ManBeardPc

Joined 3 years ago

Karma
723
Submissions
131
Member since
Nov 14
Software Engineer
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 9 hours ago
Oh yes. Verification needs to be done. Some statistics and validation is absolutely required. Also most customers don’t want their private data uploaded anywhere, so ai gets only test data and writes the script to transform it. As long as it is just XML, CSV or similar it’s pretty reliable. Handwritten notes and bad scans however…
Comment · 9 hours ago
Yes, but they tell things and maybe forget to mention certain things or contradict other data they have given you. Now we may not notice it initially until we make an experiment and get the results. Something is wrong and we have to find out what. Talk to the customer again. Fix experiment. Repeat. Faster experiments means the latency from new data to results is less and we finish the project faster. Errors become less expensive and cause less delays. People make errors and data quality is often horrible so the shorter iterations are nice.
Comment · 10 hours ago
Can’t share more than that publicly. Just that the time saved on this one thing alone is saving us way more money than the subscription per employee that is needed (~100$). I don’t doubt there are companies where this is not the case. Would like to share more details, but the rough math of doing something in a day vs several days + engineering salary have to do here.
Comment · 10 hours ago
No, but if we go from data to experiment faster we see earlier if something is wrong. Once we get data we quickly can fix the data pipeline and get results. If there are issues we can quickly show what/why and discuss it with them in detail and make changes based on their response faster.
Comment · 10 hours ago
A lot in this world is not optimized by software yet. For our customers they have employees with decades of experience guessing things, maybe some software that kind of helps but still not good enough (slow, not finding really good formulas). They often have difficult problems and many failed projects. We try to find such customers and offer our service. If we are cheaper (+ show portfolio of successful projects) more are willing to give it another try with us.
Comment · 10 hours ago
Tons of unstructured data that needs to be cleaned up in so many different ways that are hard to predict. Knowledge distributed in the heads of greybeards, handwritten papers und excel, sharepoint and dozens other locations like ancient proprietary software. Which you have to repeatedly ask for and discover more piece by piece. Then clean up, discover issues, make the customer gather more data/correct it, etc.
Comment · 11 hours ago
Not all experiments work out. If we find the right approach faster we can finish the project faster. Some projects are mostly fixed price or offer bonuses for reaching milestones in a certain time. Meaning we more often get a bonus and can take more projects. Also we can take projects with tighter deadlines that we would need to decline otherwise.
Comment · 11 hours ago
Does for us (data science, specialty chemistry, finding/optimizing formulas). We can get from idea to prototype in a day compared to 1-2 weeks. All that boilerplate to process data took a long time to code by hand, especially for the data science/math guys who are not programmers. Now we can actually try all ideas instead of guessing the most promising and only try that.
Comment · 2 months ago
The Record struct contains rtype and data where RecordData is a tagged union. Aren’t those two always in sync? Not a DNS expert, just wondering if this is redundant or there is a reason both are there. Doesn’t matter anymore if they store it already serialized but I would be interested why it was this way.
Comment · 3 months ago
Don‘t know any other runtimes that have that by default. Probably kind of possible in Erlang or so by transferring the state, but stopping and moving a green thread in the middle of execution I’ve not seen elsewhere.
Comment · 3 months ago
Last I checked (and remember right) they used Stackless Python. Very interesting, it can serialize tasklets and send them to another machine to continue executing. Seems no longer maintained though.
Comment · 5 months ago
It was an improvement in some regards, but a pita most of the time. Before I had to work on an Angular project React was my least favorite frontend library. Solid.js gave me back my sanity (also Svelte 5). Fast, small, includes what I need and feels like just writing JS/TS. Sadly businesses love to torture their developers, themselves and users too much, so React/Angular it is.
Comment · 9 months ago
News in general. Also works well in sales, see how often financial "advisors" try to convince people the market is crashing soon and everything except their product is unsafe and how they try to mitigate downsides (active funds, low/zero interest savings accounts).
Comment · 10 months ago
The endgame is to normalize punishing groups/individuals for any reason on a whim of the ones in charge. Start with minorities and people who can’t defend themselves, then later you can do easier to anyone who gets inconvenient. Despotism 101.
Comment · 10 months ago
My next company‘s boss was pretty much Windows only (server and desktops/laptops, some Linux servers). Linux on the server was already replacing more and more machines. Now I am even allowed to use MacBooks or Linux laptops. Current company is already using the Google suite, MS Office was an exception if required for some reason. I saw the same shift with Oracle. Previously nearly everyone wanted Oracle as a DB, then the price increases got too much and everyone who could switched to alternatives like MySQL or Postgres.

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