all completely free. Of course Gnu stuff had been around for awhile, but Linux is what propelled it into warp speed adoption. In thr 90s I was privileged to work at Bear Stearns and had a Sparc Station on my desk and regular interactions with SunOS, Solaris, and HPUX for the guys downstairs. Outside of University and business, it was hard for individuals to break into it.

By the late 90s any old anybody could get a CD ROM with Red Hat or whatever.

Absolutely. That is what extreme organizations do. I monitor some extreme environmental groups who mostly are crying wolf about every little thing on the planet. But occasionally they twig to something real, and the more conservative orgs start catching on and taking up the call.

FSF is constantly telling us the sky is falling. It isn’t, and your point about GNU/Linux is a good example. The FSF is still valuable in those rare cases where they find serious issues. I just learn to ignore them on the nonsense side.

From my perspective, movements need multiple organizations that exist on different levels of the “extremism” spectrum. Just like there are various environmental NGO’s, some very radical, and others more mild and open to compromise, the free software movement needs the same.

The FSF is the extreme org, the canary in the coal mine that is going to alert on critical issues, but also which frankly are going to send out a lot of false alerts. They are the die hards that will get it wrong constantly, but also will be the early alert system for true critical issues.

We need other, more moderate voices they are willing to compromise more and be less extreme. That should not happen within FSF, but as a separate org.

V2 Aurora costs really took me by surprise at my last gig they used it. It seems to be extremely expensive compared to just about anything else.

I think the article ranking is probably good enough.

Where I have more trouble with is with comment-ranking within an article. The interface makes it hard to understand conversational flow, and of course that flow changes over time according to whatever the algorithm does. This makes it very hard to catch up later on an article’s comments and get a view of what has changed since my last view. Maybe there is a way to do this via the interface, but if so it’s not obvious.

This obviously is very important.

However, the more important aspect of Jesus’ teachings was to steer believers away from the Old Testament and Jewish faith, and into something new.

Jesus is the catalyst for change from one religion to a new one based on the old. Indeed, one of the many contradictions of Christianity is having the New Testament contradict the Old Testament in so many ways.

This advice is so spot on. Too often, I try to write a perfect essay from moment one, and inevitably it is all a crazy, incoherent mess. What I have learned, like the author, is to let my brain get it all out in an orderly fashion (linearly, via writing), and that one linear act will start setting up background processes in my brain that are doing processing: filtering, highlighting, pattern matching.

By the time I start a second draft, it is often from scratch, with elements from the first brought in. It is far more coherent and organized, and may move in a radically different direction than the first draft did.

You iterate depending on how important and big this is. For something short, two drafts or so is fine. When I did some legal stuff (not a lawyer, but making some important legal filings) I did many drafts and outlines.

But that act of the first linear writing to get your brain marching is a key first step.

The tech has changed, but the Flamewars were just as hot 2 decades ago! Bob was never afraid to have an opinion.

A bit sad to see all those deadlinks in the comments though. From what I recall sites like JRoller were captured by the Way Back machine, but images seem to have been lost. At least they were for my blog at the time.

NYTimes picked it up as breaking news:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/05/technology/cash-app-found...

Finally a positive use for LinkedIn - a lot of Tributes to Bob over there:

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?fetchDeterminis...

I remember fondly interacting with him quite a bit 20 years ago early (?) in his "crazy bob" phase on theserverside.com, and the epic flamewars around Java backend frameworks and app servers. Quite a shock to hear of his death.

The gist of what she is alleged to have done:

“An internal investigation revealed that Javice and Frank chief growth officer Olivier Amar — referred to as "CC-1" in the federal charges — paid a New York data science professor $18,000 to create nearly 4 million fake accounts in order to juice Frank's user numbers, JPMorgan alleged in its lawsuit. Amar later bought a list of student email addresses from a marketing firm for $105,000 in order to make those accounts seem more credible, JPMorgan alleged”.

It’s the phones. I have to drive my kids regularly 45 minutes to school on a highway with very high accident rates. It is people staring at their phones approaching dangerous parts of the road with lots of sudden stops and interchanges.

A sudden secondary effect - legal pot is leading to many more stoned drivers where I live (NJ).

Sorry, no. It’s not all cops. I know several people in law enforcement, most of them are very decent people and don’t do nasty things.

If policing was as bad as some people want us to believe, we’d all be cowering in our homes afraid to go outside.

I expected my post to be a roller coaster.

But seriously, taking an HN viewpoint, the GOP has stopped looking at any data other than polls a long time ago (and has only accelerated that trend over time). And real harm is being done to people in the meanwhile.