halbritt (u/halbritt)

halbritt commented on Gemini AI deepmind.google/technolog... · Posted by u/dmotz

IcyWindows · 2 years ago

Can you share some examples in the Kubernetes space? I'm not as familiar with that area.

halbritt · 2 years ago

https://twitter.com/kantrn/status/1511791378497384454

And a whole thread on HN about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30938842

halbritt commented on Gemini AI deepmind.google/technolog... · Posted by u/dmotz

dweekly · 2 years ago

How it manages its promotions, even moreso than org.

halbritt · 2 years ago

To add some color to this, the culture for a very long time would reward folks that came up with novel solutions to problems or novel products. These folks would dedicate some effort into the implementation, land the thing, then secure a promo with no regard for the sustainability of the aforementioned solution. Once landed, attention goes elsewhere and the thing is left to languish.

This behavior has been observed publicly in the Kubernetes space where Google has contributed substantially.

halbritt commented on The death of a public intellectual thmsmlr.com/public-intell... · Posted by u/judiisis

wsve · 2 years ago

Let me give a personal story about this guy,

A while back, when I was just beginning therapy, my therapist recommended I take an online personality test, which unbeknownst to me, was authored by Jordan Peterson. After I took the test, it gave 5-7 paragraphs explaining what each individual personality trait meant. Pretty boilerplate, but for some traits, when you got further down the explanations, it started feeling less and less like a personality test.

For example, for the "agreeableness" trait, it would talk about how it was testing how "compliant, nurturing, kind, naively trusting and conciliatory" the person is, and that it generally found women scored higher. Sure, I can believe you've found that during your surveys.

But then you scroll down a little more, and it starts saying things like "This difference in agreeableness between men and women is largest in countries such as Norway and Sweden, where the most has been done to ensure equality of outcome between the sexes. This provides strong evidence that biological factors rather than the environment and learning account for the dissimilarity."

Uh... Why are we talking about Norway and Sweden suddenly? Scroll down a little more, and it makes more sense: "Agreeable people, [...], are more likely to enter professions associated with people, such as teaching and nursing, which are dominated by women. This is true even in the Scandinavian countries, where attempts to produce gender-equal societies has reached a maximum."

Ah. So what we have here is, regardless of whether you agree it's true or not, a political agenda masquerading as a personality test. It's purpose is to argue Peterson's vocal political belief that the gender pay gap is not an issue, because women are biologically better at being nurses instead of engineers. His proof? Just look at those Scandinavians, they have completely solved sexism (citation needed) and still see this gap!

Peterson may have genuinely good self help books and lectures, but the issue is it's not for the purpose of actually helping people. It's to push people closer to his world view, to agreeing with his political agenda. If you truly gained something from reading his books or watching his lectures, don't let me take that away from you. But be mindful of when his self help veers towards political beliefs.

halbritt · 2 years ago

> Ah. So what we have here is, regardless of whether you agree it's true or not, a political agenda masquerading as a personality test. It's purpose is to argue Peterson's vocal political belief that the gender pay gap is not an issue, because women are biologically better at being nurses instead of engineers. His proof? Just look at those Scandinavians, they have completely solved sexism (citation needed) and still see this gap

I'm not sure it's a political belief per se so much as a refutation of the implicit assumption that the gender pay gap is entirely the result of sexism and more likely the result of other factors, not least of which are the traits and proclivities of either sex.

I'm not prepared to debate whether or not his argument on the topic is legitimate, but it is something that he has elaborated on and supported with some data.

halbritt commented on Show HN: Every Breath You Take – Heart Rate Variability Training github.com/kbre93/every-b... · Posted by u/kbre93

guzik · 2 years ago

I'm curious, have you explored compatibility with other hardware as well, like the Polar H7 or even other types of physiological monitors? We've conducted a study comparing Aidlab physiological monitor’s accuracy of heart rate variability measurements with the Polar H7 and found a high correlation in the data. It would be interesting to know how your app performs when paired with various hardware.

halbritt · 2 years ago

The H10 is the gold standard for HRMs and the one most commonly used by anyone doing experimentation with HRV. I don't have the specs memorized off hand, by my recollection is that it does a better job of capturing the entire waveform.

halbritt commented on My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022) teamblind.com/post/My-fri... · Posted by u/luu

vanjajaja1 · 2 years ago

the problem is that its a zero-sum game, you can only compare performance across a cohort. if the majority of your cohort cheats, and cheating hurts performance, then they'll all be low performance and you'll still end up promoting some of them (because thats just what happens)

halbritt · 2 years ago

> you can only compare performance across a cohort

I can't accept this premise. Optimally the persons responsible for managing engineering staff should be able to independently determine whether the work being produced was of sufficient quality or not regardless of the cohort.

At issue here, I believe is that this is a difficult thing to cultivate consistently in many corporations and so there's some desire to create standardized metrics for performance against which a cohort is measured. Regardless, most large tech firms have some kind of well defined rubric against which the engineers are measured.

halbritt commented on My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022) teamblind.com/post/My-fri... · Posted by u/luu

halbritt · 2 years ago

To say nothing of the ethics of cheating, I think this behavior speaks to the value of the interview process. If it can be gamed so easily, it's likely not a great measure of the quality of the candidate and the companies that have implemented deserve the hires they make.

It'd doubtful the folks at the company actually mind that the interviews are being cheated. If the candidates appear to be qualified and appear to be fill the role for which they were hired and appear to be competent in that role, that's sufficient for most corporations and one of the problems working in "tech". That is to say, there are plenty of people in it that appear to be doing a thing, but aren't actually capable.

Somewhere in this thread a poster mentioned woodworking, which is a nice contrast. If you hire a carpenter, it becomes obvious pretty quickly if the carpenter is competent.

halbritt commented on Homemade Heat Pump Manifesto (2009) ecorenovator.org/forum/sh... · Posted by u/walterbell

0x53 · 3 years ago

I have been doing a ton of research on building my own GSHP lately and so this is a great resource!

However, what I have found in the process is that for well insulated homes GSHP probably doesn’t make sense.

Originally I was considering buying a kit from this site: https://www.123zeroenergy.com/pricing/geo-thermal.html

But like it says on the page, because air source heat pumps have been getting a lot better they no longer sell the kits. There are a couple of individuals on YouTube who have used similar GSHP kits and had good success. The main challenge is that you need to dig 100ft of deep trenches per ton of cooling. Edit: should be 300ft not 100

halbritt · 3 years ago

> air source heat pumps have been getting a lot better

Mitsubishi, specifically, makes a heat pump with the marketing vernacular, "H2i" or "hyper heat" which has reasonable efficiency down to -13F/-25C.

halbritt commented on 6 Raspberry Pis, 6 SSDs on a Mini ITX Motherboard jeffgeerling.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/ingve

erulabs · 3 years ago

Man, Ceph really doesn't get enough love. For all the distributed systems hype out there - be it Kubernetes or blockchains or serverless - the ol' rock solid distributed storage systems sat in the background iterating like crazy.

We had a huge Rook/Ceph installation in the early days of our startup before we killed off the product that used it (sadly). It did explode under some rare unusual cases, but I sometimes miss it! For folks who aren't aware, a rough TLDR is that Ceph is to ZFS/LVM what Kubernetes is to containers.

This seems like a very cool board for a Ceph lab - although - extremely expensive - and I say that as someone who sells very expensive Raspberry Pi based computers!

halbritt · 3 years ago

I love it, but when it fails at scale, it can be hard to reason about. Or at least that was the case when I was using it a few years back. Still keen to try it again and see what's changed. I haven't run it since bluestore was released.

halbritt commented on Amazon’s HR Failures amazonchronicles.substack... · Posted by u/ramimac

greenail · 4 years ago

In my experience the farther left DEI policy goes the more chaos, distraction, and resentment it creates. There also seems to be some correlation between how far left DEI policy goes and how acceptable vocal political activism is. The final anecdotal observation is that the farther left the DEI policy is the more likely you are to destroy your career by being voicing any dissenting critique of the DEI policy.

Amazon tends to embrace/reward constructive critical thinking but not disruptive/revolutionary critical thinking and so it may not be possible for Amazon to keep it's culture and adopt a left leaning DEI policy. I think the Amazon culture and staying focused on people who will thrive in that culture are the things that have made it so successful in so many areas.

halbritt · 4 years ago

How is a DEI policy "left" or "right"?

halbritt commented on TimescaleDB raises $40M blog.timescale.com/blog/4... · Posted by u/slashdev

somethingAlex · 4 years ago

Under 100GB; I'm sure vanilla Postgres would suit our needs too. However, adding TimescaleDB on top was not much of an investment and in exchange we got an interface for operations we do often, effortless continuous aggregation, near-constant time appends, and a native way to leave data mutable for a period of time before marking it immutable and compressing it.

The performance is a great feature but its also just an intuitive, familiar (pretty much just SQL) tool that makes life easier.

halbritt · 4 years ago

Cool. I'm keen to try it. Wondering how well it works with multi-terabyte data sets.