sigmaml

Hello Shawn!

I have been "hear"ing people out, without trying to "help", for over two decades.

In case you wish to talk to me, please mail me: Gmail sigma.ml.

The GP probably meant "unclear".

I strongly second this. In my own experience of about 30 years, I have seen this method to work almost always.

Did you mean to say "in addition to" rather than "instead of"?

If yes, then the answer is: sometimes, depending on the other factors.

You parsed it incorrectly. It is the other way, in fact.

Several times, people do very interesting personal projects, but fail to perform at the same level at work. That gives a clue that it may have been an unsuitable work environment that impeded their performance. It could also be a difference pertaining to their orientation to structured vs. unstructured working conditions. It could be related to explicit objectives with tight deadlines vs. exploratory development with open deadlines. And, more.

Knowing what my work environment is, I usually could understand their medium-to-long term fitness.

Hope this clarifies what I meant.

When I interview people, I ask them to describe one of their difficult work projects. I also ask them if they ever developed anything just for fun. I take their responses to both the questions into account when making a decision on taking them to the next round.

> We have no way of telling a dynamic universe apart from a static one where we're all just suspended in a single unchanging moment.

I am curious to know why you think so. What would you say about repeatably observable causality, in that case?

> Tangentially, this induces an obvious concern about cheat and cheat-detection arms races.

This exists in every domain, and is - perhaps - inevitable. Look at what SEO has done to web search.

Here is my quick list.

- Linux + GNU: My servers would never have been the same without them.

- Emacs: So many varied use cases over the years. I can type in Telugu (my mother tongue) and Devanagari so seamlessly ... bliss!

- LaTeX: From papers to books to presentations.

- Helix: A very recent discovery that replaced Vim for me in just a week!

- Kitty terminal: I no longer use GNU screen or tmux locally.

- Go, Ruby, Python: They have been paying my bills for so long.

- KDE: The other half of the Linux spirit!

- ffmpeg: Such a boon!

- Homebrew: So convenient.

A quick question.

Have you also included:

  - storage costs (equivalent of EBS, S3 and Glacier) and
  - cost of analytics pipelines (equivalent of EMR, Athena, SageMaker, ...)

in the above price comparison?

Would you have some insights there? Thanks.

Firstly, not many kids and young adults are capable of assessing and understanding what they "truly want".

Secondly, someone "truly wanting" something does not always make that "something" good or correct. When I was an adolescent myself, there were several things that I "truly wanted", which would have led me down paths of ruin.

Thirdly, engaging the adolescent / young adult in productive ways - that don't necessarily need computers - is one thing that I have seen to be demonstrably beneficial. This involves a certain degree of interaction with them and doing things together.

All the best!

1. This kind of pagination can be done for any key as long as its data type admits total ordering.

2. The WHERE condition typically uses `>` or `<`, so it doesn't fail even when that record is deleted before the next client request referring to it.

You appear to be referring to a database cursor.

It is quite simple to implement pagination in the application layer using a unique record identifier (primary key or ULID or ...) as an anchor for the navigation. From that unique ID, we can then fetch the previous `n` or the next `n` records, depending on the direction of the navigation.

This way, the server remains stateless, since the anchor (possibly sent as an encoded / obfuscated token, which can include some other parameters such as page size) is supplied by the client with each pagination request.

Unless I am missing something in your argument.