HN user

jkbyc

589 karma

@jkbkot

Posts39
Comments107
View on HN
lethain.com 8mo ago

"Good engineering management" is a fad

jkbyc
218pts118
leon168689.substack.com 9mo ago

LLM hallucinations are compression failures, and we can detect them

jkbyc
4pts0
www.youtube.com 9mo ago

YouTube is shutting down my channel (Davie504) [video]

jkbyc
3pts1
taylorpearson.me 9mo ago

What Is Optionality? How Can Optionality Improve My Performance?

jkbyc
1pts0
thndl.com 2y ago

Python Gets Down to (The) Metal

jkbyc
2pts0
www.nytimes.com 3y ago

A Psychedelics Pioneer Takes the Ultimate Trip

jkbyc
1pts0
rossum.ai 4y ago

Rossum raises record $100M Series A to reinvent B2B document communication

jkbyc
2pts0
en.wikipedia.org 6y ago

Mathematical Universe Hypothesis

jkbyc
4pts0
math.stackexchange.com 6y ago

Why is the Continuum Hypothesis (not) true?

jkbyc
2pts0
www.linkedin.com 7y ago

Understanding Big Debt Crises (Ray Dalio)

jkbyc
3pts0
www.youtube.com 8y ago

Raspberry Pi Looper/synth/drum thing

jkbyc
2pts0
www.cs.ox.ac.uk 8y ago

Myth and the EU Study on Civil Law Rules in Robotics

jkbyc
1pts0
www.technologyreview.com 9y ago

Google’s AI Explosion in One Chart

jkbyc
5pts1
www.theverge.com 9y ago

A judge wants to make patent trolling a first amendment issue

jkbyc
10pts1
www.youtube.com 10y ago

Statistical Physics of Complexity

jkbyc
1pts0
www.infoq.com 11y ago

Exploring the Architecture of the NuoDB Database, Part 1 (2013)

jkbyc
1pts1
medium.com 11y ago

U.S. Has a Chief Data Scientist

jkbyc
2pts0
www.jakubkotowski.com 11y ago

Can all books be found somewhere within the number Pi?

jkbyc
31pts29
medium.com 11y ago

What I’ve learned after 10 years of quantifying myself

jkbyc
6pts1
venturebeat.com 11y ago

A card game called Exploding Kittens just made Kickstarter history

jkbyc
3pts0
arstechnica.com 11y ago

Ars UK is looking for writers and reporters

jkbyc
3pts0
www.rawstory.com 11y ago

MIT professor explains: The real oppression is having to learn to talk to women

jkbyc
6pts3
www.youtube.com 11y ago

Quantum Mechanics and the Geometry of Spacetime – Talk by Maldacena at NYU

jkbyc
1pts0
www.messynessychic.com 11y ago

Paradise Lost: The Hippie Refugee Camp

jkbyc
5pts1
www.indiegogo.com 11y ago

Campaign to create eye tracking software for disabled musicians

jkbyc
1pts0
arstechnica.com 12y ago

Nokia paid millions in ransom to stop release of signing key in 2007

jkbyc
3pts0
article.gmane.org 12y ago

Response to the request to remove CFRG co-chair

jkbyc
72pts34
www.morganclaypool.com 12y ago

Aaron Swartz's A Programmable Web: An Unfinished Work

jkbyc
3pts0
intellihub.com 12y ago

Police Crack Down on Burning Man

jkbyc
95pts24
www.youtube.com 13y ago

High social class predicts unethical behaviour

jkbyc
1pts0

You might enjoy an entire talk on using a limited color palette for graphics in early games and how it stimulated creativity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

"In this GDC 2016 talk, Terrible Toybox's Mark Ferrari discusses and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation

GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives."

Related post: https://www.quantamagazine.org/sleep-evolved-before-brains-h...

And an interesting comment of someone on FB:

Hydra

Hydra have a diffuse neural system

But no brain to speak of

A simple creature echoing older, more primitive forms

They doze off, so we've found

Using familiar chemistry

To slumber every four hours

When I sleep I descend like a bathysphere Down through layers of earlier incarnations

Dipping below the surface

Leaving the airy light of consciousness behind

To enter the involuntary dream world of Freud and Jung

Deeper still then dreams themselves disperse

Slipping away like darting fish

Leaving me reptilian, autonomic, just breath and pulse

But there's further to go - into the abyssal dark

To reach my fundamental hardware

Where I am the hydra

https://www.facebook.com/QuantaNews/posts/1789738887890362

My mom used to read these to me and my brothers when we were little, we all really enjoyed it and had a lot of fun.

If you like Jerome K. Jerome, you should also check out Saturnin: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1724928.Saturnin It has a great poetic and funny style of classical Czech works. There's a movie too. Just in case someone is interested, a movie with a similar funny and poetic style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_It_Short (Postřižiny) and I'd also recommend checking out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_and_Her_Week_of_Wonder... - a surrealistic horror film...I love the soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPyPEraG74c ...and to make it relevant to the original request, there's a book of the same name by Vitezslav Nezval (I haven't read it though)

"An IBM plant in Windsor, Ontario, is said to have ordered a shipment of components from a Japanese firm, specifying an acceptable quality level(AQL) of three defective components per 10,000 shipped. In a covering letter accompanying the shipment, the Japanese company apologized and said it had met with great difficulty producing these defective parts, and had been unable to understand why they were required. They wrote: “We Japanese have hard time understanding North American business practices, but the three defective parts per 10,000 have been included and are wrapped separately. Hope this pleases.”

This seems to be the oldest reference: Chris Taylor, (1995) "The case for customer satisfaction", Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, Vol. 5 Iss: 1, pp.11 - 14 http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/09604529510081... but behind a paywall

...it is referred to for example by http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-287-429-0_3... "The Effectiveness of Service Quality by Jabatan Agama Islam Wilayah Persekutuan (JAWI) Towards Customer Satisfaction"

> What if standups are misused for micromanagement?

Then fix it.

That's easier said than done. It assumes that the micromanager has enough self-awareness and listening skills. If he had, maybe he wouldn't be a micromanager. I tried to fix it but eventually it was one of the biggest reason I left the company.

> If there are so many ways standups can go wrong maybe its not a good generic tool after all?

I don't think that's a useful conclusion to draw. Standups go wrong if they are too long, and that's about the only way they can fail.

Micromanagement is another way we already mentioned. Fabulating stories about work done as a means of avoidance is another (as your sibling suggests). I'd say there are even more ways they can fail in general. In specific cases they might still be indispensable.

edit: formatting

What if your work consists largely of research and experimentation? No tasks or stories, mostly many long spikes.

What if research and experimentation happens over a period of time and only later there is a period of focused prototype development?

Have you experimented with alternatives to daily standups? Standups three times a week? Changing the routine based on the stage of the work (research vs. development for example)?

What if standups are misused for micromanagement?

If there are so many ways standups can go wrong maybe its not a good generic tool after all?

Learn Prolog Now 11 years ago

A year ago I asked about real-world use cases for Prolog, there were a couple of interesting ones: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Examples-current-realworld-u...

People might not be aware that the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) specification includes a class verifier written in Prolog, see http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/jvms7.pdf

Clementine -- a data mining application purchased by SPSS

SPARK toolset -- a rigorously defined Ada subset used for developing software correct by construction. This approach is used in areas like aviation, transportation, medicine, energy, etc. where failure is not an option.

ECLIPSE-CLP -- an open source constraint logic programming library used to solve various resource allocation problems. Think of it as a poor man's Operation Research expert.

Experian, the credit rating company, bought out Colmerauer's Prologia company: http://www.experianplc.com/news/company-news/2005/25-10-2005...

ContractExpress/DealBuilder from Business Integrity Ltd http://www.business-integrity.com/

InFlow from OrgNet http://www.orgnet.com/

GridMind tool - a for modelling and simulation new technologies implementation into energy grids (smart grids, smart metering etc.). They have to generate detailed complex models satisfying lot of rules which to make models realistic. Prolog together with CLP is excellent tool for that. Fast development, small code, elegant solutions. www.mycroftmind.com

David Warren (Leading Professor at Stony Brook University): "We at XSB, Inc. use Prolog and Java. We use Prolog for knowledge extraction and standardization and for ontology representation. We have (to me, somewhat surprisingly) found that our Prolog code is more stable and we spend less on maintaining it than we do our Java code. It may be programmer skills, but I think it is also due to the much more succinct expression of similar functionality."

The Nokia N900 phone used prolog to do ui state management .... prolog in a smartphone!

London-based startup Texrazor performs text analysis via API and the engine behind it is coded in Prolog http://www.textrazor.com/technology

Prolog does social and organizational network analysis for clients around the world. http://orgnet.com/inflow3.html

Orgnet, LLC also uses LPA Prolog to do data analysis, especially for hidden relationships and patterns in business data... for examples, see: http://thenetworkthinkers.com

etc., see the discussion on LinkedIn

My linear algebra professor insisted that we, as computer science graduates, know and can reproduce most if not all the proofs of the theorems presented in the class. He didn't have such demands for math majors. His point was that we as computer scientists / software engineers / programmers will always have to understand and construct all the minutiae of the programs we write (otherwise they won't work). In contrast, mathematicians could use a lot of it "just" as tools.

I also had to go through a lot of heavy calculus courses which were very proof-centric and built from first principles. Rarely we skipped a proof of a theorem and we were expected to be able to reproduce and understand all of them at exams. I hated it often back then. However, these days I can appreciate the rigor it has taught me and I would wish I could send some of the programmers I met to similar courses so that they would learn to think clearly and precisely and be able to spot unmet or missing assumptions.

Our teachers and the creators of the curriculum were not stupid or naive. They knew well how much of hands on calculus we would use in practice vs. algebra or linear algebra. One of their main reasons for including calculus was to teach us rigor. I know that once someone overheard two teachers talking - the calculus teacher was asking someone from a CS department what to teach the CS graduates and the reply was that he can teach us whatever he wants, he just should make sure to teach us to think. I think they were quite successful at it even if it wasn't a very pleasant experience for most.

That also reminds me of this very relevant and true comic: http://savethepenguins.net/image/237344573 ("Wtf, man. I just wanted to learn how to program video games.")

I sometimes use it to do parallel greps on large files:

  zcat large_file.gz | tee >(grep -F pattern1 > pattern1_results.txt) >(grep -F pattern2 > pattern2_results.txt) > /dev/null
If you stick _pv_ between zcat and tee you can even get nice info about the progress.

There might be. One financial sage gave the following example: buy nickles. Currently, the value of the material is ~30%(?) higher than the nominal value of the coin. Therefore at some point in future the government will have to switch to a different material. At that point you'll be able to sell at 30% gain. If this for some reason is not possible then you'll still have whatever you started with. This way you are sure not to lose any money (except due to inflation) and possibly make 30% profit. You have to consider the likelihoods of both outcomes, etc. Anyway, he bought nickels worth of a couple of million dollars.

[dead] 12 years ago

Learn about positioning (market segmentation, differentiation). Think about what clients want, resp. what your ideal client would see as ideal service. Do they care about how good/pretty your designs are? Or maybe do they care about making money? They care about achieving a goal with that design - getting more users, building their trust, converting them, ... Do they know how to achieve all that? Probably not. How do you help them with it? What are they afraid of? (missing deadlines, overspending, lack of visibility into what you're doing, having to handhold you too much). How do you overcome that? How do you communicate it? Network. Find your ideal clients. Approach them. Read comments of HN users such as patio11. Check out what Ramit Sethi has to say (and many others).

I can't speak for myself (yet) but some successful bloggers such as Ramit Sethi or Derek Halpern recommend spending even 50% or more time promoting the content you write. But that's of course only one part of the whole equation. One should make sure first that someone will actually want to read that content - i.e. do a lot of upfront research.