oerpli

I work at a company with enterprise support and still found their contact persons & support completely useless.

We had a few training and introduction sessions with their people and it usually ended with us tuning out/joking about their useless slides and presentations (with "inspiring" Jeff Bezos quotes and brags about the number of packages ordered on Amazon.com that have 0 relevance for anything our company would like from AWS) in a private channel.

He is suggesting that and it's wrong. Shootings are up by an even higher amount than deaths. The implications of that are left for the reader to figure out.

An anecdote: I prepared a little bit with Hackerrank for my Google interview (in Oct 2018) and never once encountered a problem where a linked list would be remotely useful. I also watched the YT video about why LL are useless in practice in most cases (cache locality etc) and I therefore eliminated them +- completely from my "toolset" (despite being actually pretty comfortable with them (spent a lot of time implementing sort algorithms on single & double linked lists).

Then, one of the interviews had some problem about a scenario that wasn't actually that far away from something one could encounter in real life and the optimal solution (by far) was with a simple linked list.

I completely blew it. I devised some convoluted MinHeap solution with Log(n) that was confusing as hell and my interviewer was wondering why he's wasting his time (he didn't tell but it was my impression). In the last few seconds he said something like "do you know a data structure with cheap inserts at the end and start" and everything was clear (but to late).

No hard feelings, wouldn't have hired myself after that performance as well.

I thought they addressed this with "git switch".

https://bluecast.tech/blog/git-switch-branch/

Predictable in what way? Last year there was some discussion about the correctness of the usual take-away of the original blind-audition study: https://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-05-12-blindauditions/

I would like tab-management to work as follows:

- Export Tabs as list. Format could be something like URL;TITLE[;GROUP][;...]

- Import list as Tabs: The inverse

Then I could use existing tools (xsv,fzf,vscode,excel) to do whatever I like with my tabs. Some things may be lost (cache, scrolling position...) but I wouldn't care as they don't work anyway with modern websites.

This makes it somewhat easier on the eyes but is still 80% too verbose.

Crosstabview converts a table from:

  |a x 0
  |a y 1
  |a z 2
  |b x 1
  |b z 5

to

  |  x y z
  |a 0 1 2
  |b 1   5

I used PostgreSQL as student and during research and had to switch to Microsoft SQL Server as my company uses that since forever.

For features I used on both, the average quality of the SQL Server implementation is between middling and pathetic (mostly the latter). I cannot recall a single instance where I thought "that's nice" or anything positive about how SQL Server does something. At best, it has been "this is not awful".

Things that sucked especially hard:

- Datetime API: In postgresql it is a joy to use and most features one would like to have to analyze data are directly there and work as they should. The analysis for my master's thesis was completely done in postgresql [1] (including outputting CSV files that could then be used by the LaTeX document) - without ever feeling constrained by the language or its features. Meanwhile, the way to store a Timespan from C# via EF is to convert it to a string and back or convert it to ticks and store it as long.

- The documentation: The pgsql documentation is the best of any project I have ever seen, the one for SQL Server is horrible and doesn't seem to have any redeeming qualities. - Management: SMSS is a usability nightmare and still the recommended choice for doing anything. I assume there are better ways but I haven't found them and if I have, they usually didn't work.

- The query language: In psql you can do things like

  select a < b as ab, b < c as bc , count(*) from t group by 1,2; \crosstabview

To get even half of that in SQL Server one would do

  select case when a < b then 1 else 0 end as ab, case when b < c then 1 else 0 end as bc, count(*) as count group by case when a < b then 1 else 0 end, case when b < c then 1 else 0 end

I think crosstab queries are unsupported (there are PIVOTs but I haven't yet looked into them a lot).

Maybe my use cases are a bit weird and I haven't encountered the better features of SQL Server yet. Would appreciate if someone could point out what I am doing wrong.

[1]: https://github.com/oerpli/MONitERO/blob/master/sql/queries/r...

But they could just do the same with the current ruling - the only difference would be whether they spend their money on more expensive slots or on wasting fuel.

I think it is more some innate drive some people have and (most) other people don't.

In my family I was always the only one that placed any importance on pursuing wealth. I would say that my upbringing wasn't that vastly different from my sisters. Also from what I gathered at lunch with my colleagues, most of them don't really care about a few k more per year and would prefer benefits like "flying business".

And how would you argue the other side?

- Women and men are equal! - But they behave differently - Because women are discriminated against - How do you know that? - Because they behave differently.

What now?

Same for Teams. Based on what I've heard I thought I will like it but the input box ruined it for me. It's beyond pathetic how a company the size of MS cannot implement a text-box that outputs text how I want it more than 1 in 10 times.

While I agree that non-technical persons would not get Markdown, not a single non-technical person ever messaged me something with markup. So why not just disable the shitty WYSIWYG and make markdown-formatting a opt-in choice from the sender of messages?

Also: Even Azure Dev Ops suffered from the same problem. I have no idea, how the same company can produce VS (Code or full version) and then release junk like this.

Here in Liechtenstein things are working again.

I've heard that the Aldi guys (there's Aldi South and North in Germany) don't compete for other countries and usually one of them gets the whole.

As the US market is larger than most other countries combined they shared it with this agreement (Aldi is from Aldi South, TJ is Aldi North).

Might be an urban legend.

Last year I interned at a company and the designated office had a huge black dog that smelled like a hobo in it (the dog belonged to one of the other 3 guys - no idea how his 2 colleagues can handle that smell).

I spent approx. 2 minutes in that room to introduce myself and then sat the remaining time (4 months) in the kitchen or at my bosses desk when he was away.

Since then I asked in every job interview about the company's dog policy.

The fun thing is that I'm pretty sure that someone on the other side could write the exact same thing and sincerely believe it.

I am not even sure if I am the dunce here for not getting that you wrote it that way on purpose and I'm explaining you your own joke.

Indeed, that is correct. Though I think that most people enjoy having children but the economic circumstances and expectations make it hard to have them.

I personally believe that fertility rates will go up again, due to two things:

- YIMBYs (/reason) will prevail and at some point and living in constrained areas will get more affordable - Social expectations will change. Having children in school was a bad idea a few decades ago (when school was from 6-18/20). If the majority of people spend their 20s in some sort of school these social norms have less reason to exist and will likely fade at some point.

And even if I'm wrong in both cases, I would assume that the rising population in southern countries will offset losses in the northern countries.

I think the argument is pretty straightforward:

You take the following things as premises: a.) Humans tend to reproduce, often above-reproduction level b.) Humans usually tend to optimize their well-being c.) Well-being of individuals of your own species is more important than well-being of other species

The first two should be uncontroversial. The third one is not uncontroversial but still the foundation of most legal systems worldwide.

The argument goes: More humans need more resources. Each generation uses more resources than the previous generation, due to (b). Even if you could educate everyone to use less, due to (a) you would still have to provide more resources. Better technology allows more efficient generation of resources with less impact on the environment. Thus if you care about the environment/whatever, technical advances are a good thing. You could also try to kill humans/don't allow them to reproduce but this clashes with (c) and basic decency.

Also: You will never convince a non-marginal amount of humans to give up pleasure for some greater good.

- Cruelty of meat production will be solved by artificial meat, not by a tiny percentage of vegetarians. - Global warming will also be solved by clean energy, not by using less energy.

What Hassabis is hinting at is the possibility of using AI to advance crops (GMOs) and materials in way that allows efficient provision of more stuff for more people. It is far more likely that these efforts yield fruits than that you convince 8B people to constrain their consumption (we've tried the latter for many years now: If you're aware of any progress made so far I, please share).

The full version is also free. It comes included with the Office365 installer, but can be downloaded on its own: https://www.onenote.com/download

OneNote syncs to OneDrive - so if you have O365 your storage space is quite large, whereas free users only have 5GB (though compared to Evernote's 25MB this is still plenty)

Approx. last week there was a big study that investigated whether other studies replicate or not.

Here's a fun quiz where people can guess the results: https://80000hours.org/psychology-replication-quiz/

One of the trends was that priming studies usually failed. I would assume that the quality of study form OP is similar.

It seems that the post was written in 1997 [1], with some parts added in 2005 [2].

The author is generally a computer science professor with some idiosyncratic (at least for the current time) opinions. Though I enjoyed the classes I attended with him a few years ago and some of his points I found quite convincing.

For example, in the class on stack based languages (forth & postscript mostly) he also showed how using PS instead of PDF allows him to put results from the analysis in the source code of papers and generate the plots from them. I try to mimic this in my PDFs by adding shortened links to the source and data for each plot (example: [3]) as I've often been annoyed with figures in papers that omit crucial information on what they show.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/19971016211209/https://www.compl...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20051231210211/https://www.compl...

[3]: https://i.imgur.com/CfuYeOO.png

They say that they brought some new search features to mobile, though I would prefer if they fixed their search on desktop (or in general) first, as it only returns results from recent messages.

Until sometime in 2016/2017 it was possible to look for specific things at whatever time (e.g. 2011) and now even things from <3y ago don't return anything.

Flynn himself does not believe that the Flynn effect represented real intellectual gains.

For any test, your grade is usually based on: * Your form on that day (good day/bad day whatever) * Your competence * Test taking ability (TTA)

The first one can result in pretty large fluctuations, though on the population level (what the Flynn effect measures) it should not matter. Competence usually means "knows the subject", for an IQ test this would (ideally) be "is smart". TTA is either "is prepared for the test" or "knows how to make educated guesses".

It is believed that the Flynn effect largely results from two factors: * Some parts of the population were severely malnourished 50-100 years ago which hindered their brain development. * Improved TTA

The first one would be a real gain (of intelligence), though with limited capability to expand upon, as these days almost no one (in US/Europe at least) is malnourished enough to allow for further gains at the population level

The second is not a gain of intelligence though it is a gain of competence, just not the kind that we want to measure with an IQ test.

As there are not many reasons to believe, that the current decline is due to nourishment/TTA, it may be that those are constant but actual intelligence is on decline.

Does someone know what's the current state of TF on Windows? I've used it for some image classification homework 1.5y ago and back then I had some issues but it kind of worked.

Does someone have more recent experiences in some hobby project or even in a production env? Or are there other NN frameworks when using Windows?

I recommend looking at . and $ to make code more readable (by preventing unnecessary brackets)

    product $ map (\x -> x^x) [1..5]

    (.) :: (b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> a -> c
    ($) :: (a -> b) -> a -> b

=>

    f (g (h x)) == f . g . h $ 5

>In fact, from what I've seen most of the media and politicians lack basic maths skills.

FTFY. Or maybe even:

>In fact, from what I've seen most people lack basic maths skills.

I think what the author meant is: It's a guess where the best position is for the first click.

You can't fail with the first move but you can have different outcomes and it's advisable to choose a position where the expected information gain is optimal.

I attended a similar course and talked with other students about their solutions and what difficulties they encountered.

From what I've seen I had the impression that MiniZinc had some problems, i.e. it has some unexpected behavior, such as: - reordering constraints changes performance - reordering constraints may change results/feasibility of a problem

For quick prototyping it was nice though.

In the native dialect of western Austria you can't say "I love you".

Some form of "I like you" is as high as the emotions get there.

Diverging colormaps should only be used when some value in between should be highlighted (sea level height, median).

Also, I find 21% surprisingly large for Austria.