psidium

I’m typing this just down the road from this Kirkland roundabout. It is fine. I’m used to roundabouts from my old country tho. I do fear someone else will just hit me down there cause I don’t trust people around here on roundabouts.

A breath of fresh air is how much faster getting off I-405 is now. I used to wait a lot on the traffic lights that were there before, and now it is like a mini slow rollercoaster.

I’ve seen a setup like this in software for some specific high-demand SAP (ERP) consultancy roles. The nature of SAP migrations are per-project in nature (you wouldn’t want to migrate your company’s ERP all the time). The person had such a skillset that they had what is effectively an “agent” who would negotiate their next job assignment. The agent was even baked into the contract with the client as a party, I don’t recall how much of the hourly this agent would get, but they were invoicing the company separately.

At least this is what I recall.

Meta: this is probably the first time this year where I use the word agent to refer to a human. Feels odd even.

Ironically, we have an infringing website right now on the front-page of HN (nypost).

Wow, thank you for the explanation. Such a complex topic and yet you’ve made it simple to understand.

Is it correct to rephrase PolarQuant as “embeddings vectors but as complex numbers” since polar vectors were represented with i complex numbers in other fields of applications? Would this open a new field of transformations using complex number arithmetics?

Edit: I believe I have my math concepts all wrong. Vectors are currently represented with xyz coordinates, so that can be our complex number equivalent. This paper saves memory size by ‘simply’ transforming this “complex number” into its polar form (radius/size and angle). Since you use less bytes on angle + radius you then always refer to that polar form instead of the regular vector/complex number part. If I have my concepts correct this idea is simple and genius.

Edit 2: I may be missing the forest for the trees here. I’ll try to learn more from the actual sources if I can.

I work at a enterprise tech company that has kinda of a monopoly on its market. The hate I get when I mention I work there is so big… I can only imagine what a MS Teams dev would get these days. The worst is when they complain about the UI… when I’m one of the few frontend focused devs there.

I’ve had a government worker stop processing my request and start complaining about the product I build. Lost a good half an hour trying to understand their bug but we didn’t get anywhere

Yep, bugs are already just another cost of doing business for companies that aren’t user-focused. We can expect buggier code from now on. Especially for software where the users aren’t the ones buying it.

Disclaimer because I sound pessimistic: I do use a lot of AI to write code.

I do feel behind on the usage of it.

This was 2008 when they were fighting for titles still (turns out they were robbed and the FIA knew about it and let it play out).

That said I imagine what Jonathan Wheatley would be able to achieve in a task similar to this since he had the Red Bull team maintain a consistent sub-2 second pit stop at Red Bull and he was able to significantly quicken the Sauber one this year.

I like this. I have crafted a Claude Code docker container to similar effects. My problem is that my env has intranet access all the time (and direct access to our staging environment) and I don’t want a coding agent that could go rogue having access to those systems. I did manage to spin up an iptables based firewall that blocks all requests unless they’re going to the IPs I allowlist on container start (I was inspired by the sandbox docs that Anthropic provides). My problem right now is that some things that my company use are behind Akamai, so a dig lookup + iptables allow does not work. I’ll probably have to figure out some sort of sidecar proxy that would allow requests on the fly instead of dig+iptables.

So they automated most of the production in order to compete with cheap labor. It didn’t bring the manufacturing jobs as we think of them back: it did something better.

I’m not not a lawyer at all and I have no real idea. My guess is that existing visas are already printed and henceforth there is no petition anymore, you have a status or visa already. Since the old petition didn’t require the payment, you don’t need to show proof of payment now. But lol if I actually know how this works, can be anyone’s guess.

My guess is that if this goes forward new h1b visas petitioned while the worker is outside the US will have a line saying “must show proof of payment” or something like that, while petitions while in the US won’t have that line on their visa stamp

Yes, but a visa stamp renewal is a visa “application” while the document that allows the application is the “petition”, which is the word used on this text and the step requiring the payment.

But I said the book does offer replication studies in different populations in different continents, albeit from the same author

Yes, maybe I was not clear but I’m in doubt of the Italy claim in the book and that’s why I remember it

IIRC the author compares brain scans and recognition abilities of children of hunter gatherers that where sent to school vs same age relatives that were not. I’m bringing this up from memory now and I’m not so sure of this, but this claim stems from some studies of the author

Literally one of the main points of the book: the church’s mandate and enforcement of monogamy in Europe lowered violence so much that a different kind of society emerged.

Do you have some recommendations? I remember seeing Show HN tools gathering book recommendations from here, but I like specific experiences

The author uses mostly hunter-gatherers tribes/societies in different continents as the control groups, usually. Most of his work is in anthropology.

I do not have the time now to craft you a full answer as I don’t have the book on hand and have only been commenting from memory so far. But to give you a quick answer: I don’t think all of it is shallow, especially given the format: the book is mostly a prose re-writing of the author’s own peer-reviewed anthropology scientific papers. Most of the authors claims are backed by actual papers for reference on the footnotes. As for replication it seems that the author himself replicated some of his studies with different hunter gatherer societies in the world. It’s been a good while since I read it.

I can tell you from my personal experience that the info there has helped me understand the differences between how people think in Brazil (where I come from) and how people think here in the US. Could it be me pattern matching? Possibly

I wouldn’t expect all of it to be true, but I would be very surprised if most of the sources the author provide are false or lack theory and tests, since he explain control groups and experiments in details.

I’m not that married to the book either, as I find some claims rather bold (like the Italy divide)

The title does sound catchy tho

Edit; the author’s main point is how the papal rule on monogamy changed Europe and its colonies to this day, which I didn’t capture on my main comment. Lots to unpack there

Yes, your point and other points around the web I’ve seen make his argument about north and south Italy very controversial to say the least. He does have data to back it up, where he presents distance to nearest church as a predictor for how well a population will fare, and south Italy didn’t have the churches that north the Italy had

I meant it as “is responsible for” or “explains”. The author doesn’t seem to make any judgement in over the other, but he presents polygamy in a society as a causation for male violence. Sorry for that, English isn’t my first language

I don’t have the data but I assume the corpus available to train an LLM is majorly in English, written by Americans and western counterparts. If we’re training the LLMs to sound similar to the training data, I imagine the responses have to match that world view.

My anecdote is that before LLMs I would default to search Google in English instead of my own native language simply because there was so much more content in English to be found that would help me.

And here I am producing novel sentences in English to respond to your message, further continuing the cycle where English is the main language to search and do things.

Can’t recommend the book that coined this acronym enough: The WEIRDest People in the World Book by Joseph Henrich.

It is such an eye-opening piece that explains so much of the world around us. He’s an anthropologist that goes into the psychology of it all. Touching on points like how religion plays a part in shaping the America of today and even how humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that.

There are so many interest studies mentioned there, one that really stuck with me is how Protestant-raised Americans will work harder for the next day after having (reasearch-led) incestuous thoughts when compared to Catholics and Atheists.

He explains how monogamy is to blame for a lot of our western views today, and how Mormon towns in Utah were affected by not having monogamy as the basis of society (women there tend to prefer to be 2nd wives of a better man rather being the only wife of a lower-ranking man).

One of the wildest claims in there is the one that the north of Italy is more developed today because it was part of the Holy Roman Empire while the south wasn’t. About a thousand years separate these and he finds effects still. Mostly in connection to the spread of read/write to the public being a core tenant of Protestantism.

Anyway, this is not a summary of the book but instead a few points from it that really stuck with me after reading it. Fascinating stuff

> If devs follow certain simple rules while writing UI text, it would make a tremendous difference for translation quality

As a UI Developer that has accidentally focused my whole career in building (complex) forms, I can tell you there is a night and day difference from when I worked alongside User Assistance professionals vs when UX designers had to come up with the texts. These “User Assistance professionals” were usually English/Language-majored that would exclusively take care of how to properly write the texts on the screen for the users. From help texts to button labels, to release notes and RCA, and especially taking care of how to write texts in English so the app would be easily translatable, they would own all. The apps that had that sort of handholding with the devs were extremely easier to use and input data to, even when the UX itself was subpar.

I used to think it was standard to have English-focused professionals helping UI teams to deliver easy to understand products, only to find out that that company was kinda odd in that regard, and having UX or even product people coming up with labels is quite common. I do miss being able to fire an email when I need a quick text reviewed to be sure that a button is well labeled for the user and translation.

I remember some 12 years ago at high school where I was trying to create an iOS app tailored for visually impaired users, that AppleVis was the go-to website to understand what was happening on the world of VoiceOver and apps focused on this demographic. I remember finding a guide for VoiceOver there that really helped me getting started.

I'm sad to see it go. I'm not sure there is will for someone to create a replacement, but hopefully something tailored for the visually impaired users can emerge.

At least at work I try to focus and champion the a11y features we have to add on the app we build (web). Sometimes it doesn't feel like it is enough.

I came here to second that. They had the Paso now which isn't even the first round of actual elections.

This is an English article I could find about it: https://www.as-coa.org/articles/what-are-argentinas-paso-pre...

aquilo ali varia se o teu usuário é daquele país ou não. é uma cidade do meu país? cidade, estado. É de outro país? cidade, PAÍS.

wait do you have more info on that or a link? never heard of it

For all the documentation you see surrounding SAPUI5, it is very incomplete when you have to actually use it do develop something.

It is built on top of jQuery and extremely slow. They are very adamant on MVC with two-way databinding (the opposite of React or most other frontend libraries that have been around for almost 10 years). The backend request is geared toward OData (think graphql but table-oriented), and adding logic between the UI and the OData endpoint is hard.

SAPUI5 is hard to use even for a mediocre screen need. It aims to get the simple apps really simple to write (to lower development cost), but at that it kills the productivity of all the other apps.

Getting back to documentation, after your app is not just some components living in logical islands but have to interact with one another (think getting data from one place to drive another component) most of the time the documentation did not help with that, and I had to resort to debug the whole library internally to understand it.

Add all that to the fact that they don’t even care to support firefox for non-windows users bah

It is really understandable why no one but SAP uses this library. It was made for one use case by sap for sap and that’s it.

Too bad no one chipped in, as I myself wanted to use Bazel to do these sort of things too. I tried to use Yarn 3 in the past[0], and I was able to get the watchers with the dependency tree working and its own PnP modules, but the building phase was hard to manage. Some plugins to handle that do exist but I don't know if I'll keep on it. I may start to look into nx.

[0]: https://psidium.github.io/lerna/monorepo/yarn/nodejs/pnp/zer...