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webel0

373 karma · joined July 15, 2019

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webel0··on Incident with Github.com [resolved]
I object to the notion that having "american born engineers" is the cause of their issues.
webel0··on The only moat left is money?
Welding is coming along. Ever heard of Path Robotics? That's high-mix, high-complexity welds. (There are a lot of other, less-sophisticated welding robots out there.) The biggest moat for a welder right now is special certifications to be able to do welds on submarines, etc.
webel0··on Targeted Bets: An alternative approach to the job hunt
I tried to build this back around 2020. I think my concept was trying to be too cute in several places. But this was the basic idea.

I found that neither side of the market wanted to rethink the market, they just wanted something that worked well for them. Even today, job seekers may be reaching for something like this but employers have no interest; there is a glut in the market.

I’m sure I never quite got the messaging correct. However, I distinctly recall that triplebyte attempted a pivot in this same vein and also failed bad.

webel0··on OpenAI acquired AI training monitor Neptune
They are shutting down the product. I haven't received the sunsetting guide. What are people moving to instead?
webel0··on Adversarial poetry as a universal single-turn jailbreak mechanism in LLMs
These prompts read a lot like wizards’ spells!
webel0··on Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?
Can you provide some examples?
webel0··on The 1-HR nurse visits that cost $15B to Medicare
If medicare increases payouts then the payoff to this sort of behavior only increases.
webel0··on Polylith
I've been mostly pleased with our use of python-polylith [1] with poetry in a production application. We output a webapp, python sdk, and CLI as separate "projects."

It doesn't _really_ solve python dependency/import issues. Instead, it helps to you keep your project in discrete chunks and well-organized. It also makes it easy to package up the separate projects as artifacts.

I've run into some issues with versioning separate projects but I suspect that is a matter of bandwidth rather than an actual, insoluble issue.

I'd use it again at a startup or on project where you need to ship a bunch of artifacts but don't have a lot of bandwidth.

[1] https://github.com/DavidVujic/python-polylith

webel0··on A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece (2023)
Are there any comparisons of weather apps by area? For example, "for the San Francisco bay area, apple weather is most accurate on rain. But for NYC accuweather is better." I suppose you ought to be comparing weather APIs rather than apps but it would be most usable if you just knew which app to download.
webel0··on The Overengineered Resume with Zola, JSON Resume, Weasyprint, and Nix (2023)
I wouldn't worry about automated ATS. Their use is way overstated on LinkedIn, by "resume experts," etc.

I'm talking about whether a human can read the document comfortably.

webel0··on The Overengineered Resume with Zola, JSON Resume, Weasyprint, and Nix (2023)
I would be careful with LaTeX. I use to have a LaTeX resume generated with LuaTeX. At an old company, I saw my LaTeX resume in the ATS long after I was hired. Apparently, something happened and the PDF displayed as blurred-but-not-unreadable in the ATS. Maybe the ATS did some post-processing or used a limited PDF display engine? Lucky for me, the resume for that job was just a formality. These days, I just use Google Docs and export to PDF.
webel0··on How close is AI to replacing product managers?
I would have liked to see them focus on less well-known companies. It seems quite possible that the reference human responses (from exponent) were already present in the training data.
webel0··on How I turned seemingly 'failed' experiments into a successful PhD
It is definitely harder to grow this muscle when you are remote. Be biased towards hopping on a call/zoom rather than messaging on slack, etc.
webel0··on How I turned seemingly 'failed' experiments into a successful PhD
I would be interested to hear more about how much they were discussing their failures/challenges with others. It sounds like this might be a case of, "I finally talked to someone about it and they unblocked me in an hour."

When I was in grad school I was very hesitant to ask others for help or feedback. Big mistake! I see similar things with interns: they'll wait until a daily or weekly check-in to raise problems.

My approach now is to set a time budget; if I don't figure it out myself within X hours, then I have to ask someone for help.

webel0··on Why Triplebyte Failed
I would love to learn if TripleByte's data was sold off somewhere? I also had this concern (which was probably a bit overblown). One of the main scenarios I was concerned about was a case where the firm was sold off for parts.
webel0··on Nonintrussive non-datamining ads platform?
You could check out ethical ads [1]. I have no first-hand experience with them as a publisher. But they are fairly unobtrusive on readthedocs [2] sites.

[1] https://www.ethicalads.io/publishers/

[2] https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#

webel0··on How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business
Waymo's relatively rapid geonet expansion suggests that they have either improved their mapping productivity substantially or gone fully map-less.

I can't speak to their RVA operations.

webel0··on How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business
Waymo is currently under investigation for multiple incidents, not all of which it had previously disclosed to the NHTSA [0]. The recent light pole incident also doesn't help [1].

If they are doing 50k rides a day, then they would appear to have a remarkable safety record.

It will be interesting to see if these investigations lead to a repeat of the Cruise debacle or if this will become the price of doing business.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-saf...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZP-RNSr0s

webel0··on Amazon's robotaxi co is under investigation after two crashes with motorcyclists
Full NHSTA document here [1].

[1] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2024/INOA-PE24015-12348.pdf

webel0··on Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?
Yes, Hesai LiDAR [1] bug is grounding cars.

[1] https://pandaily.com/hesai-technology-addresses-lidar-produc...

webel0··on APL at Volvo
Yeah, I wonder if that is 425k _formatted_ lines of APL? I'm blanking: wasn't there someone who wrote their hedge fund's entire data processing pipeline in 4 lines of APL?
webel0··on 4-day week made permanent for 89% UK firms who took part in Worlds biggest trial
> Most gave their staff one full day off a week, either universal or staggered.

I think that this will start to take off if stakeholders can start to coalesce around a single day. Either Monday or Friday. Once you build up the expectation that people are off on a given day, it becomes that much easier for a new firm to adopt (because, e.g., none of their counterparties are in the office).

webel0··on YC: Requests for Startups
That makes sense. Explainability would be a big issue/requirement with any attempted automated decision framework. I don't know if I would want my doctor to just order up tests based on the output of some app without understanding why they're ordering them up.
webel0··on YC: Requests for Startups
(Tangentially related to, “A WAY TO END CANCER”)

After seeing how my doctor iteratively ordered up different sets of tests for me over the course of a few months, I got to thinking about improving decision trees for blood testing (and maybe others).

However, when I spoke to a (first year) med student about this he suggested that doctors actually don’t want something like this. I don't think I followed the thought process completely but it was something along the lines of, “we’ll always find something.”

Would be interested if someone could elaborate on this line of thinking.

webel0··on The dating app paradox
A dating app is a two sided market. And those are hard to get going. You need a lot of marketing, for one.
webel0··on Placemark is now open source – web-based geospatial data editor
I can’t believe I’m saying this but: I wish they had placed an ad for placemark on geojson.io.

I had no idea this existed until just now but I’ve worked at two companies where a lot of coworkers could have benefited greatly from a map app that has a few more features than geojson.io but is less complex than qgis/arcgis.

webel0··on Overpass Turbo: A Web Based Data Mining Tool for OpenStreetMap
It does. The problem is that I have a hard time determining if the output is, indeed, what I was trying to query in the first place!
webel0··on Thomas Cochrane
> all of the above is sourced from Cochrane: Britannia’s Sea Wolf by Donald Thomas

Thats pretty much what they did. I do sort of like the idea of sharing less-than-perfectly-polished writing. But it does make for an odd read.

webel0··on Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs
Adobe acrobat (and maybe reader) is really the only app that fully supports the full PDF spec as understood by the authors of the spec. There are ridiculous parts of the spec that allow support for things like JS, etc.
webel0··on Waymo outperforms comparable human benchmarks over 7M+ miles
Better NHTSA testing/benchmarks/regulations would help the entire industry at this point. After the cruise debacle, we need more than just, “our internal metrics show.”
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