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jacinda

708 karmajoined 14 वर्ष पहले

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Sparrow raises $35M Series B to automate the employee leave management nightmare

venturebeat.com
1 points·by jacinda·12 माह पहले·0 comments

comments

jacinda
·8 दिन पहले·discuss
Last night some neighbors set off some illegal fireworks a few blocks from our house. My husband was out on a walk when the paramedics arrived because one of them had burned off half his face and another his arm.
jacinda
·12 दिन पहले·discuss
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/

Churning out the blog posts isn't a bad idea if it's true. Repetition isn't inherently bad.
jacinda
·पिछला माह·discuss
Amen to childhood leukemia rates improving being awe-inspiring. I had a friend I rode the bus with around 2001 who was diagnosed with leukemia and didn't make it. They let us know over the PA system at school. I suspect these days she would have survived.
jacinda
·2 माह पहले·discuss
It's misleading because a single murder in this case is not statistically significant, but phrasing it using probabilistic terminology (i.e. percentages) obscures that fact and implies that you have enough data for the probabilistic language to be relevant.

Choosing to use percentages when there is a countable or small amount of data is typically misleading, even though it is "technically" true. In fact, a misleading statement is almost always something that is technically a fact.
jacinda
·3 माह पहले·discuss
It would be good (especially with the replication crisis), but historically to earn a PhD, especially at a top-tier institution, the criteria is conducting original research that produces new knowledge or unique insights.

Replicating existing results doesn't meet that criteria so unknowingly repeating someone's work is an existential crisis for PhD students. It can mean that you worked for 4-6 years on something that the committee then can't/won't grant a doctorate for and effectively forcing you to start over.

Theoretically, your advisor is supposed to help prevent this as well by guiding you in good directions, but not all advisors are created equal.
jacinda
·5 माह पहले·discuss
This is an excellent point! People often forget that something uncommon out of a much larger pool is still larger than anything that comes from a smaller pool (base rate neglect).

https://www.simplypsychology.org/base-rate-fallacy.html

> For example, given a choice of the two categories, people might categorize a woman as a politician rather than a banker if they heard that she enjoyed social activism at school—even if they knew that she was drawn from a population consisting of 90% bankers and 10% politicians (APA).

The general population is much larger than the population of child prodigies.
jacinda
·8 माह पहले·discuss
I think many people in the Bay Area also see careers as a game.
jacinda
·8 माह पहले·discuss
I think this was meant in jest, but Florida is not that wide on the peninsula. You can drive from Clearwater to Cocoa Beach (the entire width from west to east) in about 2.5-3 hours. So if you live in the middle like near Orlando or Gainesville, you just...drive an hour to go surfing.
jacinda
·9 माह पहले·discuss
The funny part of this is, you just described not only travel, but all of life prior to about 2003ish (at least in the United States). This is when, in my social circles, we transitioned to most people having cell phone access and the ability to "let people know if you would be late." Still a long time before smart phones became ubiquitous.

So this was "just life" in the 90s and beforehand. The upside you describe was also sometimes the downside. E.g. my mother was traveling for work when one of my brothers was injured in a way that required a trip to the ER for stitches (he's fine). My dad was getting us all (4 kids under 7) into the car as she called from her hotel and he basically had to answer and say that we were on the way to the hospital, and she just had to wait for an update once we got home many hours later.

And yet, I would still agree that "Life felt slower, but somehow more real?" and that we haven't yet found the right equilibrium for always being connected in a way humans were never able to be before. I'm glad experiences like this are still possible.
jacinda
·10 माह पहले·discuss
On the one hand, this seems nuts. On the other hand, the mechanism compared to all the other things biology can and has done doesn't seem that crazy.

Create egg, remove nucleus of egg, replace nucleus of egg with one or two nuclei from stored sperm that initiate replication and growth of the other species from there (depending on the exact mechanism which it sounds like they're still figuring out).

Compared with fungus that creates zombie ants (this is a real thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis) and birds that change their eggs to match those of other species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brood_parasitism) it almost seems tame.
jacinda
·10 माह पहले·discuss
+1 to the other comments recommending Zulip over Mattermost. The threading model is fantastic.

Also, for a non-profit teaching coding note that they regularly have interns under the Google Summer of Code program and it's open source, so the students can even help with it.

https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/organizati...
jacinda
·10 माह पहले·discuss
I would recommend trying it anyway. The really poor reviews are from 5-8 years ago when it was legitimately difficult to use. They recently rolled out an overhaul that's significantly improved.

We used Zulip at a company I was at (about a decade ago) and everyone on the engineering team refused to switch from it to Slack, even when it looked like Dropbox might end the product because it was so loved (it's completely independent now so that's not been a concern for a long time).
jacinda
·11 माह पहले·discuss
What I would love to see happen from a safety perspective and which I think might happen (but zero timeline on when) is that a human driving a car will be relegated to something people do purely for enjoyment and only in areas designated for human drivers, similar to how you don't see horseback riding anymore except in designated areas or for specific use cases.
jacinda
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
jacinda
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
Exactly what "late-comers" do you mean here? Epic was founded in 1979.
jacinda
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
And this reminds me of a wonderful parody blog post - https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...