lazydon

Not sure why, but I thought this was going to be a friend of Aaron Swartz writing in memory of him.

This is relevant not only in the context of books and blogs, but also for the shorter forms of reading that we do more often like HN or Reddit comments, tweets etc.

One way to think about it is that reading on the internet, no matter how casual, is like scattering seeds on the soil of your mind. Some of these seeds will grow into trees and influence your actions and decisions, whether you're aware of it or not.

In context of RAG, the goal is not to have a pure vector DB but to have all the relevant data that we can gather for a user's prompt. This is where Cognitive Search and other existing DBs shine because they offer a combination of search strategies. Hybrid search on Cognitive Search performs both full text and vector queries in parallel and merges results which I find a better approach. Further, MS is rebranding Cognitive Search as Azure AI Search to bring it more in line with the overall Azure AI stack including Azure OpenAI.

Missing the /s I hope.

The articles does talk about lack of productivity and "not enough labor". Just my guess that that would could be likely causing bottlenecks as there isn't enough staff/equipment/ machinery to unload everything in time.

Check the graphic here - https://www.bbc.com/news/58926842

Yeah, I dig such stuff too. For this, I go for Reddit live streams where you can QnA with the streamer and it's quite fun. In last few months I have been to Rome, Kenya, Germany and of course Japan has it's own charm.

My main use of Periscope was to watch live football (not the American one) matches. Going to miss that!

The part of the world where I live sports subscription fees are simply too high and controlled by duopoly of old school companies. On Periscope, it was great to have some good person point their phone camera to a large screen TV and watch the match together with many others on chat.

Thanks Periscope for letting me enjoy live action of a few El Clásicos!

It's funny how a team develops their own common vocab not only for the stuff they work on (Ubiquitous Language as in DDD) but also to describe people.

When a few teammates and I interview folks, other than the usual official evaluations, the best we understand each other's feedback is through this common language. A language that got unconsciously developed while interviewing and working together for years and our experiences with other folks in the organization.

We are no YC, but what PG is referring to as earnest would be in our language simply "good energy". The opposite of it would be "looks tired" i.e. for someone showing completer lack of interest in what they do. Another ones would be "fighter" (one who doesn't gives up on hard problems) and "pacifier" (one who stays calm and composed that's good for handling production incidents and help team through with difficult people).

To further muddy the waters, I think if the job descriptions came up with more details about the personality traits required for the job, that could help people have better job matches and satisfaction. I know it becomes too subjective if you overdo it but perhaps things like StrengthsFinder can help. On the other hand there's a risk of going too further on altogether a wrong path as it happened with Myers-Briggs.

It's interesting that you mention workflows and serverless together. In this regard, have you looked at things like AWS Step Functions and Azure Logic Apps? You get the best of both worlds - state machines with excellent workflow management tools along with the flexibility and cost effectiveness of AWS Lambda in the background.

Talking of "Serverless Revolution", I think we are going to see more of such abstractions as things evolve. Abstractions and tools built upon serverless functions that are going to cater more closely to problems being solved rather than worrying about managing new-found complexity of the functions themselves.

May be it's just me, but the first thing reading that name reminds me of is the Zika virus. I wonder why would you choose a name for the startup that's so close to something with horribly negative connotations. Especially, in today's world scared to hell by viruses.

I checked for red spots in regions in Indian that I am aware of. The big ones mostly are cantonments / areas reserved by military and wild life reserves.

Reading everything from an account will usually give you quite low signal to noise ratio. Even for someone like pg's timeline. I usually use min_retweets and min_faves filter of Twitter advanced search to get to the best (crowd-sourced) tweets by someone. For example -

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Apaulg%20min_faves%3A200&...

When I saw the domain (th(e) reader) next to this post, I for a while thought it was a Google reader clone that's going to be lamenting about it. As in Google Reader was a product people actually wanted but it no longer exists as opposed to Google Stadia. Ah, how much I miss Google Reader to make this weird connection.

My seven year old absolutely loves GCompris. I would recommend GCompris by far compared to what we have on the phone apps nowdays for kids.

I personally appreciate the old school non commercial spirit of the makers of the GCompris. It's one of the many goodies of sticking with Linux as my primary desktop OS.

For those who prefer the reader app for reading this:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/990968833547497472.html

Reminds me of the way Bezos writes about Customer Obsession in his letters to shareholders:

"There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality. Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invention on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples. Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen."

(answering the conference part of the question)

There was a recent HN submission for such aggregator. See if it helps you.

Show HN: A tech conference aggregator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12943889

On the contrary, the decentralisation is what I appreciate so much about Google - I feel it's the primary driver for innovative stuff that comes out of Google. It may seem like a mess but then you see - creativity doesn't flows out of grand visions.

PS: perhaps Apple was able to achieve "centralized creativity" only because of Jobs.

Metaphoric org charts of tech companies: http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2011.06.27_or...

If you look carefully enough its not only the developer in you but anything meaningful or living in your life is done by someone other than what you usually refer to as me. Normally, such phenomenon is mostly associated with ideas we get on waking up or during shower or exercise.

My observation is that whenever you do anything that's unscripted or unplanned - it's "someone else". Say - answering well an interview with questions that you never expected and had relatively less exposure to, writing a blog post when you plan to write something but then all the ideas rush in and begin to write themselves and so on. I'm from India and I find it hard to communicate with western people these ideas directly. A contemporary ideas that's closest is the Dennet's theory of Narrative Self. Essentially, this article is the author's narrative self trying to make sense of the overnight solution the got.

it was interesting when in article he says such ideas come to him sometimes not all the time - one thing he can do to improve this is to subdue this narrative self a bit. A very good video on this point is by Alan Kay in context of Inner Game of Tennis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50L44hEtVos

Yup, look at graph of likes spiking in last couple of days: https://www.facebook.com/randomdirectionsblog/likes

The post on the blog itself is a month old.

Wow, I know it doesn't sounds very mature, but to see this article and comments on HN, really make me feel happy and proud to be a Sikh.

But, alas Sikh's own state of Punjab is nowhere close to successes of the community all over the world. It's a great tragedy.

The state of Punjab once a pioneer in green revolution and the richest in India is now being looted by dynasty politics and corruption. The state of things is so bad that people don't even want to visit back the place. Sometimes, we wonder if that's the key for our current success everywhere but in our own home.

If the big idea was messaging and not objects, I'm curious to know how did we end up in this primarily object oriented world. Especially, when its founding father didn't had that intention as he says: ""I invented the term object-oriented, and I can tell you that C++ wasn't what I had in mind".

I have a guess from following quote: "This was why I complained at the last OOPSLA that - whereas at PARC we changed Smalltalk constantly, treating it always as a work in progress - when ST hit the larger world, it was pretty much taken as "something just to be learned", as though it were Pascal or Algol." -

There were people in hurry to make something with whatever theoretical basis there was instead of further refining the original concept. Probably, that's where it took the wrong turn.

For those complaining about the "quality" of this piece - that somehow it degrades his past essays - its a response like others here: http://paulgraham.com/kedrosky.html Where even in past he usually explains when he thinks he is being misunderstood.

For that matter, I think this was more of a response too: http://paulgraham.com/speak.html (written when suddenly the whole world seemed to be worried about pg saying um a lot). I think this article did calm those people a bit.

For me the route was via StackOverflow (SO). I looked for a question like what other sites are there like SO for gaining some real world wisdom.

I've always found good stuff with this technique - It's like poor man's machine learning algo applied to oneself. People who liked this item also liked...

One such thread of my current favorites looks like:

SO --> HN --> Reddit --> Less Wrong --> Yudkowsky's blog --> Marginal Revolution blog

We have an expression for this in Hindi I’m not sure if it translates well – trying to use a sword as a needle. To use mindfulness which is transcendental in nature and can open secrets of the life for few more bucks! Yes, as someone becomes mindful, it does helps to concentrate and focus more and be more creative and productive – but that’s a side product and yes, we still have to earn bread. But to make that the entire aim is not the right direction for that energy.

But Zen is such an open philosophy it won’t mind it and judge it as corrupt or otherwise. It will allow people to naturally see the difference – that they are giving away their diamonds in return of pebbles. Not profitable in my opinion.

Whenever I read a story like this I inevitably remember Greenspan. Its always good to start with an extreme to begin with whats wrong with most systems today.

As he once said - there shouldn't be any law against financial fraud; as the markets themselves will take care of that.

And he himself got away with all the mess by saying there was a flaw in his model of the world.

The post is very negative. If you take away from someone what you think of as false, don't run way without providing a better alternative. Even if that is just thinking for yourself and not to follow anybody.

Yes, most blog posts go on to follow the same path as that of so called self-help books. But once in a while a sincere anecdote can make you think of fresh perspective on how to handle a situation in which you did not do better.

I think we as a generation should feel lucky to be living when Experimental Psychology is blossoming. Books from authors like Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, Daniel Gilbert have had a life changing impact on my thinking. To really understand that our brains are not perfect - but are infact a kludge - makes you think about taking necessary precautions about these limitations.

And for productivity, number one thing that we need to outsmart is our impulsiveness.

Oh God! Please no. For someone, who lost his dad in an accident due to a distracted scumbag, this is heart breaking.

Just say no to phones (in any form) while you drive.

Multitasking is a myth. Try driving on a new road while chitchatting to someone siting next to you; or, even try walking fast while thinking something hard or even recollecting something.

I wonder how the author keeps such a long list in his mind while working. I'm not sure how, when his brain is actually not cooperating, he would say "brain, here's the remedy, so stick to it". Most points have this pattern "don't..", "resist..", "seize..". Whom are we kidding - as if its that easy directing our quirky mind.

I'm reminded of following Daniel Kahneman's closing notes in his books 'Thinking Fast & Slow'. So, after listing all biases and quirks (to which he has devoted his life), he writes:

What can be done about biases? How can we improve judgments and decisions, both our own and those of the institutions that we serve and that serve us? The short answer is that little can be achieved without a considerable investment of effort. As I know from experience, System 1 is not readily educable. Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues. I have improved only in my ability to recognize situations in which errors are likely: “This number will be an anchor...,” “The decision could change if the problem is reframed...” And I have made much more progress in recognizing the errors of others than my own.

Singletons are always a lazy solution to the problem. For me the rule of thumb is if there's some class requiring lots of work to test, I've been lazy. So, go back and review my sloppiness.

The questioner was in a way implementing a poor man's cache using Singletons (I wonder how was he planning to test it); some use it for connection pooling instead of a specific library.

I've heard even GoF regretted including Singletons in the s/w patterns club.

I'm a big fan of Misko Hevery's (now working on Angular) work on this.

http://misko.hevery.com/2008/08/17/singletons-are-pathologic...

http://misko.hevery.com/2008/08/25/root-cause-of-singletons/

http://misko.hevery.com/2008/08/21/where-have-all-the-single...

I miss this guy in Java world.