brad0

OT, but the superlogical browser tab icon gives me flashbacks (pun intended) to the flash player icon:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Adobe_Fl...

A generic name for a collection of things used to gain access to something.

That’s not really helping explain it, so here’s some examples:

Airplane tickets, library membership barcode, sports tickets, loyalty cards for your local coffee shop, conference tickets, etc.

Essentially anything with a barcode first and foremost. The website that this blog is about allows you to generate your own passes.

In the video you show a 2D mask to blur diagonal lines. How is that mask applied to the DFT? Is the mask also converted to a DFT and the two signals get combined?

The summary of the post says that lambdas/procedures/etc. are another type outside of composition and inheritance. I’ve always thought of lambdas as composition though. You’re assigning a function just as you would any other data, right?

Thanks for the link! I read through it and agree with most of your points, especially the parts about presence and separation of tasks.

I personally liked the intellectual aspect of it, though I also agree that the emotional component should be there as well.

I've been reading through the book The Courage to be Disliked recently. I'm not a big fan of the writing style of the book, but some of the ideas in the book appear in this post too.

One of the concepts in the book is being comfortable with being disliked. If instead you're trying to avoid being disliked, you're effectively subject to other people's whims.

When you look at it from that perspective, that's a pretty stressful experience!

There was another reply here earlier that was saying it isn't a trade deficit. I wanted to steelman the parent post:

Foreign investment into USA companies reduces the USA trade deficit but it isn't tracked in traditional methods.

I've heard that foreign investment in real estate generally isn't counted as each country owns properties equally between the two, so it nets out. I wonder if investments into companies is the same?

Showing my age here, but this reminds me of knex. You would get different models but you could make whatever you wanted out of the parts. It was a great creative toy back in the day.

I just took a look online and they’re still selling kits. I’m partial to the Ferris wheel.

https://www.basicfun.com/knex/

I put down $50 to reserve one. I grew up with an old car that I tinkered with endlessly. Mostly because it was simple enough for me to get my head around! This car reminds me of that time.

I'm hoping that they go with a lot of "off-the-shelf" electronics and mechanical parts. Standards are a blessing.

It feels like they're going with a different business model to traditional car manufacturers. AFAIK most manufacturers make a lot of their money via servicing. I'd love to take a look at what their long-term business strategy is.

Do you have a doc or article that describes more about this? I’ve worked with relational algebra before but I’ve never heard it described with an API before. Are the responses all table based? I suppose you could wrap all calls with a SQL style API?

For all my GTD-style note taking I'm using Things. I stuff everything that I need to remember into its inbox as soon as I think about it. Adding context + sorting happens at a later date once I can sit down and give more details.

The one thing I don't have is a general "reference" system. Once I've finished with a task / project / etc. I want to be able to archive it into a wiki-type system. But I also want to be able to query structured data out of it too.

The closest thing I can think of is writing mini-wiki pages. Because they're mini wiki pages, a screen should be able to show multiple pages at once. There's something there, I'm just not sure what.

According to this post it looks like new accounts can’t onboard:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41104997

Yes and you can add me to the group.

FS is Field Separator. It’s ascii code 0x1C. Theres a whole group of these separators in ascii:

> The separators (File, Group, Record, and Unit: FS, GS, RS and US) were made to structure data, usually on a tape, in order to simulate punched cards.

https://www.ascii-code.com/character/%E2%90%9E

Yep! I haven't read the article, but the core issue that DevOps is trying to solve is the old division between coding and deployment/ops.

Back in the day you would have one team writing code, and another team managing the infrastructure + deployment.

The problem with this team breakdown is the lack of ownership and the delay in feedback. Devs aren't incentivised to make the software work well, and SREs aren't incentivised to deploy new versions of software. DevOps should be a strategy to resolve these dysfunctions.

Unfortunately, most companies just renamed their infra roles to devops roles, and called it a day. They weren't resolving their core dysfunctions in their team composition.

There's probably other levers as well that I'm not aware of or have forgotten. But you'll be seeing companies everywhere using most, if not all of these levers, not just tech.

We can replace some of the engineers income with company equity ie: shares of the company. This way we don't have to take out as large loans, but we have to give up a certain percentage of the company. This can be done via share transfer or share dilution.

Share transfer is easiest to understand. You give up x% of your company and give it to the other entity.

Share dilution is trickier. Basically you create additional shares out of thin air, and give them to the other entity. This reduces the value of each share, as there's a greater number of shares representing the same company.

Management can pay down the existing debt, which makes future debt payments easier. But they need cash to pay down existing debt, which they may not have.

What about cost-cutting measures? As long as it doesn't impact your ability to generate revenue, this is a good strategy.

However, other companies that are your clients are doing the same thing - cutting costs by no longer paying your company. It's an economic positive feedback loop. Companies cut costs, which reduces the revenue of other companies, so they cut costs.

Let's say management decide to lay off 50% of their engineering workforce.

This decreases our new loan amount to $1.5M. Revenue now needs to increase by $74,150 instead of $105,800. That's less than if we retained all our engineers, but it's still quite high.

What about something more drastic? What if we lay off 90% of the engineering workforce?

This decreases our new loan amount to $1.1M. Revenue now needs to increase by $48,830. The pour soul(s) that are left are going to be spending all their time maintaining the existing systems, they won't be able to increase revenue by over 2x what we did in 2022.

I'd say they're holding off on investments and focusing on increasing their bottom line, ie: reducing costs.

Software engineers cost a lot of money. Their employment is largely driven by corporate loan interest rates. Some pay with equity as well, but let's ignore that for now.

This example is massively oversimplified but should help put the point across:

Say it's January 2022 and you pay $1M per year for some software engineers. You take out a loan of $1M to pay those engineers. That loan comes with an interest rate and a maturity date. Generally a corporate loan is 2% above the fedfunds rate. January 2022 had a fedfunds rate of 0.08%, so the corporate loan interest rate was 2.08%. To keep the example simple, let's say that the maturity date is in 1 year after the loan creation.

In 1 year, you will owe $1M plus the $20,800 interest on top. If you can use those engineers to increase your revenue by more than the $20,800 in a year, those engineers are a good investment.

You can take that extra revenue to pay the $20,800 interest. But what about the other $1M owed? Well, you can do something that's called rolling over a loan, which basically means you push out the maturity date, and renegotiate the interest rate on the loan.

It's January 2023, so the fedfunds rate is 4.33%. The corporate loan rate is +2%, which makes for a total of 6.33%. For the engineers to be worth it, they need to increase revenue by $63,300 from 2021 (or $42,500 from 2022), 3x as much as 2022.

Ah, but it's actually more than that! Because we still need to pay our engineers, we need to take out an additional $1M for their salaries this year. So our new loan is $2M, and the amount of additional revenue we need to generate is $126,600 from 2021 (or $105,800 from 2022), which is 6x our 2022 revenue goals.

Before I go any further, what levers do you think management have to help manage this situation?

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EDIT: FEDFUNDS graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

I've never heard a convincing argument for graph databases.

What specific tasks does a graph database perform better than a typical postgres database?

I don't care about queries that are easier to read - I'm looking for performance, particularly under load.

Austerity, taxing the rich, restructure debt, printing money.

This video by Ray Dalio explains it much better than I ever could:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

That sounds very similar to AWS Step Functions to me. You define a workflow graph in JSON, then run the workflow and hand out subprocesses to lambdas etc.

I would highly recommend getting the $25 bundle. It has a great set of titles:

- Building Event-Driven Microservices

- Building Evolutionary Architectures

- Building Micro-Frontends

- Continuous API Management

- Flow Architectures

- Foundations of Scalable Systems

- Fundamentals of Software Architecture

- Learning Domain-Driven Design

- Mastering API Architecture

- Microservices Up and Running

- Monolith to Microservices

- Software Architecture Metrics

- Software Architecture: The Hard Parts

- The Art of Agile Development

- The Software Architect Elevator