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jimsparkman

90 karma · joined January 25, 2015

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jimsparkman··on A guidance language for controlling LLMs
I think this is the exception, not the norm. My experience is business users (incl. PMs) are lost outside of Excel.
jimsparkman··on EVE Online player uses obscure rule to pull off biggest heist in game history
I don’t know anything about the game, but I’m guessing the new account was created to protect his identity, should the ploy fail?
jimsparkman··on Neural Networks: Zero to Hero
That program sounds quite impressive, I wonder if any equivalencies exist in the US?
jimsparkman··on Gazette – Build platforms that flexibly mix SQL, batch, and stream processing
The slides [1] helped me grok what problems this tool solves pretty quickly.

Everything big data is moving to blob storage these days, but streaming can lead to small files problem or longer latencies. File fragments stored locally with proxied readers seems like a simple solution to that.

[1] https://gazette.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview-slides.htm...

jimsparkman··on Billing systems are a nightmare for engineers
I assume they are using something like DB2, which has very specific meaning when it comes to temporal or bitemporal tables.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/db2/10.5?topic=tables-bitemporal

jimsparkman··on The fastest tool for querying large JSON files is written in Python (benchmark)
Since duckdb is OLAP, it would directly compare with other columnar database technologies like Redshift, Presto/Athena, etc.

Most of these systems strongly encourage or outright enforce JSONL, so that’s the defacto standard, and most tooling or pipelines are going to generate that nowadays.

You can obviously still have a row of arrays, and different systems have slightly different approaches on how to deal with those. In Spark, this is referred to as “exploding”, in Presto you would cross join to unnest an array, in Redshift you can glob on the super type.

I’m not sure I have a particular favorite, only that the database support such an operation since it is a common occurrence.

jimsparkman··on What the Hell Is This Company the 76ers Just Partnered With?
Fantastic article. Searching the stock ticker (CSCW) on Reddit turned up some humorous old posts about how this penny stock is about to take off.
jimsparkman··on Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company
Thanks for the recommendation! Now that you mention it, I’ve seen similar behavior on Dateline. Wonder if there are other terms for essentially “digging the hole deeper.”
jimsparkman··on Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company
Wow, quite brazen. What an interesting read.

Couple things that stood out to me was that the incident occurs in December and the raid ensues March 24th, so roughly 3 months. Building the case I presume.

Then after the raid, the accused doubles down and seeds fake news stories.

jimsparkman··on The impossible dream of the nuclear-powered 1958 Ford Nucleon
While certainly focused on larger vehicles, by all appearances Ford is much more exciting and innovative than its traditional domestic counterparts. The new electric F150, electric mustang, the Bronco series, etc. have all seemed to drum up quite the fanfare. I can’t say the same for GM.
jimsparkman··on Offline-First PWA for Plotly Visualization of CSV via SQLite
This looks really great, like a local version of redash but way more in the way of charting options. Such simplicity to boot.
jimsparkman··on Show HN: PyWebIO – Write interactive web app in script way
Fantastic work! This looks like an arguably better/more generalized version of something like Streamlit.

Great concept for building rapid applications.

jimsparkman··on Signal apps DDoS'ed their own server
That is correct. Typically used to enable or modify a feature in the client on your own time table vs. App Store approval.
jimsparkman··on We don't need data scientists, we need data engineers
Keeping in mind DE can mean different things at different companies, I spend a lot of time working on infrastructural components to just get at data reliably. Working in a product company with disparate generators of data, I’m often building out network connectivity (VPC peering, VPNs, etc.), subnets, ACLs, firewalls and load balancers across our visualization tools, managing job flows, controlling AWS costs, building read replicas for production databases, yadda yadda. There might be a ton of hoops to jump through before I can even start to process data and it’s the type of work that wouldn’t make sense to hand off to my DS counterparts.
jimsparkman··on Ask HN: What is the defacto tech stack for a startup now?
If not a serverless model, then Docker at the very least. Something like Kubernetes might be overkill but containers make life easier both starting out and managing future growth.
jimsparkman··on A distributed Posix file system built on top of Redis and S3
Interesting, I’d guess list operations are significantly faster because of the cache, even a hash map like Redis? That can be a real slowdown in s3 with large quantities of files.
jimsparkman··on Simple Anomaly Detection Using Plain SQL
At least in the AWS ecosystem, Athena makes this very simple to implement. Stream load balancer logs to S3 and query directly.
jimsparkman··on How to Become a Data Engineer in 2021
With direct integrations to EMR, Lambda, and Athena, its a great tool for building pipelines and effectively costs nothing on its own and is completely headache free.
jimsparkman··on Stop Writing Shell Scripts
Admittedly, its not always apparent. I think a general rule of thumb for me is if I can effectively write the script in my mind ahead of time. Anything beyond that and I might regret choosing a shell script for the purpose.

Sometimes a shell script just proves a concept out and is then rewritten later in a production language.

jimsparkman··on Stop Writing Shell Scripts
Shell scripts are obviously imperfect, but I don’t necessarily agree with this absolutism view. In the right circumstances, you can quickly prototype an idea or process information in a shell script with such low friction. Truly the hacker mentality, which I don’t think a “real” language can always provide in the spur of the moment.
jimsparkman··on The Elements of Statistical Learning [pdf]
[0] returned a 404, but this appears to be substitute: https://statlearning.com/
jimsparkman··on GoDaddy employees told they were getting a holiday bonus in a phishing test
The URLs include some unique identifier that’s traceable to you. As far as my company is concerned, merely clicking it is grounds for security training.

Edit: I guess the argument is any page could contain an RCE.

jimsparkman··on GoDaddy employees told they were getting a holiday bonus in a phishing test
My company ran something similar recently. The cyber security team opted for “an important change to your available PTO.” It was from an internal address but from a made up name. The company is large enough (1,300 people) that you wouldn’t know if the name was actually an employee in HR or not. Because IT runs software that proxies and mangles all the links in an email, it’s super hard to evaluate the legitimacy of a URL anyways. Of course, most people clicked the link.
jimsparkman··on iPhone factory workers say they haven’t been paid, cause millions in damages
That view is missing human consideration, however, and is a cynical take. People in those non-free economies you speak of simply do not have the choice and can not just choose to emigrate to a free market at will. We must have some constraints to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
jimsparkman··on Foxconn tells Wisconsin it never promised to build an LCD factory
Foxconn’s model of business, industry, and logistics just don’t jive with the region, at least not intuitively to me. And of all things Foxconn could conceivably manufacture in the US, LCDs seem like the least economical option for them.
jimsparkman··on Foxconn tells Wisconsin it never promised to build an LCD factory
The idea of Foxconn manufacturing anything in Wisconsin, let alone something so specific, never made much sense to me. Do touchscreens sound fancy and exciting to voters?
jimsparkman··on Foxconn’s empty buildings, empty factories, and empty promises in Wisconsin
As an aside, does Wisconsin even make sense from a logistical standpoint for LCDs?
jimsparkman··on Look ma, no mouse: Vimium
I’ve used Vimium in Chrome for years and years now, I couldn’t imagine going without it. It’s such second nature I don’t even think about it.
jimsparkman··on We Can Do Better Than SQL
WITH (CTEs) make queries so much more readable and digestible. As a programmer who now does data and SQL, I latched on to these as soon as I found I could reduce repetition in a query with them.
jimsparkman··on How Mormons built a startup ecosystem in Utah
I relocated to SLC recently after taking a new position in my company. It has been a very positive experience so far. Tech scene is bustling, a number of interesting meetups. From a geographical perspective, the mountains offer incredible opportunity for adventure. A mix of desert to high alpine.

I’ve lived numerous places domestic and abroad, and haven’t seen anything quite like the accessibility to adventure as is found in SLC. Trail/mountain running, numerous ski resorts, Park City (of Winter Olympics fame), rock climbing, mountaineering and backcountry skiing, etc. All within 20 minutes drive.

It’s surprisingly amazing how close to the city you can be and yet feel so far away. You can get ~6,000 feet above the valley within a few hours run/hike and see moose, mountain goats, porcupine, etc.

Also interesting is the number of outdoor gear companies that have offices here. Petzl, Black Diamond, Backcountry, etc.

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