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sparsely

844 karma · joined May 3, 2016

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sparsely··on AWS Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow
There's no mention of AWS's own existing workflow management systems - Step Functions and AWS Glue. Would be interested to see AWS's own advice on when to use one over the other.
sparsely··on Oxford University vaccine shows 70% protection
Obviously they'll be a bit disappointed with those numbers, but I think the article undersells how big a difference the ease of storage will make. It requires a fridge instead of specialist cold chain equipment.
sparsely··on Did Neanderthals go to war with our ancestors?
Not quite the same but The Inheritors by William Golding explores the coexistence of the two groups.
sparsely··on Dutch brewery burns iron as a clean, recyclable fuel
Remarkably good science journalism - I appreciated the caution at the end about the economics of the process and the understanding that there are many different factors that can make a process attractive.
sparsely··on Names are not type safety
I believe that Ada, or perhaps a specific subset with some extensions, achieves most of these goals. You can definitely restrict types to be a range or enumeration of e.g. ints, and they have some facility for contract based function interfaces.
sparsely··on Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia
100% Agree about any non trivial retool immediately becoming a mountain of tech debt. We use retool extensively and have put a lot of effort into making a workflow that is vaguely manageable, but it's still pretty bad. And once you start using custom components it's even worse. It's also an incredible resource hog.

Still, it lets you churn out working UIs and mini apps really fast so it's very hard to stop using it once you've started!

sparsely··on GDPR Enforcement Tracker
Nice, although I did find this one for 560EUR:

``` Fine imposed on Forbes Hungary for publishing a list of the 50 wealthiest Hungarians and a list of the largest family businesses without a sufficient balance of interests (Art. 6 (1) f) GDPR). ```

sparsely··on The Battle over Dyslexia
My impression from the article is that they want all students who struggle to read to be supported, not just those from wealthy backgrounds
sparsely··on We now consider Moment.js to be a legacy project in maintenance mode
I think the suggestion is just use Luxon - the apis are a bit different but there isn't really need for another library
sparsely··on Phosphine detected in the atmosphere of Venus – an indicator of possible life?
It's worth considering that: * we have an N of 1 when it comes to understanding under what conditions life can appear * when life first appeared on earth, conditions were such that almost no currently existing creatures could survive

that being said, it does seem more likely that this will result in some new chemistry or a better understanding of conditions on venus than anything else

sparsely··on Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor
It's so various news orgs can just publish it in all or part with no editing.
sparsely··on Brexit fuels brain drain as skilled Britons head to the EU
I think almost everyone involved would have already been resident, if they are measuring it by passport issuance. I am moving (officially in the next few months, in practice already) to an EU country but won't qualify for a passport for 5 years. The deadline for most people to make a move like this is the end of this year, and in fact some countries (e.g. France) haven't even made the official process for changing residency available yet.
sparsely··on Proteus: Underwater research lab worthy of a Bond villain
Someone's been playing too much Subnautica
sparsely··on Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods
Cars are incredibly loud, as are delivery trucks. Both tend to be smaller in Japan, and there is a much lower car density in particular in most urban areas.
sparsely··on Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods
while i agree that there is a trend in that direction, they are still better than the status quo of separated developments.
sparsely··on Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods
Mixed use zoning isn't about becoming like NYC, it's about being able to walk to the cornershop at the end of the road to buy a pint of milk. Maybe there's a cafe and a accountant's office there too.
sparsely··on Up to 4GB of Memory in WebAssembly
Imagine how much adware you'll be able to fit in 4GB!
sparsely··on Amazon AppFlow
The sales guys will certainly be getting hydrated off AppFlow
sparsely··on The myth of the developer that can't code
Recruitment for accountants etc often includes a technical skills component, I don't know why he thinks it doesn't.
sparsely··on The Bloomberg Terminal, Explained
The terminal, and particularly the business model around it, is widely disliked in some parts of the industry. Bloomberg has an incredible amount of power as the only high quality source for certain types of data, and they tie it to the terminal. There are all sorts of contractual requirements around data not leaving the machine the terminal.

It's not uncommon to hear stories about small trading shops or asset managers having a shared terminals which they run over to do specific actions, or a substantial amount of effort being put into automated data extraction which avoids Bloomberg's controls.

sparsely··on How to play with people who are better than you
Bananagrams is a word game based on scrabble which has a really elegant catch up mechanic which comes so naturally out of the rules you barely notice. If you are behind you will tend to have more free tiles which don't require large rearrangements, making it easier to see new words. (This breaks down slightly with big skill differences or if you are way way behind but in most cases works perfectly)
sparsely··on Microsoft’s web-based version of Visual Studio
From the screenshots it looks as though it is based on Visual Studio Code, which is a remarkably efficient electron app and different product to Visual Studio.
sparsely··on Edison Mail app scrapes users inboxes for purchase receipts
Compare to their tagline at mail.edison.tech, "Switch to Edison Mail and take back your privacy."
sparsely··on When XML Beats JSON: UI Layouts
Good article, but for some reason he doesn't mention one the best XML UI systems: WPF.
sparsely··on Can a Machine Learn to Write for the New Yorker?
The generated text is a little too on the nose and sure enough:

> In each case, we generated more than one response and selected the predicted text that follows each section in the article.

Good article even so.

sparsely··on My OpenStreetMap Workflow: Mapping the Village of Marmari, Evia
It's always impressive to me that OSM has (or at least exposes) better off road walking data than Google does.
sparsely··on France to tax flights from its airports, airline shares fall
Massively https://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_128.shtml
sparsely··on Show HN: 300k lines of Java UI code running native in browser at desktop speed
Performs better than most websites which intentionally target JS
sparsely··on Assessing efficiency of changes in land use for mitigating climate change [pdf]
Biofuels come accross really badly by their measures.
sparsely··on The Big Hack: The Software Side of China’s Supply Chain Attack
Is it possible that only lower level Apple/Amazon employees were involved in the investigation and that they are forbidden from telling anyone else, even senior legal executives?
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