zenogantner

So maybe we need programming languages that are really good/supportive at handling errors (while not introducing more of them)?

Well, good management/tech leadership is about making sure that the risks coming from individual failure points (10 people in your example) are recognized and mitigated, and that the individuals involved can flag risks and conflicts early enough so that the overall project success probability does not go down as you describe...

The problem with collapsed repeated chords comes not only from the data processing -- most Ultimate Guitar songs are written down entirely ignoring how often a chord is repeated -- the classic "lyrics plus chords" format is incomplete and requires the player to somewhat know the structure of the song anyway. The write-up usually just gives hints where, relative to the lyrics, the chord changes.

Typically, chord progressions are described independently of the key they are in.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2750s_progression

While this is from ByteDance, who also are behind TikTok, this algorithm is likely not the one behind TikTok.

Instead, it is likely a component that powers ByteDance's commercial recommender system solution, which they market to e-commerce companies: https://www.byteplus.com/en/product/recommend

This was mentioned in past discussions of the paper on HN.

And even if aspects of this are used for TikTok: (a) it would be just one of many components of their recommendation system, and (b) the TikTok recommendation system has changed a lot during the 2+ years since this has been published.

So take what you see here with a grain of salt. After reading the paper and the code, you will NOT know how TikTok's recommendations work.

Most of these sound like team/people problems, not technology problems.

Like most problems in IT in general :-)

... and the compound interest of being consistently slightly better makes these people much better than others in the long run.

People here in the comments seem to focus on whether it is possible to predict an artist's success based on secondary "civic" virtues, and criticize the author for having subjective criteria for what "success" means. I'd argue that independently of how you measure success, all other things being equal, having diligence and other civic virtues will get you further, on average.

That said, the most interesting lessons are in the first and sixth (the 2nd 6th, the actual 6th) item: How to do a better/more widely scoped job than what you got hired for (by understanding how interests, incentives and responsibilities align in an org) and the fact that in most places, most people are not serious (meaning they tend to not go deeper, look at the big picture, etc.).

"The people" are the president's superior.

IM software can be closed, too, and in a healthy company the expectations around IMs should not be that they are "instant", but more of an async medium like email.

Next step: The Onion buys X.

Really interesting story. Different from a standard VC biography.

Thank you for sharing it, Adam!

I do not think that guy was only caught by accident. More red flags would have been raised if there had been further interviews.

At least there were tests ;-).

I am somewhat surprised that a programmer who was unaware of arrays in Perl managed to have tests. But then again, he managed to implement their own version of arrays, maybe he came up with the concept of software testing by himself :-P

It's cheaper for a (large enough) state to just damages/settlements, rather than paying insurance contributions.

Many countries manage to have (mostly) courteous and effective professional police forces without using an insurance/private lawsuit based framework such as the one you suggest.

And Perl 5.

> once you make it to adulthood - your body is strong enough, or can be made strong enough, to get you most of the way to your expiration date.

Yes, if you are male. Different story for women who give birth.

"Fifty Sounds" by Polly Barton is a book-length essay about this. Very entertaining read. Plus some Wittgenstein thrown in ...

I'd say making adding new features that deliver value safer is an even bigger benefit of having tests.

Why is this post flagged? In which way is it against the guidelines?

> 40-90%: Amount saved by appending “Be Concise” to your prompt

Looks to me like "numbers every LLM user needs to know".

Maybe try Debian stable?

Ubuntu is based on Debian, and the releases receive mostly security updates ... so this might be really something for you.

Also, no snaps as far as I know.

> wonder why we don't have external "neural processing" devices like we once had soundcards.

Some video cards/GPUs have become just that, becoming more and more geared towards non-graphics workloads ...

This blog post is unlikely to contain TikTok's secret sauce, or even anything that is actually used by TikTok.

ByteDance runs TikTok, but they also sell recommendations as a service. The paper that this blog post is based on explicitly talks about that service in the abstract, and never even mentions TikTok.

Now, if I were to advertise a service that contains some of the ingredients of my other, very popular product, I would surely mention that fact ... but this is not the case here.

Name and shame, please!

... so that others do not have to go through this experience ...

Yes, pretzels are sold in bakeries all over Germany, but there are huge quality differences.

As a Bavarian living in Berlin, I am shocked both about the (lack of) quality and the (high) prices of pretzels.

Why even "the left"? When Marco from the article was put into foster care, both West Berlin and West Germany had conservative governments.

Being able to undo an action is is actually a general usability principle that has been around at least since the 1980s :-).

As a former Nokia/HERE employee, I agree. A really interesting read!

It is a book originally written in Finnish by two journalists who start out with the question of whether Elop was placed at Nokia with the goal of "handing over" the phone business to MS. Their final answer is "no": it is unlikely that this was the case, according to their research. Most decisions that were taken were rational and explainable, many of them risky but adequate given the desperate situation ...

I was not at the company at the time of the memo, having joined in 2012. I do remember the morning when every employee at Nokia got an SMS on their phone saying that the phone business was sold to Microsoft. I was part of the maps division that was later sold to a consortium of German, an event that was way less spectacular ...

Literature if you want to get better at using the language and gain a deeper understanding of it: "Effective Python" and "Serious Python". Also have a look at the Python standard library documentation and e.g. the data model documentation, plus the release notes of recent Python versions (e.g. pattern matching). Tons of interesting material there.

Hands-on stuff: Write command-line tools and libraries that are useful for yourself or that are somehow fun. Try out some existing or 3rd party libraries.