rifung (u/rifung) - Readit News

rifung commented on UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B reuters.com/business/fina... · Posted by u/blobbers

rifung · 4 years ago

I am a huge fan of the checking/budgeting features of Wealthfront. Does anyone know of a good competitor in case I'll have to jump ship?

For those who don't use it, it allows you to create categories and automatically deposit money into those categories at some interval. Then you can easily transfer between those categories.

I use this so that I can put some money away for expected expenses like taxes and a new car and also to budget for fun so I known what I can actually afford.

rifung commented on MIT moves all classes online for the rest of the semester web.mit.edu/covid19/updat... · Posted by u/ryeights

colechristensen · 6 years ago

A university education is not a SaaS product.

We are getting to the point where lectures should be mandated to be recorded and put into the public domain, and the University's value proposition in admission, tuition, and residence should be the everything else involved which could raise the focus away from re-doing the same lectures over and over.

rifung · 6 years ago

> We are getting to the point where lectures should be mandated to be recorded and put into the public domain

Does that really make sense? I thought MIT was a private institution. The research is often publicly funded but I don't believe that's the case for the tuition.

rifung commented on Was Knuth Really Framed? spinellis.gr/blog/2020022... · Posted by u/DSpinellis

08-15 · 6 years ago

What exactly is the UNIX philosophy?

As far as I can see, it's roughly "Data structures are hard, so let's pretend everything is ACSII text. Now we can use a really difficult systems programming language (C) to build functions with weird calling conventions ("tools") and glue them together with an awful scripting language (sh)."

'awk' fits into this framework awkwardly. It implements a restricted pattern (go line-by-line, match actions to lines), it doesn't want to be a full programming language, even though it really is.

But 'perl' is a programming language, and it wants to be one. Once you have 'perl', what is the point of using a reasonable scripting language (perl) to build functions with weird calling conventions and gluing them together with an awful scripting language? You're better off writing functions(!) with normal calling conventions (a library) and gluing them together using the good scripting language.

That logic taken taken to its conclusion replaces the shell with a clean language, encourages libraries instead of "tools", and embeds the 'awk' pattern into said language instead of relegating it to an incomplete secondary scripting language. In one word: 'scsh'.

rifung · 6 years ago

> What exactly is the UNIX philosophy?

I believe it is the idea of writing small tools focused on doing one thing well with reusability in mind as opposed to writing larger complicated tools that do multiple things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

rifung commented on To get good, go after the metagame commoncog.com/blog/to-get... · Posted by u/shadowsun7

thereare5lights · 6 years ago

I don't agree with that. It goes back to

> It's not until you reach a level where everyone around you has a mastery of the fundamentals, that the meta comes into play.

At any given MMR bracket, everyone around you has a similar mastery of the fundamentals so the meta is relevant.

However, put someone with the fundamentals of a 6k+ MMR player into a 3 or even 4k match and they'll demolish everyone else even with a disadvantage relative to the metagame.

rifung · 6 years ago

I believe you're in agreement.

The original comment said

> It's not until you reach a level where everyone around you has a mastery of the fundamentals, that the meta comes into play.

and you said

> At any given MMR bracket, everyone around you has a similar mastery of the fundamentals so the meta is relevant.

which refutes the original comment.

> However, put someone with the fundamentals of a 6k+ MMR player into a 3 or even 4k match and they'll demolish everyone else even with a disadvantage relative to the metagame.

I don't think anyone disagrees with this; I think the issue I (and the person you're responding to) have is the idea that you should ignore understanding the meta until you're 6k MMR as you say.

Both are important and you should develop both at the same time if you want to improve.

rifung commented on Google interviewing process for software developer role in 2020 habr.com/en/post/489698/... · Posted by u/atomlib

choppaface · 6 years ago

“You can pass every interview with A grades and still not get a job, because a senior Googler decides that you're the wrong person to be hired.”

Google doesn’t need you. They probably already have a clone of you. They have gobs of rank-and-file SWE effort on reserve should one of their key products fail.

The process is designed to entertain the hiring manager and certain key employees. They don’t want you for your productivity. They want you for the chance that you help surround one of their favorites with things they like so that this other guy doesn’t bounce elsewhere. This other Googler likely already has a competing offer— that’s how he got promoted last year.

At this stage, if Google hires you, you are almost certainly being used to aid in the retention of somebody else. You’re going straight for the bench.

Don’t prepare for months for just Google; prepare for your own future. Don’t let Google hijack your capacity for critical thinking.

rifung · 6 years ago

> This other Googler likely already has a competing offer— that’s how he got promoted last year.

Source? I'm very skeptical this is true. I am not a huge fan of Google's promotion process but it isn't that bad.

rifung commented on Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983 (2017) twitter.com/gravislizard/... · Posted by u/Bender

reaperducer · 6 years ago

As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world.

Your sentence starts out like you're stating a fact, but then peters out with "probably."

Do you have data on this?

I'd posit the opposite: That exploration is far more used in online maps.

Aside from Uber drivers, SV types, and wannabe road warrior squinters, nobody uses maps for their daily activities. People know where they're going and they go there without consulting technology. That's why we have traffic jams.

rifung · 6 years ago

> Aside from Uber drivers, SV types, and wannabe road warrior squinters, nobody uses maps for their daily activities. People know where they're going and they go there without consulting technology. That's why we have traffic jams.

I might know where I'm going but I don't always know how to get there so I use Google Maps all the time. I don't use it for my daily commute but if I'm going to a friend's or something I'll usually use it.

When I sit in my friends cars we also use it all the time. Often we're going to a restaurant or some other location that we don't often go to.

For exploration my friends pretty much just use Yelp or Google Search. I sometimes but rarely use Google Maps for this because I find that the reviews are usually much lower quality and Google Maps is too slow (I have an old Pixel 2)

rifung commented on A popular self-driving car dataset is missing labels for hundreds of pedestrians blog.roboflow.ai/self-dri... · Posted by u/yeldarb

pathseeker · 6 years ago

>Would you bet a family member?

"think of the children!"

Lives at stake don't change anything here. The question is whether self-driving cars, even with the errors, are safer for people than regular drivers on average. If so, then absolutely yes everyone should bet their lives and their families'.

Thousands of people are dying every day in cars. This is not something we need to wait for it to be perfect. It only needs to be better.

rifung · 6 years ago

> Lives at stake don't change anything here. The question is whether self-driving cars, even with the errors, are safer for people than regular drivers on average. If so, then absolutely yes everyone should bet their lives and their families'.

Maybe logically that makes sense but from an ethical perspective I argue it's much more complicated than that (e.g. the trolley problem)

In the current system if a human is at fault, they take the blame for the accident. If we decide to move to self driving cars that we know are far from perfect but statistically better than humans, who do we blame when an accident inevitably happens? Do we blame the manufacturer even though their system is operating within the limits they've advertised?

Or do we just say well, it's better than it used to be and it's no one's fault? When the systems become significantly better than humans, I can see this perhaps being a reasonable argument, but if it's just slightly better, I'm not sure people will be convinced.

rifung commented on Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video] tesla.com/sites/default/f... · Posted by u/belltaco

axguscbklp · 6 years ago

The thing is, I see no way to have full self driving without AGI. And I don't think humanity is anywhere close to developing AGI. Without AGI you can have level 4++ self driving, maybe, but not level 5.

rifung · 6 years ago

> The thing is, I see no way to have full self driving without AGI.

Why? AGI seems like a significantly harder problem than self driving cars (itself a hard problem admittedly).

What I personally think will happen is we'll meet somewhere in the middle: we can redesign roads/cars to make solving the problem of self driving easier.

rifung commented on Justice Department meeting state AG offices Tuesday to discuss Google: sources reuters.com/article/us-te... · Posted by u/mgr86

TuringNYC · 6 years ago

I would be more worried about giving up market share to overseas competitors and the US losing strategic advantage.

rifung · 6 years ago

I work for Google, opinions are my own.

In theory, breaking up monopolies increases competition which allows better companies/products to spring up that would otherwise be crushed by anti competitive practices. If you agree with that theory, then the act of breaking up monopolies actually makes the US more competitive.