fivea

Spreadsheets are better because as you say the owner is their job to maintain it. If you replace with an IT process the new "owner" is likely a below-average developer that probably is uninterested in the business.

I disagree. Spreadsheets are incomparably worse because what you charitably described as "the owner is their job to maintain it" in real life it's reflected as having a single employee who abused a first-move advantage to monopolize and excerpt unduly control over, and even hijack, key operation areas.

We all heard horror stories of how employees screwed over their former bosses because only they had control over things like key spreadsheets. Advocating for spreadsheets is advocating for these vulnerabilities.

But what happened in Spain and Italy was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard.

I lived in Spain through the pandemic. I saw from my apartment the army trucks racing across Madrid, the police cars with loudspeakers advising everyone to stay indoors, and army patrols going through the city to enforce the lockdown.

Do you actually know what was a catastrophic disruption to normal life by any reasonable standard? Having to commandeer the local ice rink to have a place to store all the excess dead bodies, and setting up a huge makeshift hospital in the city's expo hall to accommodate the patients.

Knowing that, do you have any idea what finally managed to reign in the outbreaks under control? Lockdowns. Two weeks since their onset, infection rates dropped to residual.

Don't talk about things you know nothing about.

The candidates that are interesting to me have diverse and interesting lives, their resumes should reflect that.

Doesn't your resume reflect that if it has that written down somewhere?

Why would a CV be picked over any other if a candidate, say, paid a service to pimp out it's styling?

A boring looking resume thats like all the others might be good enough for SAP but would get filtered out my me immediately.

I could see the point of that approach for a creativity-driven position such as designers, advertisement, marketing, or even front-end development.

For hard technical roles, where substante over style is a mandatory and very basic competence, seems to be a sure way for you to filter out all the candidates you'd be looking for.

You can tell by not entering any PII into the site in the first place.

That's not the definition of PII. At best, that covers a small subset of PII.

PII means any information that can be used to identify you, either directly or indirectly.

When you access a website combined with which link you opened or which search keywords you used can be used to infer who you are.

How do you tell if a script is not shipping that info to an undisclosed third-party?

The article provides no direct evidence of people starving, only that 'We cannot freely choose our recipes'.

What? The article clearly describes how people in Shanghai are barred from accessing the supplies they ordered because their buildings have been literally locked up and there is no way to get their orders past the outside gate.

From the article:

Sometimes one of the people in the locked building yells to the dabai or anyone who passes, to hand over the vegetables she has ordered and who are now perishing at the locked gate of their building. But people don’t have the key and the ones who do may not necessarily care.

How you can tell if the data you're collecting is PII?

No. How can you tell, as a user of any random website, that the script your browser is running as part of that page you've opened isn't shipping PII collected from your usage.

Keeping everything locked down has a huge human cost too.

That really depends on what's your personal definition of "keeping everything locked down".

European countries like Spain and Italy showed that lockdowns work quite well in quickly halving infection rates with negligible externalities, but their lockdown focused on non-essential work and everyone was allowed to do basic provisioning things such as going to the supermarket.

Also, if I recall correctly Spain also had in place a kind of stimulus program where people could apply for a guaranteed minimum income scheme.

It boggles the mind how some people conflate a quarantine with solitary confinement under house arrest where people are left to starve to death.

They already know english for the job (...)

You're somehow presuming that there is no functional difference between being a native speaker and knowing a language as second or third language.

If it contains PII (...)

How can you tell?

Lambda isn't single threaded. You get a core for every gig of ram that you allocate up to 16GB.

That's not exactly true.

As per AWS, with AWS Lambda you only get a second core if you provision more than 1769MB of RAM.

The number of cores can grow up to a max of 6 with provisions of over 10GB of RAM albeit AWS does not specify how that's supposed to be mapped.

There are some empirical and highly unofficial tests on AWS Lambdas that indicate that more than 1 vCPU are allocated with provisions of over 800MB of RAM, but each of those vCPUs are capped at 50% of a CPU core.

The key factor here, and what makes AWS Lambda's nodejs runtime the absolute best runtime and the de facto standard for lambdas, is that nodejs's single-threaded event loop already buys you the ability to execute code concurrently without having to rake up a large bill and resort to arcane tricks to reign that under control.

I'd add that AWS Lambda's blog post on parallel processing in Python starts off by making it clear that nodejs is the way to go.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/parallel-processing-in-...

I have used swarm optimization methods that have consistently provided better solutions than alternatives for optimizations of solution spaces in alterst 3 different domains.

Benchmark your PSO implementation against a) a naive Monte Carlo implementation with an uniform distribution, b) low-discrepancy sequence, c) a global optimization algorithm such as DIRECT, and compare convergence rates.

I'd be surprised if your PSO implementation did not competed for the last place in terms of function evaluations.

AWS lambda has a bunch of python specific optimisations that make python the best candidate for lambdas (...)

I don't believe there is any truth to this statement.

The general guidelines for AWS lambda is that a) if you seek performance then Go is the way to go, b) for everything else nodejs (i.e., JavaScript/typescript) is by far the best runtime, specially given lambda's single-threaded nature and nodejs's support for concurrency.

All other options are only relevant if you have very specific non-technical constraints, such as wanting to reuse code (JDK) or just leveraging whatever language your team already uses somewhere else.

>I fully anticipate they will come back in fashion.

It's not possible to predict fashions, but I seriously doubt that the whole evolutionary algorithms field will see a resurgence based on anything other than buzzword-driven fads.

In general evolutionary algorithms perform terribly poorly in any optimization problem, and at best are effective (but not efficient) in exploring problems involving the arbitrary addition/removal of dimensions/parameters, including high-dimensional discrete optimization problems.

Given there are already techniques to convert discrete optimization problems to non-discrete ones and to add/remove arbitrary parameters, and there are already global optimization techniques which are far more efficient and, more importantly, deterministic, genetic algorithms don't really offer any relevant advantage over even brute-force techniques.

Oh I know a few. Evolution strategies, particle swarm optimization, ant colony optimization, etc, etc.

They are a treasure trove of easily publishable papers, but frankly the whole field feels like a fraud. Each paper is formulaic and consists of coming up with a metaphor to add minor twists to established heuristics, and in the end they all fare slightly better than Monte Carlo.

The gravy train is provided by the No Free Lunch theorem, which is just a convenient copout to justify why an heuristics isn't good except on a single convenient realization.

There was never any valid justification for the police to harass a man going for a stroll.

Have you been living under a rock for the past two years?

There was a pandemic killing hundreds of people per day, and the only effective way to stop it from continue growing exponentially was to ensure everyone stayed put for a few days.

How is that "not a valid justification" ?

I mean, think about it for a second: law enforcement impose lockdowns on neighborhoods when a shooter is on the loose without any complain, and asking everyone to stay put to avoid hundreds being killed is not "a valid justification" ?

You've sorted people who disagree with you into the category of "not adults". Should they be able to vote?

No, I'm the kind of person who is well aware that reaching adulthood is not a magic elixir that automatically grants everyone the ability to act responsibly or rationally, let alone a sense of common good.

Throwing adulthood around as if it implies everyone will do the right thing is blatantly unrealistic.

Stop lying. I haven't posted any misinformation. You can literally listen to Dr. Gandhi's own words at the link I posted above.

Again, google it up. You can't fake this one. You do not need to take my word for it. Just have a shred of honesty and stop cherry-picking stale and debunked myths.

Actually Sweden's numbers are quite good, better than many other EU countries which took more restrictive approaches.

Reality does not agree with you.

Sweden fared rather poorly when compared with comparable countries such as Norway, Finland, or Denmark.

* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/norway/

* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/finland/

* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/denmark/

There is no way around it: Sweden had more covid-related deaths than Norway, Finland, and Denmark bundled together.

Denmark had 500k more cases than Sweden, but only endured a quarter of Sweden's death count.

This does not fit the definition of "quite good". These are awful numbers. Awful numbers that were easily avoidable if Sweden followed the example of any of its neighbors.

Case in point: communicating nuance is hard when no one wants to hear it!

There is no nuance. The message couldn't be clearer: if you take the vaccine then the odds you'll die from COVID are way lower than if you do not.

And reality does not lie: the bulk of COVID deaths come from unvaccinated people.

https://www.factcheck.org/2022/04/scicheck-covid-19-data-com...

Enough with all this misinformed or disinformed bullshit.

Natural immunity works. It's settled science, and has been for some time.

What exactly do you mean by "works"?

I mean, it's well established that those who contract COVID and didn't died from it will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections.

But that is not the point of a vaccine, is it?

The point of the vaccine is that it trains your immune system to fight an infection without undergoing the risk of a real infection. So that the odds you die from COVID are lower, if not residual.

Consequently, we see the bulk of all deaths from COVID comprised of unvaccinated individuals.

But other than all the dead, those who survive a COVID infection do end up with an immune system that is able to handle COVID.

Is that what you mean by "Natural immunity works"? That if you ignore all those unvaccinated people who died then the ones that lived through a COVID infection didn't died?

Because the whole point of a vaccine is that people don't have to die from a preventable disease, isn't it?

Have they? It's a horrible back and forth, not based on any evidence. (...)

You're grossly misrepresenting the facts. If you take an objective look at recent history, you'll realize that politicians have been trying to juggle public health guidelines with economic and political topics. The bulk of these arbitrary measures result from politicians caving in to issues completely unrelated to public health guidelines.

Take for example how some countries mysteriously relaxed COVID restrictions during major public holidays like Christmas and new year's eve celebrations to afterwards hastily reintroduce additional restrictions to contain the expected hike in infection rates.

Couples were arrested for sitting at the beach.

No they really weren't. People were charged for endangering public health by purposely violating mandatory lockdowns and social distancing requirements. Trying to frame this as punishment for sitting at the beach is like complaining that drunk driving is punishing people for enjoying a drink now and then.

Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot.

Not really. Two years ago, when COVID started to spread outside China, the initial concern was the potential impact it would have on saturating national health services and there was no concern regarding it's death rate, which led to the "flatten the curve" political talking point.

Keep in mind that "flatten the curve" implies that everyone is expected to contract the disease sooner or later, but only in a way that doesn't overwhelm health services. Back then it was presumed that contracting COVID was not a cause for concern, and that after the first infection then everyone was finally immune and everything was back to normal.

Only after COVID was experienced first hand outside of china, and thus without being subjected to the CCP's censors, did the world learned about it's true fatality rate, transmission rate, reinfection rate, and lingering health problems. Afterwards there were subsequent variants which again became pandemics.

When the real impact of COVID started to become noticeable, the approach to the disease changed radically to one based on containment at all cost followed by mass vaccination campaigns once the first effective vaccines started to become available.

Masks in general provide very little protection. I recommend you listen to the explanations by infectious disease experts Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Michael Osterholm. (...)

It literally takes less than 5min in Google to realize your criticism is utter bullshit, and even come across statements by Dr Monica Gandhi complaining that her comments were misrepresented and distorted to come across as authoritative anti-mask assertions.

Please be more responsible and stop contributing to spread blatant misinformation.

People are adults.

No, not really. Not all, at least.

I vividly recall from the start of the very first lockdown, when the only people expected to be outside were those attending pressing matters like restocking provisions on supermarket, the local police caught a middle age man who was avoiding the lockdown by strolling around repeatedly with the same days-old loaf of bread under his arm. He didn't even bothered to actually spend a few cents on his scheme, and reused the same loaf of bread every single day to go for a stroll.

And let's not get started on refusals to adhere to simple basic personal higiene measures such as washing hands and wear a face mask, let alone vaccination rates.

People might have the age of an adult, but too many people do not have the personal responsibility expected from adults.

As GP states, they engaged in "noble lies" in order to drive vaccine adoption.

Can you point out what was in your opinion the best example of what you described as "noble lie"?

I've seen people throwing baseless accusations by misrepresenting basic guidances, such as how avoiding scarcity of personal safety equipment like latex gloves and surgical masks in hospitals was distorted into "first they state masks don't work but now they flipflop into arguing they do".

Thus, to avoid personal subjective takes and keep this discussion on the facts, what exactly do you see as the best example of this "noble lie"?

It's not? Writing unit test is all about minimizing side effects and interaction with other systems.

Not really. Writing unit tests is all about verifying behavior from combinations of inputs, and side effects are inputs as well.

You can write unit tests that inject delays and timeouts and retries and throw exceptions under specific circumstances.

I stopped reading right here:

Me too. The author shows a deep misunderstanding and even obliviousness to testing, particularly from a practical point of view, that takes any credibility from any argument listed in the article.

It's even perplexing how the best example the author could come up with was this absurd chain of strawmen that a) it's impossible to test code that uses instances of HttpClient, b) dependencies used in dependency injection "serve no practical purpose other than making unit testing possible."

There are plenty of people talking about unit tests. This article is not one of which justifies any click.

If you have the infrastructure to manage multiple versions and collect and analyse related information, adding/removing a blinking cursor or any other UI change and analysing the results should be trivial (...)

What leads you to believe in that? I mean, you have zero insight or understanding how things work or were designed. You have zero idea of where that blinking cursor comes from, let alone who owns that particular bit of code.

Let's think things through for a moment. Let's imagine you're talking about a blinking cursor in a random page from Google or Amazon. These are organizations where you have teams owning small widgets that show off only in specific pages, and that the page that you see in your browser come from a lengthy page engine pipeline that has all sorts of tests and failsafes, not to mention regional and localized deployments managed by whatever deployment policy.

This doesn't even take into account the whole workflow from product managers, who often demand data on the impact of touching a button.

You don't just edit a HTML file and hit save, don't you?

Then why has the site become more annoying and less usable over time?

I can't and won't speak on behalf of AirBnB, but you should keep in mind that in general:

a) all software grows by accretion until a breaking point,

b) paying off technical debt without solving any concrete problem or adding any tangible benefit is not considered a worthwhile investment,

c) a site did not changed for the worse if the data shows its conversion rate increased.