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kyt

153 karma · joined September 13, 2011

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kyt··on Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade
I must be the odd man out but I am not a fan of uv.

1. It tries to do too many things. Please just do one thing and do it well. It's simultaneously trying to replace pip, pyenv, virtualenv, and ruff in one command.

2. You end up needing to use `uv pip` so it's not even a full replacement for pip.

3. It does not play well with Docker.

4. It adds more complexity. You end up needing to understand all of these new environmental variables: `UV_TOOL_BIN_DIR`, `UV_SYSTEM_PYTHON`, `UV_LINK_MODE`, etc.

kyt··on Introducing Qodo Gen CLI: Build and Run Coding Agents Anywhere in the SDLC
I've been doing software for 25 years and just had to look up SDLC ;).
kyt··on The Policy Puppetry Prompt: Novel bypass for major LLMs
What is an FM?
kyt··on Tourist in US chained 'like Hannibal Lecter'
Does anyone actually believe this is the full story? It has one primary source: her parents.

It says clearly in the article that she violated the terms of her visa according to ICE. Her parents never mention what the violation was. The idea she was deported for doing some chores around the house is laughable.

kyt··on Show HN: We built an agentic image editor that preserves the original structure
Interesting project. What makes this an agent? Just looks like an image transform that uses LLMs.
kyt··on Code reviews: A success story
Disagree. It's only the author's fault. We can't expect engineers to write code and find every last bug in other people's code especially when PRs can be thousands of lines to review.

A broken culture would be expecting engineers to find every last bug in other people's code and blaming them for bugs.

kyt··on Show HN: I built an open-source data pipeline tool in Go
Why use this over Meltano?
kyt··on Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios
Very interesting product!

I consider myself pretty financially literate, but I had no idea what an "expense ratio" was for certain. I assumed it meant fees but I had to look it up.

kyt··on GGML – AI at the Edge
I used the GGML version of Whisper and I had to revert back to the PyTorch version released by OpenAI. The GGML version simply didn't work well even for the same model. I am assuming it has to do with the quantization.
kyt··on I talked to Leonardo da Vinci
And here is the response generated by GPT-3:

This is a fictional but realistic interview with Leonardo Da Vinci based on his notebooks, and the biography by Walter Isaacson. His responses are either based on his writings, or research by Isaacson.

DKB: Did you struggle with perfectionism?

Leonardo: I sought perfection in everything I did, whether it was my art, my science, or my personal relationships. I was never satisfied with anything that I created, and always strived to improve upon it. This desire for perfection sometimes led to frustration, as I would often spend hours – even days – perfecting a single work, only to scrap it and start again if it didn’t meet my standards. But I believe that it was this striving for perfection that made me the renowned artist and scientist that I am today.

kyt··on It's legal to download The Great Gatsby in most of the world
What is the difference between inheriting money and inheriting copyrighted works? One is a lump sum payment and the other is an annuity. They're viewed vastly differently, but they're essentially both just winning the lottery.
kyt··on No email at AngelList
We looked into switching to HipChat, but we're sticking with Skype. We really liked HipChat's interface and API, but there were a few negatives.

1) HipChat doesn't support audio only calls and conference calls. This was a dealbreaker for us. 2) Skype has a much larger user base overall and we can use it with other non-company members. 3) One of our developers wrote a plugin to inline images into Skype, which is a nice feature of HipChat. 4) Skype is free. 5) Skype's messaging is P2P and works in our office when our internet goes down. (Thanks Time Warner)

kyt··on Allstate compares SAS, Hadoop and R for Big-Data Insurance Models
He forgot 5) Write it in C/C++. 150M records is not that large and using Hadoop, which is generally used for I/O bound problems, seems like overkill. A lot of these problems can be avoided by simply dropping down to a lower level language. For example, I was able to write a C implementation of a matrix factorization algorithm (100M records) that ran on my laptop in ~5 minutes. The same algorithm took over 24 hours to run on a Mahout/Hadoop cluster (it also cost about $30 to run on AWS EMR).
kyt··on A year without caffeine
I haven't, but I wouldn't be surprised if I did.
kyt··on A year without caffeine
I'm actually doing the opposite. Up until a year ago I didn't drink coffee or any other caffeinated beverages. In fact, I really didn't understand why people liked coffee as the taste never appealed to me. Nonetheless I started off trying mochas from Starbucks in the afternoon at work and noticed a huge boost in productivity. I felt energized and started to cruise through projects. Before I started drinking coffee I would get so tired that I would have to take naps during the day (and this is on 8-9 hours of sleep). Now it's a reason to get up in the morning.

I've switched over to normal coffee and I'm still a pretty moderate drinker (5-6 cups a week). I don't drink soda either, so it's my only source of caffeine generally. I think it's fine in moderation and there are definitely some health benefits as well.

kyt··on Brad Feld created a Hacker News-esque site, Startup Revolution
I doubt Brad spent much time on this. If you notice, it's powered by "SocialEngine", which got its seed funding from TechStars where Brad is a mentor.
kyt··on Programmer Time Translation Table
I've seen the inverse of this, though. For example, I estimated it would take me a couple days to do finish one part of a project, but I told the PM one week. She in turn multiplied it by 3 when she actually turned in the project schedule. So at the end I was given 3 weeks for an estimated 2 day task.
kyt··on Myspace previews complete redesign
Too little, too late. Their brand is tarnished forever and they'll never recover.
kyt··on Google Spanner's Most Surprising Revelation: NoSQL is Out and NewSQL is In
"Maybe this time Open Source efforts should focus elsewhere, innovating rather than following Google?"

There's a ton of innovative projects in the open source community, but it's difficult to convince people to use them. Developing a clone of a Google tech has a built in marketing advantage: "Google uses something like this."

kyt··on App.net: or why you shouldn't copy a successful company
All social networks suffer from 90/10 rule (90% of the content is generated by 10% of the users), so this really isn't surprising.

Other posters have mentioned this as well, but I think Twitter has too much momentum. Someone trying to do the exact same thing from the end-user perspective isn't going to be able to compete.

kyt··on RIM promises $10k to devs if BlackBerry 10 app earns $1k
So what's the incentive to promote your app past $1,000 in revenue?
kyt··on Recruiting Technical Co-Founders
Vision is a word I don't like and gets thrown around a lot. It's not quantifiable. If you are a non technical co-founder you need to be able to bring in the money. That means you're either 1) Able to raise VC/Angel and probably have a track record, 2) Have serious connections/customers in the space you're starting a business in, or 3) Putting your own cash in.
kyt··on Github: Notifications & Stars
I think this is a bad move and an example of feature creep. Were users really asking for this? The problem was that the stream was overloaded with irrelevant projects you may have watched on a whim. It seems like they solved that with the notifications drop down. I'm not sure what the point of Starring is.
kyt··on The Leanest Startup in Silicon Valley
I like his drive, but where are his 10,000 hours? I'd at least think you'd be an expert at something before starting a business with zero cash.
kyt··on Why do business analysts and PMs get higher salaries than programmers?
100% agree. It's always about how close you are to the money. The more direct value you provide, the more you get paid. This is why lawyers get paid so much, because firms know that for every hour they bill the firm makes $X dollars.

Programmers provide indirect value. If you architect a system that saves months and months of time later down the line, how do you value that?

kyt··on Codecademy closes $10M round
I'm surprised they are looking to translate the site, considering I think their English version is of mediocre quality. I have been programming for 10+ years and had a chance to go through a lot of the exercises with my girlfriend. It looks like the exercises are crowdsourced from several different authors and therefore lack flow. Additionally, I felt the exercises did not explain enough, or were downright confusing, especially to a novice. For example, one solution required the use of "&&" despite it not being taught in any other previous lesson.

I still recommend books for anyone that is serious about learning to code.

kyt··on Facebook launches App Center
Maybe this will be MySpace 2.0 after all.
kyt··on Noogler Orientation: My first 3 days at Google
Is a 10.5 hour work day normal at Google? These seem like startup/finance hours. I hope the author is getting paid well.
kyt··on What's it like to work at GitHub?
This is a misleading statement. According to Chris' founder story, they had customers at launch and he was the sole programmer.
kyt··on What's it like to work at GitHub?
The reason why this environment works at GitHub is because they're profitable -- extremely so. Money rolls in regardless of what their engineers are working on. If they were in a pre-revenue state I doubt they would be organized in the same way.
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