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whytai

Re:The Productivity Mirage on Thursday July 30, 2026 @02:29AM (#49106676)
I wonder if any old software companies like amazon, microsoft, apple, or google have data on how many prs a software engineer would produce per day over time. I wonder what that major spikes on the graph would be? live reload? vscode? faster and faster laptops? llms?

I have a hunch the amount of prs written per day per engineer is likely the same or only 10-15% higher.

Re:China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @01:29AM (#47930699)
the manus founders moved the entire company, researchers, and IP out of china to singapore. most of the researchers and business is still there, but unfortunately the founders wives/parents and family stayed in china. ultimately this is why they had to come back when the PRC summoned them after the meta acquisition.

sad day to be a chinese founder.

Re:Using an Engineering Notebook on Thursday February 12, 2026 @05:57AM (#46987223)
surprised to hear others don't do this! obsidian also works well for daily notes
i thought the reason claude code defaults to terminal-ish workflows (glob/grep) is bc they trained with bash-y sandboxes, and the creator argued for this approach vs indexing + bespoke tools. would be interesting to see how often the model defaults to using grep for everything (in my experience almost always..)
Re:My simple knowledge management and time tracking system on Thursday November 14, 2024 @05:45PM (#42142017)
I really enjoy the obsidian daily notes feature for this [1]. It's a dedicated button to create a new note with a title of your choosing. I typically do YYYY-MM-DD d, so 2024-12-1 mon.

I'm not sure about the time tracking though. Is this more for people working on contract for billing? I see the value in having the data but collecting the data seems difficult.

[1] https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Daily+notes

Re:Introducing GPTs on Monday November 06, 2023 @02:28PM (#38167565)
Every day this video ages more and more poorly: https://youtu.be/smHw9kEwcgM?feature=shared

categories of startups that will be affected by these launches: - vectorDB startups -> don't need embeddings anymore

- file processing startups -> don't need to process files anymore

- fine tuning startups -> can fine tune directly from the platform now, with GPT4 fine tuning coming

- cost reduction startups -> they literally lowered prices and increased rate limits

- structuring startups -> json mode and GPT4 turbo with better output matching

- vertical ai agent startups -> GPT marketplace

That being said, Sam Altman is an incredible founder for being able to have this close a watch on the market. Pretty much any "ai tooling" startup that was created in the past year was affected by this announcement.

Exciting times to be a developer!

It's certainly true that most people are deficient in potassium. The daily recommended dose for males is over 3 grams per day![1]

To make matters worse, the FDA limits the amount of potassium that can be present in supplements to 100mg[2]. So good luck taking 30 supplements to meet your daily requirements!

One option Id like to advertise is salt alternatives at grocery stores which are filled with potassium, some with at least 800mg per tsp. This can be another way to supplement potassium and magnesium in the diet [2]

[1] https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Potassium-HealthProfession...

[2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-i-take...

For testing:

- we have a dedicated dev environment for analysts to experience a dev/test loop. None of the pipelines can be run locally unfortunately.

- we have CI jobs and unit tests that are run on all pipelines

Observability:

- we have data quality checks for each dataset, organized by tier. This also integrates with our alerting system to send pagers when data quality dips.

- Airflow and our query engines hive/spark/presto each integrate with our in-house lineage service. We have a lineage graph that shows which pipelines produce/consume which assets but it doesn't work at the column level because our internal version of Hive doesn't support that.

- we have a service that essential surfaces observability metrics for pipelines in a nice ui

- our airflow is integrated with pagerduty to send pagers to owning teams when pipelines fail.

We'd like to do more, but nobody has really put in the work to make a good static analysis system for airflow/python. Couple that with the lack of support for column level lineage OOTB and it's easy to get into a mess. For large migrations (airflow/infra/python/dependecy changes) we still end up doing adhoc analysis to make sure things go right, and we often miss important things.

Happy to talk more about this if you're interested.

How do you guys do the static analysis on the queries? I notice you support dbt, bigquery etc, but all of our companies pipelines are in airflow. That makes the static analysis difficult because we're dealing with arbitrary python code that programmatically generates queries :).

Any plans to support airflow in the future? Would love to have something like this for our companies 500k+ airflow jobs.

Re:Telling the Bees on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @06:18PM (#36702426)
I always thought bee communication through "dancing" was visual. On reading more, it seems the bees build up electric charge which interacts with the antennae on other bees.

Excerpt [1]:

> Honeybees accumulate an electric charge during flying. Bees emit constant and modulated electric fields during the waggle dance. Both low- and high-frequency components emitted by dancing bees induce passive antennal movements in stationary bees. The electrically charged flagella of mechanoreceptor cells are moved by electric fields and more strongly so if sound and electric fields interact. Recordings from axons of the Johnston's organ indicate its sensitivity to electric fields. Therefore, it has been suggested that electric fields emanating from the surface charge of bees stimulate mechanoreceptors and may play a role in social communication during the waggle dance.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance#Mechanism

Re:Debris field found in search for missing submersible on Thursday June 22, 2023 @06:11PM (#36439825)
The boat may not have heard it, but the navy certainly did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36439661
Dubai is one of the few counties that lacks an extradition treaty with the US[1] and has a high standard of living.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

  In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake
Even more incredible is that his own advisor refused to write him letters of recommendation upon graduation [1]

  After graduation, Zhang had trouble finding an academic position. In a 2013 interview with Nautilus magazine, Zhang said he did not get a job after graduation. "During that period it was difficult to find a job in academics. That was a job market problem. Also, my advisor [Tzuong-Tsieng Moh] did not write me letters of recommendation." ... Moh claimed that Zhang never came back to him requesting recommendation letters. In a detailed profile published in The New Yorker magazine in February 2015, Alec Wilkinson wrote Zhang "parted unhappily" with Moh, and that Zhang "left Purdue without Moh's support, and, having published no papers, was unable to find an academic job".

  In 2018, responding to reports of his treatment of Zhang, Moh posted an update on his website. Moh wrote that Zhang "failed miserably" in proving Jacobian conjecture, "never published any paper on algebraic geometry" after leaving Purdue, and "wasted 7 years of his [Zhang's] own life and my [Moh's] time".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang

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