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tacosbane

24 karma · joined September 12, 2019

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tacosbane··on Top Problems with LLM App Development
1. the model's responses are unreliable 2. to make them reliable, you have to tell the model the answer 3. even though you now have a process to figure out the answer, you still have to use the model because the VP wants you to
tacosbane··on Covid has broken the social contract between parents and schools
teachers, as a class, loudly declared they aren't essential workers.
tacosbane··on Ask HN: Why have real wages been stagnant for most Americans?
not getting into specifics (because i'm not an expert), but these conversations usually lack any discussion of individual vs. group. e.g., the 10th decile of wages may stay the same, but the people who were in the 10th decile 30 years ago are not the people in the 10th decile now. i think it's safe to say that many people (not all) start and end their careers at very different quantiles in the distribution.

edited: "most people" may have been too strong.

tacosbane··on CEO Claims About Office Productivity Seem Backed Up by Data
yes, there are absolutely no confounding variables to productivity during a global pandemic
tacosbane··on Reddit’s CEO edited comments that criticized him (2016)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13028522
tacosbane··on Ask HN: What Happened to TensorFlow Swift?
lattner left google and was the primary reason they chose swift, so they lost interest.

if you're asking from an ML perspective, i believe the original motivation was to incorporate automatic differentiation in the swift compiler. enzyme would be the spiritual successor to that.

https://github.com/EnzymeAD/Enzyme

tacosbane··on Ask HN: How does Apple Offer 4.15% APY?
they don't, it's a branded account. wealthfront's cash management account currently pays 4.3% up to 3m.
tacosbane··on $335,000 Pay for ‘AI Whisperer’ Jobs Appears in Red-Hot Market
Revealing that associating anything AI with money inflates the bubble. This translates to "we need to hire a $335k employee to figure out how to use our product."
tacosbane··on Ask HN: Was tech always so scammy?
I'm not old enough to remember pre-2009 well enough to comment, but since then, yes, it's been scammy.

The SV/SFBay idea of success is what the rest of us would call a pump and dump: burn a bunch of money to drive existing enterprises in the rest out of the country out of business; while providing at best marginal, and usually no, product benefit to consumers; and dumping the money losing venture on institutional and retail investors.

That's success. "Exiting." Not building something new, valuable, or sustainable.

"Oh, but wait, there are sustainable businesses," you might say. With few exceptions, they are advertising companies. Advertising is a fixed pool drawn from the real economy; all they've done is divert it from existing businesses.

Just make sure to pretend you're changing the world.

tacosbane··on Ask HN: What is your view on MBA product managers?
the point of an mba is to be able to insert yourself between the money and the work and take a cut
tacosbane··on Ask HN: Disk-backed NumPy for data analysis?
you didn't provide any hints why it wouldn't work for you, so i recommend you look at scikit-learn's neighbors module (i.e., construct NearestNeighbors object and query it).

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/neighbors.html#unsup...

tacosbane··on Ask HN: What is going on in the ad-tech market?
ads are essentially noise. some high-nines number of ads have no effect. to counteract this, demand-side providers came up with ways to fake an effect to look valuable. they then discovered clients couldn't tell the difference between real or fake, or didn't care because the clients also want to say their ads worked. then the race to the bottom began: buy the absolute minimum quality for as little as you possibly can. that put pressure on the supply side because their revenues fell.

examples of faking: - the search "companyname" takes credit for "companyname.com" - "we promise we didn't show you the one positive result from running 1000 tests"

tacosbane··on Ask HN: How to Deal with ChatGPT Anxiety?
correctness and verification are not close to being solved. it's feasible that AI will increase individual developer productivity and narrow the field. it's also possible, and probably more likely, that increased productivity and capability will just increase the complexity of software; that may be good (more interesting problems and broader real-world applications) or bad (overengineered monstrosities).
tacosbane··on Why didn't you buy a Tesla?
they are glued together in a tent, and feel like it
tacosbane··on Ask HN: Is There a Comments-Only Hacker News RSS Feed?
https://hnrss.github.io/
tacosbane··on AI builds SQL queries for you in seconds
`users and their posts, comments, travels` generates an inner combinatorial explosion
tacosbane··on Ask HN: Upskilling as a Data Engineer
Learn SQL in depth, not just select and join. I'm tired of writing SQL for DE.
tacosbane··on Ask HN:Hey HN what are your favourite RSS feeds?
https://hnrss.org/newest?count=100&points=2
tacosbane··on Ask HN: How to get better at writing?
Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
tacosbane··on Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2023?
Elon (personally) and Tesla are revealed as insolvent
tacosbane··on Codon – a high-performance, zero-overhead, extensible Python compiler using LLVM
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33908576
tacosbane··on Tesla’s Third Largest Shareholder Calls for the Ouster of Elon Musk as CEO
Tesla is better off without Elon. TSLA is Elon.
tacosbane··on Ask HN: How would you argue that ChatGPT is not a big deal?
Ask it about something you know a lot about. The combine that with another thing you know a lot about. If you're still worried, then I guess I'm in the control group. (https://xkcd.com/2576/)
tacosbane··on Elizabeth Holmes: 'They Don’t Put Pretty People Like Me in Jail'
self-burn
tacosbane··on Ask HN: A less intense HN RSS feed?
See https://hnrss.github.io/

Filtering on points or comments will cut off the long tail.

tacosbane··on Ask HN: 10k hours rule to master anything. Could I switch career when I am 43?
don't ever do, say, or think anything because of malcolm gladwell
tacosbane··on Ask HN: Does anyone else think SQL needs help?
postgres has window functions but it does not have the `qualify` clause.
tacosbane··on Ask HN: Does anyone else think SQL needs help?
I think every dialect has an idiomatic way to do what you're asking. e.g., in Snowflake it's `select * from sales_department_details qualify no_products_sold = max(no_products_sold) over (partition by sales_person_id)`, PSQL `select distinct on (sales_person_id) * from sales_department_details order by sales_person_id, no_products_sold desc`, ...
tacosbane··on Ask HN: Is living in NYC worth it?
if you don't feel pretty strongly that it's worth it, it's probably not
tacosbane··on The rise and fall of Cathie Wood, controversial Wall Street investor
fyi, SARK tracks the inverse of ARK. easiest money i've ever made.
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