lmg643

+1, but i figured it out in an hour. Langchain seemed like a ridiculous overcomplication of what would otherwise be basic python. Has been off to the races since I decided not to use it.

this place has been around for decades - https://www.tonerrefillkits.com/

i just signed up for Microsoft hosted 365, will not use Rackspace again after this.

I think "reading the manual" can be be interpreted not just in the literal sense of whether there's an actual manual, but also in the metaphorical sense, to make sure we're considering easily available sources of information. Great advice.

love to see this stuff, reacting to users in the world's #1 accidental entry point to programming. I wish they did this 20 years ago when i was neck deep in Excel daily!

That's a great and positive way to look at vaping. Every time I hear about "medical marijuana" I think about the probable link to schizophrenia, which will likely dwarf the pot economy in both direct and indirect costs.

-- edited to add citations --

Spent about 10 seconds finding these using Brave search. For folks who can't resist snarky comments, you have to admit it's strange that this is not at least acknowledged amidst a state-by-state push for legalization.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2424288/

> "There is now reasonable evidence from longitudinal studies that regular cannabis use predicts an increased risk of schizophrenia and of reporting psychotic symptoms. These relationships have persisted after controlling for confounding variables such as personal characteristics and other drug use. The relationships did not seem to be explained by cannabis being used to self-medicate symptoms of psychosis."

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...

> "The results from these longitudinal analyses show the proportion of cases of schizophrenia associated with cannabis use disorder has increased 3- to 4-fold during the past 2 decades, which is expected given previously described increases in the use and potency of cannabis."

i love brave, it has transformed search for me, and the results remind me of what Google felt like decades ago. I find stuff on brave that i never would find on google or duck duck go. For example, trying to buy some thuja "green giants" (a kind of tree for landscaping) uncovered dozens of mom and pop operations nationwide, plus the insights from their local websites, that are typically buried under 5 layers of SEO garbage on google.

I think it's ridiculous to force healthy college students to get a covid vaccine, and 100x to mandate a booster. Curious if this becomes a flag or 100x downvote, but at some point we have to face reality - covid just isn't that severe for young folks, and the vaccines offer temporary protection that simply doesn't make sense for low risk groups.

Brave search is fantastic, haven't noticed a difference since moving

stay positive! all DS skills will be transferable to normal SWE, the best SWE are all multi-language and strong SQL never goes to waste, lastly - many of the best SWE would be even stronger with some DS competencies, so keep at it and I suspect you'll wind up in a pretty awesome place.

am i the only person looking at this as - where is the business opportunity here?

silicon valley created all these amazing tools for communication, people want to use them, and they don't play nicely with business requirements

almost like the only safe tool is email because it is so old they know how to handle it.

seems like an opportunity for better solutions?

You should be blogging...and you can, as long as you avoid saying any of the Things You Can't Say, which seems to mean following a template, which means the content gets bland and repetitive - unless it is technical, in which case it's special interest and the censors lose interest.

(That's actually my best guess as to why HN has stayed high quality all these years - minimal politics.)

Bloging, or writing, is just thinking out loud. Thinking about the real world outside of technology can easily yield heterodox conclusions that are better off not published these days.

Are we sure that Assange is better off in the UK? Reports from other sources suggest he is being kept in terrible conditions in UK as well.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/julian-assange-is-kept-u...

> "Each day Julian is woken at 5 am, handcuffed, put in holding cells, stripped naked, and x-rayed. He is transported 1.5 hours each way in what feels like a vertical coffin in a claustrophobic van,” Morris said.

> The lawyer pointed out that during the criminal hearings Assange is kept in a glass box at the back of court from where he cannot his lawyers properly.

Japan is a country that values its citizens over its companies, i think Japanese tend to like it the way it is, and there's a lesson there if you think about it carefully.

I think easy case to make IBM is dying on the back of becoming an outsourcing company. IBM, once a feared titan of global tech, is basically a joke, it's leading tech is a recent acquisition (RHEL).

America in the 100 year view - what was the society that led to the founding of HP, IBM, microsoft, google, apple? that's the secret sauce we need to cultivate, and of course immigrants are part of it, but the current culture around H1B is another story.

reading between the lines, i see the pride in your response of the new CEOs of some of these tech behemoths -

as an engineer who is bad at politics - i know this to be true - getting to the top of a big mature organization is nothing like starting one, totally different skillset.

not to say these folks aren't extremely smart cookies, but it's a different ballgame being played.

more great logic - we need to outsource jobs so the companies can earn a higher profit to pay UBI to the citizens they displaced.

This is the equivalent of a ponzi scheme if you think about it - unsustainable.

US is a country, not a company - citizens are non-voluntary members - some of them have ancestors that served and died to make it what it is. US did not magically become an epicenter of innovation where Google could be created, it took the whole history of the country to get to this point.

If "more efficient economies" were about to take over, people would stay home. folks continue to come to the US because it is still best here.

some of the "more efficient economies" come from are growing by widescale industrial espionage, made easier by lax controls on intellectual property. People still come here.

Other emerging economies have almost intractable demographic issues that only so much hope can address.

The US would be well served to not blindly repeat the mistakes of other countries for the sake of short term economic gain.

Great logic - give up citizen jobs at home because they'll be offshored otherwise.

Foolish logic for a country to operate under, and why should any citizens support that kind of policy? Lose either way.

decent amount of history indicates CIA had been partnering with academics and private industry for decades. Seems like this is an attempt to broaden the funnel of participants, away from key strategic efforts into DARPA-style R&D land?

yes...and they could call it LifeLog!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

technology recreates the town square of medieval times - publicly shame delinquent borrowers - what amazing progress!

i stopped using R a number of years ago because it is not useful for very large datasets (in the tens to hundreds of millions) and now use kdb almost exclusively.

How did the experience of shipping software compare to a "conventional" company, either a big corporation or a silicon valley type company? I get the sense the tendency to talk in big picture abstract would allow a lot of folks to bluster through. True SMEs would have to contend with the culture in order to get results in tech.

I think the rhetoric is a very sophisticated way to market the fund. (1) make highly generalized pronouncements that sound wise and get headlines because they make for good journalistic copy (2) make the business seem like it's driven by principles - eg, a system - and not just a few great PMs running it (founders).

Any developers from BW on hacker news? Curious to know what your experience is like.

does this support importing revit models? I just paid for a 3d laser scan to do as-built conditions.

I am also heartened that the #1 and #2 comments on here retain the voice of sanity.

I think this piece and the pitch it references are borderline abuse of the history and context of subscription businesses.

I see the current trend in subscriptions as largely a revolution in pure technology service businesses, where subscriptions are a rational way to pay for them (dropbox, github), along with software producers and their customers maturing to the point that they can mutually acknowledge the need for up-to-date and evolving core capabilities, such as Windows and Office, which can reasonably be seen to require recurring support which has value. (But you can still get a lot done with non subscription versions of Word 2003 etc).

Newspapers, telephones and cable TV have long been subscription based. Subscriptions alone obviously were not able to save newspapers from crushing deflation in their ancillary revenue models of classified ads, which they lost to craigslist and others. Cable TV to date has been much more successful in evolving and preventing disruption in those ancillary lines (pay per view etc) and has maintained a subscription model.

As an aside - everyone thinks Netflix is so wise with their current subscription strategy, I am a paying streaming customer myself, but the number of times of late that Netflix does not have the movie I actually want to watch, but Amazon's pay-per-view model does, makes me realize there are limits to the subscription approach as well. Netflix's model of creating content to justify their subscription is going to stop working eventually, content is a "long tail" type problem and their strategy of self-funding content is going to be increasingly unworkable within a few years.

One quirk of Mac OS flat design - i can never find the "contacts" icon - very odd. This is one of the more skeumorphic designs still, too. I guess just the dull brown without much color, easy to overlook.

This is a pretty provincial piece. Marriage has been transactional for thousands of years. To this day, the practice continues around the world. I have a colleague in the US who has an arranged marriage (he was born overseas). But of course, let's pretend that "romantic love" is the historical norm (versus recent movie invention) and we've somehow fallen from this expectation.

IMHO imposter syndrome isn't a "thing" or if it is, it's a few things:

1) You just got your first job and you are right out of school. They call you a "programmer" or "analyst" etc, but you don't know the profession or business and don't know what you're capable of. You'll outgrow it by hard work and learning.

2) The feeling many experts have after a long career that "any smart person could do this if they had the time and inclination". It's usually not true (because they overestimate capabilities of others, assuming they are like them), but I think it feeds into the humility you often see among the truly capable.

3) People who have remunerative yet non-productive jobs where you can get paid lots of money but your production is very abstract or secondary or even tertiary (or worse) to your direct output. This is the kind of person who talks about imposter syndrome at TED talks.

I have to think that what we call "imposter syndrome" is, in at least 25% of cases, and extremely useful internal guide that you need to step up your output. The solution is to do work where the direct output is something useful.

I must be out of step with the times as I'm surprised by the favorable comments about Night Shift.

For my eyes, the f.lux nighttime adjustment and configurability is great. at work, i use it during daytime hours as well, helps greatly with eye strain.

Night Shift is like an introduction of the concept to a mass audience, surely it has a positive benefit for the uninitiated but there's a lot missing for folks who rely on it. Android is much better with multiple applications available to control this.

I thought it would have been a good gesture for apple to buy f.lux and get the "market leader", and some built in goodwill, as opposed to just copying them, but I guess such is life when you are the largest corporation in the world.

I taught myself to code late in life on VB.net - amazing how easy and powerful to get going. I've done a decent amount in C# since then. When I think about C# syntax vs VB.net syntax, and consider it's all .NET under the hood, makes me wonder whether developers like feeling as though they are writing something more complex in C# than they are. Anyway, i'm indebted to Microsoft and will be a fan for life as a result.

People forget that Silver's approach is basically weighting polls to figure out what the election will be, and he's the best "poll weigher" out there. But if the polls are systematically wrong, being the best at it is an unimpressive subtlety to the layperson.

To the extent 2018 brings increasingly contentious elections, we will likely see polling to remain inaccurate due to voter unwillingness to state unpopular opinions. In that case, multi-input "big data" approaches may prevail.

(Of course, it's also possible that 2016 is a "top" in terms of divisive rhetoric...only time can tell.)