abhijitr

For me personally working in big tech, there was a sharp increase of work-related malaise in 2020 that never went down. IMO it was largely driven by 1) covid-era hiring blitz followed by layoffs, 2) so-called zoom fatigue. Teams became more geographically distributed, lots of newbies showed up, coordination overhead went up, competitiveness and backstabbing increased, work seemed to progress much slower.

The book "On Tyranny: 20 lessons from the 20th century" by the historian Timothy Snyder is an excellent read for these times. The very first lesson is "Do not obey in advance". It's about how authoritarian power often doesn't need to force compliance, people simply bend the knee in anticipation of being forced. This simply emboldens the authoritarians to go further.

I've been disappointed to see many businesses and institutions obeying in advance recently. I hope this moment wakes up the tech community and beyond.

From the job posting it sounds like the company value prop is AI agents as debt collector? They want to “solve deep problems like collecting more money”. What a shitty dystopia we’re creating.

BERT is encoder only..

Also: what happens when a nontrivial portion of public code out there is ML-generated? How will it deal with feedback effects?

It must be nice for you that you've never felt persecuted or treated unjustly by human systems and therefore can't extrapolate to how that might play out when autonomous killer robots are thrown into the mix.

> Out of curiosity, has anyone made an MMO better than UO yet?

Piggybacking on this, has anyone made an open world single player RPG better than Ultima 7 yet?

> Brazilians have done a terrible job of protecting their rainforest

While the Amazon is in Brazilian territory, it is one of the largest carbon sinks in the world and therefore has a global positive externality. Therefore this is not a domestic issue.

Perhaps by spreading awareness we can shift the Overton window on how these cross-border climate issues should be addressed. E.g. perhaps Brazil should be paid from a global fund to not cut down the rain forest.

The team has published quite a few papers (albeit they are mostly behind paywalls). Here's a good overview: http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/23...

There's a rhythm to the original that's lost in translation. GGM's mastery of the language is impossible not to notice.

In chess there are hundreds of annotated databases out there where I can study how the masters play, read analyses of different playing styles, and try to follow along and improve my own intuition.

Is there an equivalent for programming? Github and Stackoverflow are good resources, but it would be interesting to see something more structured. Perhaps a DB of a fixed set of problems such as projecteuler.net with voting and analysis of the submitted solutions.

You should check out http://www.angora.io/feed

Meanwhile... Gmail etc are working quite fine. So the claim that if you build on GAE you "take advantage of the same infrastructure used for Google services!!" starts to ring a bit hollow.

Quora

Looking at the MSIL emitted by the compiler is not a reliable way to tell that a tail call will be used at runtime. It's ultimately at the discretion of the JIT whether to compile the 'tail.callvirt' into an actual tail call in x86.

aka "sampling profiler" as opposed to "instrumentation profiler"

Can anyone comment on the claim "QuickCheck is shockingly more effective at finding bugs than unit tests"? I'd be interested in hearing other opinions.

I really hope this isn't the way most people use R. Wouldn't it be better to call out to a python script that pulls in the emails and spits out a CSV, and then load that into R?

"All of PyPy, CPython and IronPython have a GIL"

IronPython actually does NOT have a GIL: http://wiki.python.org/moin/IronPython

Isn't that like saying the Mac OS GUI cannot coexist with command-line based apps?

AFAIK, they don't take your I-94 if you're traveling to Canada or Mexico for under 30 days.

After IE6, a good chunk of the team was repurposed to work on the next-gen presentation technology for Longhorn, which eventually became WPF/XAML.

Another part of the team went on to build some ill-fated re-skinnings of IE, such as MSN explorer.

So yes, the Longhorn train wreck was a big reason for the sabbatical, but not the only one.

Agreed, we believe there's a huge amount of value in aggregating and cleaning fundamental data.

To your point about back testing, would you want guidance as to what the in-sample and out-sample time ranges should be? Tools to help you make sure you're not overfitting? Or something else?

Thanks! We're not quite ready to share screenshots, but I see your point about providing more technical details. Some code samples would definitely help. As for the business model, we're still iterating on that, but the current thinking is a straight SaaS play.

Thanks for your feedback! We will clarify it on the page, but the short answer is both daily and tick data. We plan on starting with US equities unless we get strong feedback to the contrary.

As for security, we plan on running each user's code in its own sandbox, with restricted permissions.

See also: Detours library by MSFT research(http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/detours/). It doesn't require you to recompile your binaries to add NOPs.

See this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079237

I use Windows Live Mesh for this. By default it replicates across your PCs and Macs, but you can configure it to sync to cloud storage as well.

"What small businesses really care about is cost effective customer acquisition."

The other high order bit for small businesses is repeat customers. Loyalty programs on mobile could be the killer app that gets small businesses online.

It begs the question, why don't submissions automatically get de-duped?