bionsystem

aappleby/hancho on github (a build system in python) was discussed here some time ago

Sounds like a name that could have some success. Given that the logo for Java is a cup of coffee, maybe we could also call it "Coffee script".

They are the worst, been there a few times, even as "the devops" you get sucked into while(true) loops of tech changes and everybody rewrites everything all the time to be "cloud ready" and nothing ever gets to production and everybody burns out and leave.

I just dodged a bullet recently interviewing with an old boss of mine who wanted to use container orchestration for a perfectly working set of 40+ apps. They use docker in VMs as of now already, but they absolutely want kube or swarm, the reason being that "it's too complicated to manage the capacity planning for the VMs". Yeah let's add an extra layer of clustering and complexity for internal apps that will never scale just so that you feel good about having "an orchestrator", because you don't want to take a couple days to look at CPU/RAM usage and resize your infra.

I hate when that happens, a lot of searches around the neovim ecosystem ends up with various replies that assume 96 layers of knowledge even before understanding what the solution is about.

I agree, there is a qualitative statement to be made. AI can help especially summarizing text like news and earnings calls, but there is quite a bit of human work to be made beyond just running some software.

Indeed, I pulled 500 out of my hat because that's roughly stock market history. But that kind of reinforces my point, if we only have 100 years that's very little, especially considering how fast things change. Early 20th centuries very few industries were publicly traded, even amongst those that existed at the time. And even beyond the industries, other things have changed a lot like regulation, taxes, accounting rules, management style... surely the market takes all of those into account, one way or another.

I have this idea that we only have one universe of historical financial data, and it is only 500 years long, which is ridiculously small. So backtesting and drawing conclusions is highly overrated.

Another thing as you said is that it's hard to get quality data. For example most databases don't include price history for bankrupt companies (or miss quite a bunch), which makes some quantitative strategies like focusing on low PE and PB for example, completely bogus. Which is sad because most books will actually tell you to do that, without ever talking about how many of those backtests lack companies with -100% return in their virtual portfolios. Those tend to be low PE companies that the market consider risky, and it was right, but because they disappeared, the strategies outperform because they ignore so many losers.

I'm not yet to the point where I recovered pure joy in my work, but I admit quitting my previous toxic company, and finding a new one where work/life balance is better respected makes me happier (as in, less miserable). I don't think about work in the evening or during weekends, unless asked about it. I just go there on time and leave on time, and do my thing while people either appreciate my job or make fun of me (in a kind/playful way) when I screw up, and we all move on quite quickly.

Have you tried cfengine ? I'd be curious of the feedback in heterogeneous environments.

She explained that some activities (active ones, social ones, etc), once you are used to planning them and doing them, actually reward the brain a lot more than scrolling, and eventually you don't go back to the addictive behavior anymore. It's a form of CBT. I'm going to try it because I have nothing more than her word for it.

I agree, for me youtube is incredibly addictive, I'm even working with a psychiatrist about it (and other addictions of course). She was mentioning "the youth on tiktok" and I told her, youtube is the exact same thing for 30+ YOs. Her "key" is to be busy with some other activity.

I spent 10+ years without a smartphone, from early 2010s to early 2020s. Nowadays I can barely book a train ticket without one, and so many little things require a whatsapp number or some app that I bought one refurbished. Also it's hard to find a decent brick phone that can store enough SMS, one that I bought with an additional SD card will not store SMS on the SD card, so I'm stuck with a massive SD card and a 300 SMS storage limit.

Now I have to turn it off outside of job breaks to avoid looking at it every 5 minutes. I also have people getting angry at me because I do not answer their messages within a few minutes. Helps me select toxic people I guess. Some just get crazy with this thing.

I like os161 from ops-class dot org too (Harvard course)

If there is something on longbets dot org that's a fair description on what I expect I will gladly do it.

I'm not talking about gov mistakes, but about basic climate trends. There is no way the place stays alive, hence any debate about what they do or why they do it is meaningless.

Yep, climate change will kill it. It's going to be mad max at best.

I had some success trading a long/short stock portfolio, but on longer time periods than day trading (holding positions from few weeks to few months). The fun lasted almost 3 years. Then I shorted META from 300 to 100 and felt on top of the world, it was after shorting a bunch of other "covid success stories" like zoom, moderna, carvana, and making 50%+ return on each in a reasonnably concentrated portfolio. The rest of my portfolio was doing ok as well.

As META kept going down I kept adding to my position (meaning shorting more), and then it came back up. I ended up a loser on the position despite being up almost 70% at some point. I couldn't believe in a recovery for the company.

I then thought "never again" and started to trade options so that I would have a more disciplined, guaranteed stop loss. I lost more than 50% of my margin that year and another 50% 6 month later, so I was back below square 1 at the end of it all. We are talking small numbers (maybe losing 15k in total) but an amazing amount of time and energy spent doing all this which generated a lot of stress.

Nice, thanks. But I have other limitations as well (Powershell 5 only and scripts must be signed, which I believe includes external modules).

Don't ask me why I can run a random binary instead, I don't know and I don't want to know.

Thanks this is very clear. I use COM objects through PowerShell too, not the Import-Excel module, because I cannot install anything (except Office) on my client's work machine. But I can copy binaries so working with Lua might relieve my headaches from working with PowerShell :)

Great job, thanks for your work !

Not a programmer, but I see it can use COM objects :

https://luart.org/doc/sys/COM-constructor.html

does that mean we can use it to manipulate Office files just as in VB or PowerShell ?

You guys have teams that decide the infra they run ?

I'm writing some powershell at the moment, after a few weeks of work I realized that sometimes my return types for some functions would change even though I explicitely declare them (for exemple a 'hashtable' would become a 'System Object[]' which is short for 'table full of garbage').

Turns out some ops without assignment and some printed messages would go into the pipeline (as in, to be piped in with `|`) and become part of the return value of the functions ; to make that work powershell changes the return type, appends the message or the non-assigned op to the hashtable and returns that as an object table.

To this day I'm not aware of any language doing this kind of thing, but maybe js does ? Anyway I fear I'm going to get some grey hair because of that.

Great story ! I'm proudly responsible for a small perl script that pre-processes SWIFT messages before sending them in a back-office banking Java app. It's barely 10 yo but I'm not a dev, and I suspect it will probably run forever.

The idea is to split messages in chunks and sort the rows by ISIN instead of having one big file without any sorting pattern, and it cuts the processing by the app from a few hours to 10 min. Never heard of a bug in this one but it's only like 300 lines of code.

For some reasons I thought they were using Linux for their hypervisor layer so Xen/KVM. Yes I think hyper-v is fine.

Thanks, I missed that.

Care to elaborate ?

Amazon uses Xen which they call "Xen 2" I think because they've made tons of improvements and optimizations over the years.

Google uses kvm. They probably contribute as well although I haven't checked.

From a quick search Azure uses a private build of hyper-v which surprises me actually but it's possible.

Edit : millions of VMs doesn't mean anything, at the end of the day it's just servers each running a bunch of VM, which people have been doing for 20+ years. There is no scaling issue there, the hard part is storage, networking, orchestration, managed services, power...

Not really, I burned out on interviews and I'm going to sit on this one for a bit ; I'm in France btw in case you had an opening.

Pretty sure I found a bunch of fake jobs in my previous research (H2 2023). Best exemple was an SRE job where I'm a 95% match on the (long and specialized) job description, the 5% being some xp in HPC but they have a dedicated team and a separate job offer for HPC specialist, so that sounds fine.

They tell me I "don't have enough experience with debian" and offer me to apply for the HPC job. I go and list them all the experience I have with every bullet point of the job offer, and mention that I've been using debian for 20 years and ask what specific skillset they are looking for. No answer except "all we can do is start the process for the HPC job".

I ended up finding something else where I'm not particularly interested, have no prior experience, but I'm paid way more than my previous job and they seem to love my work despite it being very slow and frustrating. So I'm just going to stick to that, and give up on the idea of finding "the dream job". More recently I found an offer where they told me they have a "multiple month hiring process" and I stopped answering to emails, pretty sure it's fake as well.