ignite (u/ignite) - Readit News

ignite commented on 64-bit bank balances ‘ought to be enough for anybody’? tigerbeetle.com/blog/2023... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

forinti · 2 years ago

I have a personal anecdote on this subject. A long time ago I worked at a bank and I had to calculate a large number of accounts regarding agricultural loans. These were state sponsored loans. When I finished my task (this was a Java job), I found that sometimes the results were off by $0.01. So I asked my boss how I should do the rounding, to which he replied that an error of up to $1 was acceptable. If I recall correctly, the amounts where in the hundreds and thousands.

ignite · 2 years ago

People care less about the dollar value than about reconciling. If there is some external system they should match, they really want it to match exactly.

ignite commented on 64-bit bank balances ‘ought to be enough for anybody’? tigerbeetle.com/blog/2023... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

HWR_14 · 2 years ago

The current US national debt represented in integer cents requires 52 bits. It can trivially increase 4,000x before we need to worry about 64-bit balances.

ignite · 2 years ago

Peak inflation in Argentina was 20262.80%.

So, not as much margin as one might think.

ignite commented on 64-bit bank balances ‘ought to be enough for anybody’? tigerbeetle.com/blog/2023... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

vidarh · 2 years ago

A shocking number of people (edit: who implement billing related software) are unaware of how many decimal points of accuracy their local tax code requires to calculate vat or sales tax correctly. And those things are often specified in terms of arithmetic correctness.

I had our CFO stand behind me while I talked him through every step of our VAT calculations once, because he was legally responsible if I made us round it wrong, to the wrong number of digits. And had we e.g. done something grossly incompetent like used floats for those calculations it most certainly would have been wrong, but so would it if I used fewer than five digits past the decimal point or failed to round in the right direction after that.

It's usually not hard, but it requires being aware that you need to look up the right rules. And know better than using floats.

ignite · 2 years ago

> A shocking number of people ... are unaware of how many decimal points of accuracy their local tax code requires to calculate

A shocking number of people who create tax codes have no idea how many decimal places they are using.

It's probably better now, but I recall having to reverse engineer the tax tables to figure out how many decimal points of accuracy were used, and what rounding rules were used, so we could match their numbers.

These numbers would change from year to year, with no change in the underlying tax codes.

ignite commented on FindMyCat – Open-Source Pet Tracker findmycat.io/... · Posted by u/popey

munificent · 2 years ago

The best way to keep track of your cat is to not let it outside. Benefits:

1. Zero cost for cat tracking devices, never need to charge them, never need to worry about the cat losing the device.

2. Dramatically reduced chance of your cat being killed by a car. Despite blogs claiming otherwise, I can find no reputable statistics on the number of pets killed by cars in the US, but there are >250k collisions with animals every year. Most are deer, but anecdotally I know many many people who have killed cats accidentally.

3. Dramatically reduced chance of your cat being killed by a coyote or raccoon. Yes, coyotes and raccoons will absolutely fuck up your cat. Yes, they are very likely in your city.

4. Your cat will not be playing a part in the wholesale slaughter of billions of birds, small mammals, reptiles, and other fauna that domesticated cats are responsible for.

5. Significantly longer predicted lifespan for your cat. The life expectancy for an indoor cat is about 14 years. For an outdoor cat, it's 2 to 5 years.

6. Your neighbors will appreciate not stumbling onto your cat's poop while gardening.

Seriously, keep your cat indoors.

ignite · 2 years ago

My cat is an indoor cat. It wears a tracker. Cats escape, sometimes. This way we get an alert if he manages to get out.

ignite commented on The Tyranny of the Marginal User nothinghuman.substack.com... · Posted by u/ivee

michaelmrose · 2 years ago

Alternatively hear me out you could have people who actually care about other people make a website that treats people like they want to be treated charges a modest per month fee to users looking to do a good job and turn a profit. Unless you've already signed a deal with the devil with people who don't give a fuck about other people it doesn't have to be a maximal profit per user it just needs to be more than the cost to run the site.

If you don't constantly redesign your site or feel compelled to use the most expensive hosting possible, or cosplay as google it doesn't even have to be that expensive. A single actual physical computer could serve a hell of a lot of people for a modest amount of money. The $20 OK cupid charges per user could trivially pay for the oh so complicated task of allowing people to find and message like minded users.

A doctor doesn't need to work around the market economics of not making people sick so you can cure them they have agency they can choose just to be a good doctor and most of them do.

ignite · 2 years ago

I think many of the dating sites started that way. That's why they were better in the beginning. But eventually, they go public, or get acquired, and end up getting run by people who are bottom line focused.

ignite commented on New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl npr.org/2023/08/16/119420... · Posted by u/8ig8

bewaretheirs · 2 years ago

The copyright holder gets a share of ownership in any AI model derived from its work, and thus a share of any resulting revenue.

ignite · 2 years ago

All 10 million of them?

ignite commented on Learn as you search (and browse) using generative AI blog.google/products/sear... · Posted by u/jonifico

machdiamonds · 2 years ago

I typically run lengthy YouTube video transcripts through Anthropic Claude to get a summary. It's free and offers a 100k context window. After summarizing, you can engage in a conversation with Claude. You can ask specific questions about the covered topics or prompt it with queries such as "What were the standout points?". It's quite adept at extracting key highlights.

ignite · 2 years ago

Looks like that is still invitation only.

ignite commented on Getting a job at Apple without going to college or doing LeetCode aheze.substack.com/p/gett... · Posted by u/aheze

pocketarc · 2 years ago

I think it makes sense to use LC or something like it. Is there a better way to judge the 100 random developers who've applied to your position?

- They may not have formal education, you can't judge on that.

- They may not have active GitHub projects, you can't judge on that.

- They may not be active on social media or have any kind of fame, you can't judge on that.

- They may not have built anything they can show off like this `Find` app, you can't judge on that.

So what can you judge them on? LC makes that pretty simple: "can they answer some standardised questions about algorithms and data structures, showing that they have at least some basic knowledge of what's going on in computers?"

It's not without downsides, but I also struggle to see a better option that can scale to the armies of devs that Amazon, Google, etc, all hire.

ignite · 2 years ago

The problem with leet code is what it really measures is how long you have spent on leetcode. Yes, you can solve the problems if you have experience, but you are not going to look as good as someone who had done that specific problem on leetcode and could just write down the optimal answer.

ignite commented on LK-99 isn’t a superconductor nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

mgfist · 2 years ago

Yet we're all the better for it happening. Even for the original researchers - maybe it would've taken them another 10 years to get to a similar conclusion. Now, they can take the next step and not waste more time.

ignite · 2 years ago

This was great science. Hypothesis, test, and attempted confirmation. Too bad it's not superconducting, but the process worked the way it is supposed to.

ignite commented on What happens to all the stuff we return? newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/pseudolus

mixmastamyk · 2 years ago

Interesting. One of the reasons I prefer shopping at Trader Joe's instead of Albertson's is that they don't have constant stupid sales all the time. (Also because TJs is usually 30% cheaper.) Maybe groceries are different?

ignite · 2 years ago

It's the people. If you shop for "fun", then you probably like sales. It's a game.

If, however, you don't like to shop, and you do it solely to acquire things, you probably don't like sales.

Very clearly, Ron Johnson was in the latter category, while JC Penney shoppers were in the former.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/j-c-penney-apologize...