cromd

Their addition of AI into Quicksight (their BI tool) really cemented for me how much they're willing to bluff to look relevant. They launched the AI addition at least a year ago, but recently rebranded the whole thing as "Quick Suite", promoting new AI capabilities. It really just seems like a new skin, with more purple. So far, out of 4 people at my org who tried it, all were disappointed after upgrading. I get much better results from sending a CSV to ChatGPT and asking for a graph.

It just doesn't seem to work out of the box. I test drove it on 20 BI questions, and for trivial questions, it gets about 50% right, and for more nuanced questions, it gets about 20% right. For example, I have a table like "people" with a column like "job_title" which has 10 possible values in an uneven distribution, and I asked "what fraction of people are nurses?". It gives me a pie chart where each slice wrongly gets 10%, because of the 10 possible values. Or if I asked what the mix by decade was, it would just show a flat line, 10% each period.

Then you have the more tricky questions, like "show me the revenue for each of the top 3 products in each quarter". It calculates an all-time top 3 first, and then shows the same products each quarter, instead of redoing it within each quarter. Reasonable enough, but when you try to correct it, it just gets stuck, possibly with an even worse answer, and there's no way out of the loop.

Why would they let executives touch something so half-baked?

Yes, and it seems Ukraine actually did attack a base within Crimea later, the specifically forbidden thing, without any nuclear response. I can imagine it's a difficult call for Musk to make, as nobody wants to be responsible for nuclear war, and hindsight is 20/20, but it's yet another bluff in a long string of bluffs as you say.

Couldn't one say the same of any brick and mortar store? If a shoe store is going to open in my neighborhood, for example, how much data do they need for it to be optimally located? I guess they could seek out the online browsing history of all the friends of all the people living within 1 mile from the shoe store and analyze it.

I don't doubt that billboards are placed with some careful thought, but tracking is certainly not "required" - some aggregate stats about an area should work, especially as there isn't much feedback on who saw the billboard and bought a product etc.

> "On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect."

This "zero comments" part doesn't line up with my experience. Maybe what was meant was "on any niche topic that very few people understand that I happen to be an expert in". I consider myself informed about a number of topics, and also constantly learn things from HN within those topics, from people who are much more informed than I am. (But, I'm not really a top 1% kind of expert on anything)

Are you including “basic economics” in the list of things sports taught you? Curious how that would be learned.

Interesting that some people can turn it around. I believe the benefits of sun are maybe poorly understood for now, and I maybe spent too many decades hiding from the sun entirely, as a fair-skinned person, tracking the UV index a little too closely.

That said, I've also read that heat can make MS symptoms worse. I anecdotally get a bit weird in the heat. So, I thought maybe I'd stick to colder, cloudier places. But maybe that's wrong, and I should get a sunny, not-so-hot place. Maybe that only leaves California, or I can stop wearing coats in winter to get some rays at a low temperature :)

Could this deficiency be caught by some kind of blood test, though? Do regular checkups screen for this? Is there some reason you'd be "super low on it in brain tissues" and not in other parts of the body?

I found out this year that I have RIS or perhaps mild/early MS. (Most RIS cases proceed to an MS diagnosis within a few years, but there is some possibility it was some "random" one-time damage). Just a surprising result of a random MRI for something else, although I had also suspected MS before, and brought it up with doctors over a few years (always told it was just stress). Since it's rare, I guess most people who suspect MS are wrong about it, but I feel vindicated by the imaging at least. I'm not struggling much at this point in terms of function, but I've dealt with the mental struggle of thinking "that feeling just now, that was weird, was it a not-so-abnormal sensation that's part of aging? Or am I slipping a bit?". I spent a few months fretting my future. But you may take my points with a grain of salt.

This thread is heavy on health advice, which is great, and I'm seeing some good tips here. I trust this forum more than many general health forums! But I'm curious if you could elaborate more on your work struggles. I worry that , as a programmer, my brain is everything, and if that goes, I'm done. Do you think your employer has noticed a drop in your performance? Have you been objectively failing at necessary projects? Have you had to take a pay cut after being laid off elsewhere? Have you had to take time off of work? This is not (entirely) me challenging your sense of worry, but also wondering how bad the symptoms can get.

I have also felt a "lobotomy" or "mild dementia" state at times, but given my very early stage, I think it was partially burnout or mid-life crisis. Working a job for 5 years, staring at a screen in the same room every day, realizing your life isn't as moldable as when you were younger, it can make you feel weird! That is, there are many causes for a drop in attention and focus, and it's probably a combo of MS and other things. You said in a reply that 3 years ago, your "brain was working great", because of low stress, good finances etc. So, even if your MS is objectively getting worse, make sure to keep those other factors in mind, or you might think the MS is worsening faster than it is.

I have found it difficult to read about MS because the symptoms aren't quantified like "X% of people feel this Y years after onset", it's usually just said that Y CAN happen. I've maybe seen stats about complete mobility loss. But for mental impairment it's hard to measure and report. Maybe there's degradation in memory, but how much can I expect?

People tell me "oh, those things, that's just getting older", but sometimes it feels too fast. One thing that seems more objective is how often I just use a completely different word than the one I intended. This can obviously break my code, but because they're so random, it tends to break loudly and early, and I hope maybe linters/tests/compilation can save me from these simple mistakes.

I think forgetfulness would be the biggest hindrance to coding. Forgetting to check inputs, forgetting to unwind a temporary hack, forgetting to warn people about things. But, one can take copious notes, keep checklists, write lots of to-do/revisit-this comments in code. And of course some tools provide more safety nets than others. So, we can try and "engineer" our way out of some things, and it's a good thing even the sharpest airplane pilots don't solely rely on their brains.

I've also started independent consulting recently, spreading work between multiple clients, and maybe that format could be useful to others. While it's less stable in a way, I fret less about the drama/consequences of temporarily scaling back my hours if things get too stressful. A shorter engagement doesn't trigger stigma of inability to focus, and some time off probably won't trigger questions about resume gaps. By having clearer expectations up front about me not looking to lead teams or be some keystone member, I don't worry as much about possibly letting people down. It may also let me experiment more with companies/setups that work for me. Being in the USA, I'm also feeling good about having bought my own health insurance. Yes, it costs money, but people expect you to charge more for it, and now I don't find myself listing "health insurance would be a mess to deal with" as a reason not to leave a job. I'll be less eager to jump at a job that's not a good fit for me, just because I want insurance.

Lastly, and this is for whoever, having some portion of remote work could be good. It's good for when you need to rest, but it's also good for diagnosing yourself a bit. If you're anxious about contentious face-to-face meetings, or office social pressures, it can be hard to know what is causing certain feelings. I could more easily confirm that something was off about me once I removed the stress of the office. I could say "I feel good, I feel calm, with low stress, and I still feel weird". In the office, a sudden strange feeling, noticed at the wrong time, could be interpreted by me as some kind of panic state, which feeds on itself. Now that I understand my body a bit more, I'd feel more comfortable going back into the office, because I can just ignore some feelings as routine. Getting back in the office may be a useful distraction/exercise for people who otherwise are feeling dull or dwelling on their state at home.

I also have some thoughts about how I'll keep perspective, but I'll DM you with those, as that's more touchy, and my post is already quite long. But overall, I think even a programmer with some mental degradation can offer a lot to society and business. There must be so many projects in the world that would be grateful for a bit of your attention and skill, even if they're less popular or less lucrative projects.

I assume you agree that some kinds of opportunities are limited. Not trying new foods because you're afraid of wasting your money would be silly, or not saying hi to your neighbor because they might ignore you would be silly, but some things are very complicated. I'm thinking of: surgeries, mate selection, college degrees, white-collar crime, etc. I'm just saying that utility and loss aversion come into play, and "life is long" can't always save the day.

On startups, I think there are people who have been in situations where they have an expected value greater than something like a FAANG $300k/year over 3 years scenario (e.g. they own a large stake in a close-to-IPO company). And they should maybe still walk away, if the 50% chance of a tiny IPO payout would destroy their self esteem and make them feel even further behind their high-salary peers. (Also keep in mind that not everyone lands jobs at FAANG companies, so it shouldn't be super hard to find people who lucked into a startup where their EV is higher than their market salary over a few years). In other words: even if a startup somehow has higher EV, you may want to ignore the EV.

Well, life doesn’t always give many chances to play a game. You can only work at so many failed startups, or have so many failed long-term romantic relationships before you’ve used your best years! Someone else already made the point about the risk of walking away empty handed, but I’m just pointing out that some domains allow for many retries and some don’t.

Also, the two types of generalists aren't quite the same. Being a generalist in a 10k person company feels different from having to do everything alone at a 5 person company.

I think some heuristic like "earn double a FAANG income" isn't going to go over well with companies that are getting off the ground. Are the companies stupid for not paying that? Maybe sometimes. But there are definitely way more companies willing to hire someone at $200/hr than at $500/hr.

The calculations are just different for the companies. An operation spending $1B gains a lot by shaving off 1% (and small improvements are not strictly in the domain of specialists). But a new venture with $0 in revenue may have a very real risk of running out of cash one day, even if their product idea is great and well-built. "Hire the best people in the world" seems more prudent for a company who is certain it will pay off.

But to be fair, I guess one should occasionally try asking for high amounts anyways. I think jaquesm had recommended aiming to have 50% of your clients turn you down on the basis of price, to find the sweet spot for a rate.

But wouldn’t any host running the malicious package be vulnerable to having creds stolen from that host? Maybe I don’t know which “ACL” tech you’re referencing. You can limit where credentials are used from, and not just something like where an S3 bucket is read from? (For example)

Yeah, traditional Boolean search would be an improvement in some ways: “show me men taller than 6, or programmers of any height” (heh), but that’s either too overwhelming for users, or promotes spam or scraping or stalking or something. But maybe more choice isn’t the answer. Or maybe if you gave people the flexibility, they would be more cognizant of all the things they’re missing out on, and of the difficulty of getting it right, and take a less targeted approach with less “overfitting”. But the current system of independent “AND” cutoffs is what people get forced into. And an algorithm is a good alternative, but people don’t trust the algorithms much.

I think you and those responding to you are saying many valid things, but there are ambiguities still. Does "dating" mean "late-stage worried-about-dying-alone parents-nagging-me dating"? Or does it mean "screw around and go where the wind takes me?". Is the context online or offline?

I think "looks win" accurately describes the way many women select men online for many of their dating years, but it can't continue forever. The "20% of the men get 80% of the women" works in short term dating, but it won't work out for more permanent relationships. From 100 men and 100 women, 20 men would pair with 20 women, and you have 80 men and 80 women left over. So they start to change preferences as they get older. And women know that a man can have a trait that's useless in the bedroom but very useful when raising a child.

It's also hard to say what "4th most important" means. Maybe looks are the 4th most important thing, given that the man is, at a minimum, in the top X%. But what's the formula? There are nonlinearities also, i.e. you can't always compensate. Having a million dollars and being 5.5 feet tall is better than having a billion dollars and being 4.5 feet tall, I'd predict. Something can be low-importance, but just about anything can be a dealbreaker.

I think you're correct in saying the gender inequity isn't so terrible at the end of the day. I predict if you surveyed both genders about whether they get what they really want out of online dating, they'd largely say no. Yes, the average woman has lots of options on Tinder, but that doesn't mean the average woman enjoys using Tinder much. Men think women have it great online because the women have what men want - lots of choice. But I have many female friends who are depressed about dating despite their long list of suitors. They struggle to build satisfying connections. We could ask who is to blame, but I'll just note at the end of the day, one side might be slightly happier than the other ... but only slightly! So frustrated people should keep that in mind.

I think you're right about 100-1000 being a count for "likes" rather than "matches" (terminology would differ by platform). If a woman had 100 people with a mutual interest, ready to talk, they wouldn't keep swiping to get to 200.

(Not super relevant to your point but maybe to the whole page) I think many swiping apps mostly show people that are already interested, which seems reasonable as a prioritization method. So a "like" from a woman is converted into an instant "match". I've heard some women brag like "90% of guys I swipe on like me back", but there's some bias in there.

I've also known men who are perfectly likable, who took a more passive approach, and never received a single incoming "like" from a woman in months. It's inconceivable that in a city of millions, _nobody_ finds the man attractive, not even the bottom 1% of women. It's just that they're not showing the profile much, and it's unclear if they're even giving it a tiny amount of random exposure. Even if you swipe, it's probably not enough to get to the top of the pile of thousands of horny dudes. So one has to buy the exposure for an hour or so then, possibly for hundreds of dollars a month. It's a good scheme, and the platforms like the information asymmetry on how it all works too - many people are guessing about things in these threads, which platform employees know the simple answer to.

If I’m not mistaken, runit was another author. Did you maybe mean daemontools? (Agree with the general sentiment though, and both tools felt nice to use.)

Oh, maybe I am behind on this “future litestream” that “redirects writes”. I only knew of the ability to sync/backup/restore. Do you have a link to something discussing those other features?

Yeah, maybe 4% is all one could manage to withdraw to survive the longest downturns. I haven't dug into that much. But, people are maybe debating different things - some are likely talking complete early retirement whereas my comment was more about "financial security" (or at least the claim it's "basically impossible to stay in the Bay long-term unless you make an absolute fuckton of money").

For me, financial security means something more like: money will be low on my list of problems. I could get more money by turning my attention there. I might have to work, but it could be some low-stress job, and losing it isn't a big deal. I could afford extra care for an elderly parent. I won't be knocked out by most random things that pop up, specific to my personal life, though I can't control what happens to my country etc.

For some, it means they don't have to work at all, and can't be ruined by market downturns that last decades. And further for some others, it means they can survive wars and societal collapse.

I think both are valid to wish for, though at a certain point it's a burden on yourself to control things you can't control. If there's a 1.1% chance of widespread nuclear war in our lifetime, and you want to be 99% certain your lifestyle won't take a hit, one needs to save and spend a ton to be able to weather it all.

Local inprocess databases might be a bigger thing, but won’t they do nothing to help cases where 10 different applications on different machines need to read and write in the same database? I would think the target audiences are very different, i.e. people who are finding non-distributed PG insufficient probably can’t alleviate their problems by switching to SQLite

If you put $5M in index funds, you’d grow it by about $400k a year (8%) on average, to start. It’s hard to imagine going broke with that by doing “normal middle class” things. For added security, one could add in a part-time job.

Is that for a very large family? Or maybe I don't know what "family plan" means exactly. I just got a plan on my own, not far from New England. I am paying about $450 per person per month, and I thought it was the best plan listed from the provider. As of this morning's doctor visit, however, I do agree - much is broken!

Seeing some comments about the reliability of dogs, it’s good to keep in mind that traditional medical tests can also be quite unreliable. This link [1] explains how mammograms can have a “positive predictive value” (% alarms that are correct) of under 10% for many age groups. Maybe that’s what you want in a screening test to catch most of the bad stuff. And maybe dogs could be incorporated as one component of several.

Though, maybe similar to the sense of “unreliable” is that performance could vary a lot from dog to dog, or over time, in a way that might not be true for other tests. But Im not sure if that’s worth worrying about if the aggregate performance is quantified and comparable to other methods.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/40935...

If there were a machine that could only detect one disease, I don’t think that automatically precludes it from being cost effective. I could see a dermatologist buying a cheap pen-sized device that solely detects skin cancer, at least.

What are you saying learning Excel would solve for the owners? (honest question)

I've been in orgs where it was on same team, and on different teams, both as a modeler and a data engineer. So far, I personally prefer when they're on the same team.

Pros of same-team: fewer ideas "lost in translation" between data scientists and data engineers, better understanding of which datasets/flows are top priority, can sometimes share some stack components and help datascientists improve their code, better chances of getting data scientists to contribute their own batch jobs (there's just more trust as opposed to dealing with some "engineering" team that is less connected to you)

Cons of same team: data engineers may not be as in-the-loop on what's happening with production datasets, may not be as tightly integrated with a devops team, may get overly caught up in "business logic" as opposed to "plumbing".

Here's an example from 2018 of someone trying to extract secrets from a Yubikey. https://duo.com/labs/research/microcontroller-firmware-recov.... Seems they don't get very far. Or it's at least very laborious. But as you say, who knows what a cutting edge lab can do. Skimming the web, it seems like people have had more success with things like Google Titan keys.

> [...] execution plan is formed by the DB engine before the parameters are even considered

Is this really possible if the server considers table statistics (i.e. frequencies of certain values) when forming a plan?

I subscribed for a while, and really liked the news! However, a little off topic, there was a very strange several day period where I got repeated auto-playing audio-only ads that I could not stop from playing. There were no audio/video controls anywhere, but I could turn my phone volume down. For days, the ad was always this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYUvgxwuJbA (Dietz Nuts ad, the joke is that Dietz sounds like "deez" or "these")

I called their support asking if this is a known type of ad that they do for paying subscribers. It seemed like a bug, so thought they'd want to dig into it. They told me that this is indeed a thing they do, and that I am not exempt from autoplaying unstoppable audio ads just because I pay. I told them to double check, since otherwise I'd be canceling, and they confirmed that it's a thing, so I canceled. (I'm 50% sure the support person just didn't know what I was saying. Maybe my ad blocker was being screwy somehow.)

I read the comment as "I wont pay $50 20 times, totaling $1k, to get onto the 20 sites that have articles that interest me"

I definitely read news from at least 20 different sources each year, without going around paywalls, and I pay for the one I enjoy the most - NYT. (I personally read ~150 articles a year, so that's 33 cents per article, which many readers of HN would earn in 10-30 seconds of work. But maybe I read excessive news). If I really just want to read 1 article per month, I'm often accommodated by some "N free articles per month" policies.

I agree they may be pursuing a suboptimal strategy somehow. Not sure I would call it "absurd". Having 100k individuals producing music on Spotify might be great, but I'm not sure what the implications would be for getting my news that way. But if someone wants to start "Spotify for News", I'm interested. Not sure that NYT needs their paywalls worked around in order for that to happen though.