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jacinda

708 karmajoined 14 лет назад

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

venturebeat.com
1 points·by jacinda·12 месяцев назад·0 comments

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jacinda
·8 дней назад·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 дней назад·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
·в прошлом месяце·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 месяца назад·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 месяца назад·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 месяцев назад·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 месяцев назад·discuss
I think many people in the Bay Area also see careers as a game.
jacinda
·8 месяцев назад·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 месяцев назад·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 месяцев назад·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 месяцев назад·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 месяцев назад·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 месяцев назад·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
·в прошлом году·discuss
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
jacinda
·в прошлом году·discuss
Exactly what "late-comers" do you mean here? Epic was founded in 1979.
jacinda
·в прошлом году·discuss
And this reminds me of a wonderful parody blog post - https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...
jacinda
·2 года назад·discuss
Related (and hilarious): https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatc...

> What is despair? I have known it—hear my song. Despair is when you’re debugging a kernel driver and you look at a memory dump and you see that a pointer has a value of 7. THERE IS NO HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE THAT IS ALIGNED ON 7. Furthermore, 7 IS TOO SMALL AND ONLY EVIL CODE WOULD TRY TO ACCESS SMALL NUMBER MEMORY. Misaligned, small-number memory accesses have stolen decades from my life.

All James Mickens' USENIX articles are fun (for a very specific subset of computer scientist - the kind that would comment on this thread). https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
jacinda
·2 года назад·discuss
YouTube was also one of the easiest ways to share family videos back then (the files were too large to be emailed, Google Photos didn't exist yet, pretty sure Facebook could share videos but the quality wasn't as good, etc).
jacinda
·2 года назад·discuss
Warning - some of these can be reasonably graphic. I came across this which is live footage of a hammerhead shark being caught and killed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isHEsOPIr28

Also got some cute things like a dad giving a piggyback ride, some weightlifting, an amazing dance rehearsal - so very human.