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last yeardiscuss

Just curious, what would you consider, "absurdly small amounts of data around using big data tools like spark" and what do you recommend instead?

I recently worked on some data pipelines with Databricks notebooks ala Azure Fabric. I'm currently using ~30% of our capacity and starting to get pushback to run things less frequently to reduce the load.

I'm not convinced I actually need Fabric here, but the value for me has been its the first time the company has been able to provision a platform that can handle the data at all. I have a small portion of it running into a datbase as well which has been constant complaints about volume.

At this point I can't tell if we just have unrealistic expectations about the costs of having this data that everyone wants, or if our data engineers are just completely out of touch with the current state of the industry, so Fabric is just the cost we have to pay to keep up.

last yeardiscuss

Sorry, that's the point I was making to which I may have got off track. Marriage can't be ended by one party "calling it quits on frivolous grounds" because its a legal contract between two people.

Both parties must come to an agreement about how to break the contract, including conditions they may or may not have realized they agreed to, otherwise the must demonstrate how one has already broken the contract.

If you want a relationship you can just walk away from, or believe your parter does, you should not get married.

last yeardiscuss

Divorce is a legal procedure to dissolve a legal union; local rules vary, but while it can be accomplished without standing in court, in the US at least the terms of the dissolution must still be documented and--even if signed by both parties--approved by a judge. One of the most notable pieces of the divorce is the division of the union's assets, which especially in a "no fault" divorce must be "fair" to both parties since neither one is accusing the other of wrongdoing.

_In general_ (I am not a lawyer, I don't know your situation or laws of your area), anything acquired during the marriage is joint property. That can include every paycheck you receive in the span of the marriage, even if the salary is established before marriage, deposited in a personal account, and you were the only one working the entire time.

And that means everything you pay for with that money is also jointly owned, including any mortgage payments using those joint funds. Therefore your (to be ex-)spouse may have stake in any property you own that must be fairly divided. If you bought the house after getting married this may at least be a simple 50/50 split, but if one of you put your whole pre-marriage savings as the down payment you can bet this gets a lot messier.

Speaking of money, if you're making 100K and your spouse makes 50K the union has 150K to sustain a standard of living. After the divorce neither party will be able to keep that same standard of living of course, but one party is more greatly affected than the other. In a "no fault" divorce the outcome must be "fair" to both parties.

But WTF does that even mean? Is it "fair" to have to pay your ex-spouse for being less successful in their career? According to the courts the answer may be, "Yes," especially for any income gained (or lost) during the marriage because, "Pursuing a new job is something you decided _together_, right?"

All that is to say that even if both parties agree that holding onto a failing relationship isn't to anyone's benefit, divorce is something else that either (or both) might not find so agreeable.

When my ex-wife asked for a divorce, I wasn't going to fight over what had already felt by that point a completely one-sided relationship. That helped a lot getting over the emotional shock of the situation, and we did manage a pretty amicable no fault divorce. But it was still was months of debating how much she should get from the two years paid into our 30 year mortgage, and ended with both of us being worse off financially for several more years.

Divorce is not just a break up that you state your waning interest and walk away from; it is a complicated legal process that will force some uncomfortable conversations about things you probably would have never imagined being an issue while you believed the relationship was going well.

Which is not to say you shouldn't do it if your relationship is bad, but if you think your relationship is bound to end on some frivolous grounds you either shouldn't get married in the first place or find relationship help immediately.

last yeardiscuss

When I get frustrated enough to consider putting a kill switch in my work, I cool off by reminding myself that would prompt them to make a huge effort recovering from backups and have someone go through my code to get it working again. If I just do what they ask me instead, it will slowly decay without anyone having any idea what it even does, until its too late to fix or recover anything.

last yeardiscuss

There are almost certainly different approaches depending on the environment and situation. But, especially if this is a "culture" problem one of the best fixes I've found is to make shorter meetings with a defined agenda, such that you can always pull out a, "I'd love to take this offline, but we need to get back to..."

I've personally found you should almost never need more than 30 minutes unless you specifically want to get into rabbit holes. And if you do need more than 30 minutes, it's probably better to split it into multiple sessions of no more than 30 minutes anyways to prevent this from happening. If you still have this problem at 30 minutes, shave 5 from either side (or both), which you can even use the excuse of giving time to transition between meetings.

That's not to say you shouldn't genuinely allow room for brainstorming, but if you're going to take an entire room of peoples time, make sure it's something the room agrees is worth discussing and find another time to do it instead of getting sidetracked now. If not, offer some 1-on-1 time, and move on.

last yeardiscuss

In a college chemistry lab we would have to write lab reports of our work. The instructor made it very clear that he has never given 100% on a lab reports because there's always something to improve.

A one of my CS cohorts happened to be in the same class so we teamed up for the first lab project. It was pretty straightforward, we collected whatever information, and started working on our report. We didn't bother spending much time on it because we already knew we'd lose points for something or another.

When we got it back, there was a big, red "100" on top. We checked around and it did look like we were the only ones that got a perfect score, so we went to the instructor and, mostly jokingly, said, "What's up with this?" to which he stayed on beat and replied, "Do you want me to take another look?"

It's not hard to do good work, but you do have to make a habit of it. Re-read what you write, preferably out loud, to make sure it actually makes sense.

You'll still make errors and mistakes and you won't catch them all, but no one's going to care about a typo or two unless you draw attention to it with more glaring problems. And I think this is where metrics, especially things like code coverage, can actually be detrimental, because they bring attention to the wrong things.

Specifically, in places I've seen code coverage enforced, tests (written by consultants making x5-10 more than I do) tend to look like, `assert read_csv("foo,bar") == [["foo", "bar"]]` that execute enough of the function to satisfy the coverage requirements, but everyone is surprised when things break using a real CSV document.

The corollary of the author's trick is that if you keep making excuses to produce poor work, you may subconsciously decline instead.

2 years agodiscuss

Is this even new for "lifetime"?

A "lifetime warranty" often refers to the "lifetime" of the product, not your lifetime or the expected lifetime of any person.

In that sense, T-Mobile has played this pretty straight. Customers got a price lock for the lifetime of the offer.

Just on a quick read, it looks like a "lifetime warranty" must actually define a length of time though. Which for a product you can, at least claim to, stress test or base on the weakest component.

2 years agodiscuss

Physical attributes are easy to recognize, so if these weigh heavily in your expectations, you can more rapidly estimate the distribution. Being able to do this quickly also means you can break out populations to make more accurate estimates of your current environment; i.e. while the media bombards us with beautiful celebrities, you can maintain an independent estimation of your actual dating pool.

Social attributes take more time. You need to spend time with someone to understand where they are, and you would need to spend time with a lot of people to understand the distribution. You can try to use heuristics, like being in a relationship with someone you believe has similar expectations, but as noted those aren't actually very accurate.

2 years agodiscuss

It's not for lack of trying. People just get a little touchy about putting us in control of anything.

2 years agodiscuss

Reading about aphantasia was a trip. I couldn't even understand it at first, so curious if this condition fit me I looked up the test for diagnosing aphantasia which started describe scenes of a beach, now with a sunset, and so on, to which I was hopelessly lost because the responses seemed to suggest I should be "seeing" something. I could "imagine" a beach, and think about how wet sand feels and what waves sound like; but of course I couldn't "see" it, it was just imaginary. I had to read an essay from someone else with this condition discovering that other people do "see" things before I had my little spit-take moment.

I think I _used_ to be able to visualize things. I remember feeling frustrated when I was younger and did a more art because I could never imagine the same thing twice when I wanted to draw it. Every time I tried to think about about it, it would have a different pose or texture or orientation. But even then I think I just had a different "level" of aphantasia. I could never figure out how to use color. I kept to pens and lead pencils for art and couldn't get into painting. Even now, staring at a wall and thinking about repainting it, I cannot visualize it with any other color, much less two or three colors for trim and accents.

One of the advantages, perhaps, is that I don't need to close my eyes to imagine things. There's no point, there's nothing there. I may let my focus drift so I don't get distracted by shiny or moving things. But I can stare at a wall, or go for a hike or a run and just let my mind go wild.

That said, I do enjoy fiction, though I never really get "into" anything in particular. In light of this discovery, perhaps it is because I'm not really able to "visualize" scenes to recreate memorable moments, I can only really enjoy it in the moment and maybe recall a few quotes and descriptions, which are harder to get excited about.

2 years agodiscuss

I've been involved in a product review at my work. The tool hits a sweet spot of identifying a real problem and demoing impressively. I have little doubt we will purchase this tool unless the beancounters simply reject the expense.

But I find myself against it. This is somewhat ideological; the tool is, at its core, a telemetry tool, and I don't believe we have the maturity to manage and leverage that data effectively. And the data and features to product enables? We already know where the problems are and have other tools to address them. It's just that everyone is always "too busy" to actually listen to the customers and do anything about it.

Pondering how to express this then, I ended up labeling the product (at first a "luxury", but realizing people want those and doesn't help my argument) a "toy," like a jewel-encrusted hammer: It's pretty, but if a plain hammer isn't solving your problem this isn't going to either. Worse, the extra time and care needed to maintain this tool, in an organization that's already "too busy", is likely going to be even less effective if not a net loss.

However, it occurred to me, knowing one of the people trying to push this tool, calling it a "toy" would only be an opportunity:

Toys can be incredibly powerful in the hands of a good imagination.

And, I agree.

And this is where I struggle. Collectively, we don't have a "good imagination." We're all too busy being busy to do anything creative and solve the problems we have. But individually there is a lot a creativity that just lacks the means to express itself. And enabling these people is why _I_ do software.

I'm still not sure this tool is the right way about it, but that fact we're even here is testament that the current technologies aren't inspiring anyone.

2 years agodiscuss

Yeah, I get it. There's a lot of complexity. I considered including something about "when the author has explicitly said not to release it" which draws up even more complexity in this case because the children argued 'Dad wasn't in the right mind.' So does that make it OK?

But honestly, for my part anyways, I'm not sure any of that matters.

I'm a big fan of creativity. It's probably the most valuable thing people have and it ought to be protected and rewarded.

That's why this is even a dilemma for me because I would be disappointed to see a good creative work lost forever just because they didn't see the value of their own work.

But that's also why I'm against that kind of inheritance. Children, especially those who have the luxury and of good upbringing, should be encouraged to pursue their own creativity and produce their own value, rather than riding on the coattails of their forebears.

2 years agodiscuss

I heard about this on NPR this morning (which is looks like someone already posted the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39633900), and it sounds like the sons justification was that the book was good and the issues was that Gabriel García Márquez's wasn't in the right mind to recognize his own work anymore.

    "When he said it doesn't make sense he didn't realize it didn't make sense to him anymore."

I'm not familiar with this work so have no stake in this particular game, but it sits uneasy for me anyways. For myself, I think it mostly comes down to the incentives for releasing it.

Is this a valuable literary work that deserves to be published? How would we even go about deciding such a thing, without breaking the deceased's will anyways?

Or, is this just the estate saying, "The money from the previous books is drying up! We can either get real jobs, or go against dad's wishes for free money." In which case, screw that.

But even if you agree with the latter, given the complexity of the former, I feel like the fix there is that the rules for publishing works of the deceased should be different, e.g. it is immediately in the public domain so that there is no (or at least less) financial incentive since the original author has already decided not to profit from it. That would at least let us address the former questions more clearly and with reverence.

2 years agodiscuss

> Installing multiple versions of Python? You have got to be kidding.

Why? There's some overhead because it's not like everything has changed between versions, but otherwise it's a very clean way to provide exactly what you need without having to maintain backwards compatibility in future development.

Mind, as long the the Python code you're running _isn't_ using removed or significantly changed function, you can absolutely run code written for Python 3.6 with the 3.8 interpreter, and so on. If I recall correctly, this is _why_ it's uncommon to specify maximum versions in Python packages: unless it is specifically incompatible with a change in a newer version it should generally be assumed to work, and pinning a maximum version would just cause it to fail for no reason.

In your Issue with mod-ui, they specifically say

> mod-ui is not compatible with python3.11, so this wont work.

but your second attempt is still using 3.11 based on your output. It's a shame this isn't better documented since it seems to be known, but that seems like an issue with the project, not Python?

2 years agodiscuss

I don't have a problem so much with the touch screen itself. It's a waste for a lot a things and I frequently just turn my screen off, but it is nice to be able to bring up a map with directions and arrival estimates.

But I am constantly disappointed by just how awful and useless the software is.

Need some directions? Sorry, I can auto-play this music station you haven't used in a week, but if you want those directions you looked up on your way out the best I can do is (maybe) have the address in your recent search history.

Want to resume the music you were streaming from your phone through your media center? Yeah, just give me a few minutes to load up this other UI and...Are you sure you have a music app on your phone? Maybe you just need to add it to the car app? Here, let me bring that up on your phone screen. Hold up. There's some audio coming through the bluetooth, I'll just play that.

Want to see why the "Check Engine" light came on? Oh, well for that you need to buy a $50 dongle with Bluetooth and install an app on your phone.

2 years agodiscuss

I've found the problem with transparency and any sort of acknowledgement of problems in business, is that there too many other people whoa are all too willing to say, "We're awesome, just leave it to us!" And these are usually the teams that have the biggest problems and rely on silos to prevent others from seeing how bad it is.

2 years agodiscuss

> It's hard to tell what your issue with backward compatibility was exactly without examples.

I can't speak for worik, but it sounds like they are talking about backwards compatibility as a user of applications written in Python. I.e. you can't just go to python.org, download the latest version of Python, and expect run any Python program because that code could be using a function or library that was recently removed (or in their case, upgrade Debian which presumably packaged a newer version of Python by default). This is compared to a Windows application where the same .exe will generally work everywhere (and failing that, there are compatibility options).

It's also common in Python to declare minimum versions but not usually maximum, so requirements end up looking like "Python 3.8+". So from a user, or Linux package maintainer, perspective, they wouldn't even know it uses something that has since been removed.

Generally speaking, these kinds of issues are considered a bug in the application and should be filed when the maintainer. Though that's of little help if the maintainer is slow to act.

Of course, it's also relatively easy to just install multiple versions of Python these days, then have specific binaries, e.g. python3.10 and python3.11, or a launcher like built into the Windows installer, e.g. py -3.10 or py -3.11

2 years agodiscuss

I've often wondered how different things would be if producers and manufacturers were required to pay for any waste they generated from their products, at no additional cost to the consumer.

Individually wrapped candies in a plastic sleeve? Landfills will send you a invoice based on the volume that enters their site.

Phones designed to be replaced every two-years? You might be able to save money by making the original container a prepaid shipping box to cut back on sending out new ones for proper disposal.

Fruits and vegetables? That's bio-degradable and people will pay to have it in their soil. Make a deal with some local group to set up compost bins charging $1/scoop, and its like a built-in subsidy for farmers.

Have a novel solution that's 100% re-useable/recyclable? Enjoy the good times while entrepreneurs offer to pick that up for you to sell back to recyclers themselves.

EPA discovers that by "recycle" you meant "throw it in the ocean when no one's looking"? If you can't pivot quickly enough to cover both the new disposal fees and clean-up fines you'll be a good case-study for others who want to take shortcuts.

Sure, companies would absolutely pass the cost straight into the purchase price, but a company that wraps your sandwich in plastic and adds a $5 disposal markup won't last long when someone starts wrapping theirs in paper and only charging $1 more.

I know it's not that simple, but a man can dream, eh?

2 years agodiscuss

That's fine for a well establish course and curriculum, where its pretty well known where the students are at (or should be) and the material is presented in a consistent manner that has successfully filtered the deserving and undeserving. Which is something that all teachers and schools should strive for, but probably not where many are at.

New topics are added, new teachers, new academic plans defining which courses are required and when. New initiatives, programs, and policies are created all the time that change how people move through the education system. Even someone teaching the same course for 30 years is going to experience their own ups and downs that they may, inadvertently, project onto their students in different ways at different times.

I'm not saying you should hand out undeserved grades. I agree with your perspective that grades have to mean something and high grades need to be earned. My personal take is that as a society we just need to get comfortable with C's, because that's where the average should be. (Sure, who wants to hire a Writer who's only average at writing? But by letting them know they are only average in writing you can now give them opportunities to _measurably_ improve, or highlight that they are above average in math and might be more successful there.)

But if 3/4 of the class failed then _something went wrong_, and I would hope that our educators are able to reflect on that a little more then, "because they deserved to."

The only thing those students got out of that class was an F. And the one thing the school administration has got right is that giving out F's is a failure of the institution. The problem is that right now their incentives are to reduce the number of F's rather than improve the teaching and learning. If those students had learned something or got your wake up-call, they would have done better.

I'm not blaming you. There's a whole institution behind you, and several more over a student's education, with all sorts of problems and not enough of them having anything to do with actually educating people.

But solutions have to start somewhere, so I would still look to you to talk to your fellow faculty and leadership; tell them that 3/4 of your class couldn't even hit average marks compared to every other time you've taught the course, and that we have got to do better to prepare incoming students for the material they are about to learn.

Education isn't about regurgitating the same things over and over and keeping up the same bell curve until you retire. It's about teaching and learning and creating new opportunities for people to grow. That won't always work for everyone. You'll have to give out a an F here and there. But just like high grades should mean something, low grades should too. A student putting in low effort but grokking the material should be getting a C. An F is an indicator that something is wrong and the student isn't where they need to be.

2 years agodiscuss

Doesn't it need some clever acronym so politicians can talk about their DoesntMeanWhatYouThink Act?

    Humans Own Unsupported Software and Electronics (HOUSE) Act

perhaps?